Last week the SMU Tate Lecture Series was fortunate enough to host Neil Degrasse Tyson. Tyson is a renowned astrophysicist who has worked hard to show people (Americans especially) about how amazing the world of science is and that knowledge of the universe is something we ought to be actively pursuing rather than eschewing.

I always enjoy listening to Tyson speak, and some of the points he made really struck a chord with me. According to him, this country’s universities graduate 50,000 engineers a year. Compare that to the nearly 500,000 graduates each year who inevitably become lawyers, accountants, and professionals of all other stripes that generally tend to avoid the world of science.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with graduating with a liberal arts degree (or at least I hope there isn’t because that’s exactly what I’m planning to do). But I do find it striking the numerical division that exists between liberal arts majors and engineers. Why exactly does this happen?

A recent New York Times opinion piece, “Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)” seeks to answer this question. The data the opinion piece offers is even more striking than the numbers Tyson proffered: “Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included…That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.”

The common stereotype is that people switch out of engineering and sciences to study less intensive subjects like English.

I can certainly understand how such a supposition comes about. Hard sciences like chemistry and physics are generally incredibly dense subjects that you can’t just do halfway.

However, the liberal arts aren’t necessarily easier; they’re certainly different from the sciences, and I’ll be the first to admit that it’s definitely a lot easier to “BS” your way through a class about Jane Austen than one about fluid dynamics.

But if you’re studying a subject the way it’s meant to be studied, it’s supposed to be difficult. I put tremendous amounts of time into the coursework for my classes, oftentimes going above what the assignment might call for, simply because I know that otherwise I’m not going to learn as much. I’m of the mindset that your studies in college ought to be taxing and overwhelming no matter the subject. The idea of “coasting” seems antithetical to the purpose of the institution of college in the first place.

But I still don’t think that goes to fully explain why so many people switch majors. Grade pressures are obviously important; even if a student is up for the challenge that science classes provide, grades are nearly universally lower in these classes in comparison to a lot of the liberal arts fields, the reasons often being that introductory science classes are designed to be so difficult that they weed out the people who aren’t serious about the major and that grade inflation is more likely to occur in liberal arts classes.

While a grade never goes to accurately demonstrate how much of a subject you came to comprehend, pre-med and engineering students often face the highest pressure when it comes to getting good grades (there’s a reason why not everyone gets into medical school) and some people simply might not think it’s worth it to continue advancing in a field where they’re convinced they have few career prospects.

Personally, I resent this idea that we need people to choose between “science classes” and “English classes.” I hate meeting engineers who can’t craft an expository argumentative thesis to save their lives and I hate coming across fellow liberal arts majors who can’t figure out how much to tip at a restaurant, nonchalantly claiming that they’re simply “bad with numbers” (imagine the double standard there too! I guarantee you we wouldn’t be so accepting of a response if the person claimed to be just as bad at reading).

The world needs good writers just as much as it needs good engineers. While I don’t claim to know how to solve this disparity, I do know that addressing this nation’s problems with secondary education is probably a good way to start. We can’t expect people to be prepared for college level classes when so many public schools are pressured into giving obviously unqualified students passing grades.

Educational reform, if we hope for it to have any sort of meaning, ought to occur from the bottom up. That might not exactly make the challenges of college classes less daunting, but then again, isn’t challenge exactly what we should be looking for?

Brandon Bub is a sophomore majoring in English and edits The Daily Campus opinion column. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].