When you say "STEM vs pretend degrees", you clearly don't know what you're talking about. There is a near continuum of "hardness" of subject, and even that's not well defined, and the quesiton of whether EE is harder than pure math doesn't have a clear answer, but which way you answer definitely affects what the opposite is.
E.g., "German" is not a STEM major, but it's also not a pretend degree. OTOH, Philosophy is often a fluff major, but some of them attempt to be as rigorous as any experimental physicist. (Most don't succeed, because it's a really difficult thing to do.)