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[marshwiggle]

All good points--I am wondering, however, how one determines what prior knowledge is essential for any given non-101-type class, vs. simply using a prereq as a way of restricting class to majors or otherwise limiting the number of enrollees?

I only ever asked to get into a class where I did not possess the prereqs-- I was denied,and 36 years later I still think I had a good case to be made.

This is in the sciences. You have to know stuff, cumulatively. I don't think this is controversial. Maybe in the humanities it is different, but the idea should at least be familiar to you from language courses.

My daughter took humanities, and it was really strange to me that so many 2nd year courses only required that a student be in 2nd year; what specific courses they had taken didn't matter. The idea seemed to be that any first year course would teach essay writing, etc.

(For Kay) In STEM, not only do certain courses require specific content from courses in the same area, but often there are things like mathematical techniques that come up in several courses, and how a course is taught depends on whether a student has taken a course which introduced that technique. (It's really inefficient to "teach" that same technique in every course that uses it.)
So, often if a course has to be moved (for scheduling reasons) to a different term, then the content may have to change. E.g. if A and B both use some math technique, if A is taught first then B can assume it. If B has to move before A, then B will have to teach it, and A can assume it. Whichever course has to teach it will obviously be able to cover less field-specific content as a result.

I'm surprised that courses in humanities don't seem to depend so much on context from other courses. For instance, a course in North American 20th century literature would seem to be approached differently if students had previously taken 19th century British literature, ( or ANY literature course, for that matter).

I'm kind of curious how that works otherwise.

Actually there are such things as prerequisite courses in the humanities.  But pathways through majors do seem to be more flexible, so they're evidently not as common.  When I was a grad student, I served as a teaching assistant in a history field--colonial Latin America--outside my area of concentration--early modern Britain.  I was considered qualified to do that because I was familiar with the early modern West in general, and because I knew Spanish and was researching Spanish as well as English sources for my dissertation.  I would assume that in STEM a grad student wouldn't be as likely to reach across fields like that.

Actually grad studies are a little different, because different students will be coming from different places with different courses, so things are done on more of a case-by-case basis. So even in STEM, that will be a bit more flexible.