Your implication that non-STEM fields are less intellectually challenging is pretty insulting. Have you enrolled in a non-STEM degree? Do you have evidence that writing a treatise on comparative literature or archeology is less intellectually challenging than pushing out some code or solving some derivatives? Please choose your words carefully when communicating.

I did a double-degree in Commerce (Finance and Economics), and Computer Engineering at Sydney Uni.

English is my first language, and I've always liked economics/finance. However, I found the commerce side of things much easier to cruise through (I was working full-time as well). The material was easier, contact hours were much less, you could fluff your way through essays (to a degree), and it was obvious many of the students there (i.e. international students) just wanted to finish, and get their degree (nothing wrong with that in itself). Many people didn't bother showing up, and just studied online, and sat the final exam.

Engineering...oh man. The material was tough, the maths was tricky, and there was many mandatory contact hours or mandatory tutorials (> 20 a week). If you didn't show up to weekly classes, you got marked down, which is basically a fail. And while you can fudge an essay in commerce (assuming some basic grasp of first principles), try fudging an answer on Fourier transforms, or gradient-descents. However, many people genuinely had a passion for the subject, and the lecturers/tutors really did push you hard.

Also - look at the dropouts rates for fields - a lot more people dropped out of engineering degrees by year 2/3 versus say, Commerce. I can't speak to other fields/areas.

This experience may not apply to everybody - but as somebody who did a degree in both fields, I think it's telling.

Things like the Sokal Hoax are difficult to impossible in hard STEM fields. Non-STEM fields are more difficult to falsify and thus more difficult to apply similar levels of rigor. Smart and clever undergrads figure out their professors' biases and are constantly submitting lesser versions of the Sokal Hoax for their writing assignments (been there, done that). You can't do that in hard STEM fields, and its more difficult in some logically rigorous soft-STEM ones like law classes. Non-STEM fields tend to be held in the fuzzy-logic-based natural language you grew up with and know intimately, while STEM fields require learning an entirely new language (math, code) where fuzzy logic does not work and precise logic is required. It's more difficult for a variety of reasons.

I also have a mixed education of 1/2 CS and 1/2 Music. I found some of my music classes way harder (and often way more enjoyable) than many of my CS classes, despite the fact that the latter dealt with well-scoped problems.

This part may be true, but I doubt it's determinative: over a long career I've not found much difference between Ivy folks and State folks in engineering roles, and I can easily think of a few Ivy-Leaguers who ended up in very high office and whose fulfillment of your criteria was, at best, questionable.

And if you were saying that I still disagree. It's not that a math degree from Stanford isn't a good indicator of ability, but that it's not any better an indicator than one from Cal Poly or for that matter Arizona State.

It would really require an in-depth curriculum and grading comparison to answer that question definitively. But one thing I do know from anecdotal experience is that top tier STEM programs carry a stronger expectation that their students not just master a body of knowledge for competent commercial application, but for continued theoretical research. The top tier programs are usually research universities oriented toward making breakthroughs in our understanding of particular fields and driving humanity’s knowledge forward.

Students at normal universities tend to be there to get the grade, get a good GPA, and get a good job. Anecdotally again, I’ve heard professors at such universities complain about that. STEM curriculums at top tier research universities tend to be designed to weed out ones not capable of advancing the state-of-the-art, which is quite a high bar. I’m not sure that standard is applied elsewhere. Though again, would take a comprehensive curriculum and grading comparison to know for sure.

This isn't going to hold for most undergraduates, since you're not going to interact with professors enough unless you're participating in undergraduate research. And getting sufficient attention to get into those programs is probably going to be harder in an online-only environment.

In my experience professors at top tier research universities encourage and enable this, as one of the most fulfilling parts of their job is finding and grooming future research collaborators. Students are also incentivized since getting jobs or especially into grad school requires strong references from their professors. The extent to which it happens depends primarily on the student’s initiative though.

> And getting sufficient attention to get into those programs is probably going to be harder in an online-only environment.

That’s certainly one of the main problems that needs to be solved by online education, but I believe it’s one of the things everyone will adapt to out of necessity. Professors don’t want to stop grooming promising students for research careers just b/c of an outbreak, so they are finding new ways of doing that online. And we know from some fields like software engineering that remote collaborations are possible, so we’re starting from that point already.