I think you're suffering from and not seeing the effects of selection bias. The ones that arrive in college STEM classes already have pretty major aptitude for STEM. You see most of them getting through if they try and assume that's population level aptitude, when it certainly isn't.

The ones that don't go and be lawyers and psychologists and social work and arts students instead.

There's some cognitive overlap for sure given general g factor (LSAT types skills vs STEM type skills) but it's nowhere near as large as you think and plenty of lawyer are dogshit at math/science type thinking at a basic aptitude level.

The easiest by far has to be getting into a PhD program and leaving with a masters. It's basically the equivalent of failing out.

Who said anything about great success? My HS teachers all had STEM degrees at the AP level. So many people get STEM degrees these days, plenty of them end up in crappy jobs. That people who can pass the bar can at least do poorly in a STEM degree with like a 2.5 GPA is all I’m saying.

People in this thread seem to be massively overrating what it means to get a STEM degree. There are entire schools where the average STEM major has the same or worse problems as those supposed lawyer types that can't do STEM (slightly above average SAT math scores, never learned high school math properly, etc). Lots of people go to schools that aren't selective at all and accept any reasonable high school graduate and these schools still produce plenty of STEM graduates. If someone you know scored 550 on SAT Math, sure, in some circles, this qualifies them as being the mathematically illiterate liberal arts person who would be laughed out of any legit STEM class, but there are entire schools where that's significantly above average. For instance, at the University of West Georgia, the 75th percentile SAT Math score is 510. Keep in mind, this is still considered a selective school in that they have competitive admissions - this isn't true of all schools. Because the system is so stratified - kids tend to go to school with others that aren't too far apart from them academically overall - most people are overly attuned to differences in aptitude between students studying different subjects at the same school, while ignoring much larger differences in aptitude between students that go to different schools.

For instance, at the aforementioned UWG (again, keep in mind this is more like a typical college - there are lower-tier schools that are much worse), their program map for CS assumes that you would start with College Algebra (this is Algebra 2 for kids who somehow managed to graduate high school without mastering it) or Pre-calc.

https://www.westga.edu/student-servi...ogram_maps.php
https://www.westga.edu/student-servi...gebraStart.pdf

Exactly this. Except law school self-selects for Type-A personalities that like to overstress themselves and waste all their time on inefficient tasks.

Your entire grade for most classes is one exam. I slacked off all semester, attended maybe 2/3 classes during which I was mostly not paying attention, studied for 8-10 hours per class at the end of the semester, and graduated in top-10% of my class.

I'm not a genius pretty much anyone on 2p2 could do this.

Bar exam also way overrated in difficulty. Its a test of marginal competence. Unless you are in California, something like 75-80% of people pass.

Irony?

Sure the productivity in tech (and consequently compensation) is all over the place but that division isn't really about CS vs bootcamp and isn't even all that strongly correlated with it. I know a bunch of bootcamp graduates and self-taught people working at top tech companies and startups earning 300K+ with less than a decade of experience. Meanwhile, the majority of CS graduates won't reach that at any point in their career. The median mid-career earnings of CS graduates ranges from 88K to 152K (depending on the exact degree):

https://www.payscale.com/college-sal...uter%20science

It's a realistic expectation long-term if you're hardworking and smart. The material is all out there if you want to learn and tech companies will take anyone that can pass their interviews. I think top bootcamps early on even had better average outcomes than most CS programs because they literally selected for people with otherwise strong credentials.

This has more to do with the school setting the bar arbitrarily high through weed-out classes and such (presumably due to capacity issues at the upper levels, though the hubris of instructors often plays a role). Yes, a selective university can set the bar arbitrarily high and still be okay because they have more than enough students that can clear that bar and still complete the degree. This doesn't mean those students who flunked out at your school would've flunked out at every school - if they went to a school where their level of preparation and ability was the norm, the bar would be different. See my earlier post about how UWG recommends that their CS majors start with College Algebra as the first course.

I can't really verify this wrt to law school....I'm just making a much weaker claim that it applies to STEM undergrad degrees.

You're not passing a Calc 3 or Comp Sci 101 finals without studying and practicing the material.

You can waltz in any law school final (with the exception of some EXTREMELY rare closed book exams) with someone else's outline and pass the exam. Mostly because literally nobody (except people who don't show up) fails at reputable law schools.

To give you an idea of how easy it is to pass law school exams. My securities regulations exam was half multiple choice and half essay that was open book.

Getting 1/3 of the points on the multiple choice portion was roughly equivalent to a B (class curved to between B+ and A-). The MC questions had 3 choices. You had to run real bad with random guesses and/or completely fail the essay portion despite the exam being open book to get B- (which people in the know understand to be the equivalent of a D or even F). 60 some % was an A. My professor told me very very few people had very different scores between the essay and MC portions. (Probably because even the essay portion was mostly asking for 1 sentence quick answers)

Biology is no joke man.. I think you underestimate how hard it is.. maybe you're thinking all biology is like marine biology or something. The major of molecular and cellular biology, I can assure you, is very tough. Part of that is the amount of organic chemistry you have to know.

organic chemistry is easily the hardest thing anyone can do as an undergrad

7% of students taking organic chemistry failed at my school, compared to 17% for quantum I and 19% for advanced calc III. Real analysis is apparently more difficult than advanced calc III, but I didn't take it and I can't find stats for it. Also 18% fail rate for methods in mathematical physics I.

The CS 101 section I TAed for failed about 30% of the students.

That's crazy. Why do you think the rate is high? Our lowest level cs course basically just teaches what loops and lists and functions are. I can't imagine 30% of students failing that. Does your course start at a higher level than that? Even our first "actual" cs class only fails 10%.

The CS 101 at my school was the actual CS class that basically jumps into programming right away. The final was a handwritten (hence why they needed an army of TAs like myself to grade the ****) and had questions that had people write functions, debug functions, and write the output (given a code applied to an input). A whole lot of people handed in something that didn't have a single correct answer. Being able to write a bubble sort function in Java (the language of choice for the class) on a given list of numbers with only minor mistakes was pretty much the pass line.

I know it seems easy for people that "get it." But as a TA for the class, I can tell you learning to program is really like learning a new language for most students. Until that moment where you know enough and things just click, everything seems impossibly difficult.

The fail rate is much lower for classes later. I think it was a conscious decision by the department to filter students with the first class so they don't waste their time.

lol, there were people crying in the row ahead of me during the first midterm exam. (I scored a 47/100.... good for a B+)

Ya ok that makes sense then. Our actual cs course sounds similar to yours but is only recommended for people with prior experience from high school. Students starting from scratch are told to take the more basic class first. I did a minor in cs and I didn't feel like the department really had a weed out course.

Sure. But we are talking about how hard passing is if you study.

Can confirm. It was close to impossible to pass w/o curve.

Lmao this reminds me of our first intro to mechanics (statics) class in Mech E.

Our first midterm was 4 questions, I got a 62% which curved to an A which was ****ing insane. I can’t imagine how many people failed/dropped out of the degree from that one class.

Classical mechanics is a gatekeeper class at a lot of engineering programs. I've known people that took it 3 times before giving up on engineering altogether.

Did they then become lawyers?