Does anyone know what the Cal POLY SLO Admission rates will look like for each Dept? I’d like to apply to SE fall of
2018 but was curious what the admission rates look like for each major either for this year or last year. I’m sitting at an MCA of 4776 with out adding the additional service points for living in the area. Thoughts?
What I meant to say was the acceptance rate for each major in the engineering Dept. not each Dept. in the school. Just curious about the Engineering Dept. breakdown.
Below is a link to SLO’s projections for each major/department.
For Freshman, take the FTF Target # and multiply by 3) and divide by the FTF apps to get an approximate acceptance rate. Just be aware the SLO is overenrolled this year, so these projections may be very different for 2018
If you’re at nearly 4800 and still get to add 500 for living in the service area, I’d say you’d have a solid chance. Just make sure you have a safety. Don’t try to backdoor into SE or CS by choosing an easier admit. Word is they aren’t allowing any students to even request consideration to switch into either of those.
@Gumbymom, I think you will be proven correct about the effect of over-enrollment this year. When we dropped my son off for WOW we went to a meet and greet with the university president. He made it clear that Cal Poly does NOT have plans to increase the overall size of the student population in the next few years. That clearly implies that some leveling will take place with the 2018 and maybe 2019 freshman classes.
@Gumbymom if you look at the actual acceptance rates found both in the factbook and on the Infobrief, you will find in 2016 it ranged by college from 23% (engineering) to 43.4% (CAFES - Agriculture). I’m not sure why you are using by 3 and divide by the number of applicants as it doesn’t even equal the average acceptance rate for CP which was 29.5% in 2016 and likely higher in 2017 based on the total number of freshmen enrolled which is 5266 vs. the projected 4451. Take 2016, overall the projection was 4451 new students x 3 is 13353 divided by 48162 applications gives an acceptance rate of 27.7%, actual was 29.5%. If you go by college it is even further off, for AG your method gives 61% acceptance rate while the actual was 43.4%, the closest is engineering where your method says a 21.3% acceptance rate which is below the real rate of 23%. It would be nice if there was such a simple method to give people a way to guess their chances but there isn’t. Certainly not one method for each major. The problem is yield rates and acceptance rates vary greatly from each other by college and even more so by major. There are majors as competitive in AG as some in engineering. Animal Science for example, in 2016, the last year we know CP estimated 160 new students (they only got 138 showing how far they are even off). Using your method 160x3/1119 the number of new Animal Science students would be 212,132% of actual projections and 172% of actuals. This would have made many think it was a target or safe school when it was more of a reach. I think you need to use different calculations for each college that use real average acceptance rates, then let them know within the college if their major is more competitive within the school by looking at the individual overall enrollment rates by the major.
This FTF x3 is just a guideline (which have seen posted several times on this website) since many schools will accept three times as many applicants than the actual # that enroll. There is no exact science to determing the proposed acceptance rate and like you stated, the yield for each year will fluctuate. This year SLO is overenrolled, so their projections are off. Again, I posted the projection link as a guide to help give applicants an idea of their chances and no one should consider these numbers as an “absolute”. I did put a disclaimer on my post indicating that the projections may be very different. I along with most posters here do not work at SLO admissions and cannot give anyone prospective applicant a true chancing.
If you are asking in order to decide which major to apply to with the intention of changing to the major you really want, don’t. Engineering is so impacted that even if you get into engineering there are new limits not allowing change of majors even intracollege. I agree with @eyemgh that if you have properly calculated your MCA and it hasn’t changed in the last 6+ years, your chances for all majors is good, but remember this is for a highly competitive program. Those who try this method of applying to less competitive majors intending to transfer to highly impacted majors, particularly between colleges, will have a harder time and then blame CP when they can’t change majors. With scores like yours it is unlikely that is your intention but I am always amazed at the number of students who try this and then complain when their tricks don’t work. Using the link that @gumbymom posted you can see both which departments enroll the most students, meaning they likely also accept the most, and which enroll the fewest number of applicants indicating they are likely harder to get in. Since I have never found a way to figure out the actual acceptances by major I can’t say whether there are some majors with much higher or lower enrollment rates than others, while it is obvious from the range by college that some get close to half their acceptances enrolled while others like Math and Science only get around 20% to actually enroll. My belief is that some majors like, science and math where CP might not be as highly rated or known, and most engineering where there are more prestigious choices and a few higher rated, that CP becomes more of a “safety” school or lower choice for many applicants, so they choose other schools, while students applying to AG or Architecture, for example don’t have many other schools to apply to and there aren’t more prestigious schools to enroll in over CP.
Thank you all for your responses. I’m not looking to “backdoor” anything just trying to make an educated well informed decision. Not all 17 year olds no exactly what road they want to take.
@gumbymom Numbers range so much I don’t think you can use a number like 3x because that is what other schools do. It matters completely whether a school is highly selective, selective, or lower. Cal Poly has the added complication that it ranges from selective to highly selective my college and requires a declared major so those differences really impact admission rates. I only continue to make a point of this because I see you being received as an “expert” and I think you are trying to be as helpful as you can. We know no specifics yet on anything other than enrollment numbers at Cal Poly for every major/college for 2017 and it will likely make it even harder for some majors for 2018. The best anyone can do is work on the known numbers from 2016 and before. It is obviously your choice if you decide to keep using your method or to revise it to reflect a number that would be more accurate by college with the caveat on the more competitive majors. At a minimum I would hope you give a caveat that the method is based on a number you use “since many schools will accept three times as many applicants than the actual # that enroll” and is not reflective of the actual acceptance rates at CP which are published and available if people choose to look them up.
@czs1994: My method is not “my method”. The calculation I posted has been circulating for several years on the SLO threads. I should not be labeled an “expert” just because I post on this website. Yes, I am trying to be helpful by linking information to prospective applicants. The link itself states that these are Enrollment projections and targets not actual acceptance rates. How individual applicants use this data is up to them and unfortunately some may interpret the data incorrectly. If anything can be gained by looking at the projection link is that SLO is a very competitive school and Engineering majors are tough admits.
We use 3x because classically, for the entire university, across all majors, CP has had a yield roughly 33% in aggregate (actual yields: '11-35, '12-32, '13-35, '14-34, '15-34) and it makes the math easy. We do know historic yields by college and they too are pretty consistent (AG 50, ARCH 50, CENG 36, LA 29, BUS 32, SCI/MATH 22). It’s not really worth though muddying the easy math with actual yields because there’s even more important information that we don’t know.
We know that yield varies vastly by major and have no idea what the yield is for each one. Far worse, the selectivity of a major only tells part of the story. My suspicion is that the pool is stronger say for Aerospace than Psychology. Psychology accepts fewer of their applicants, but I’d bet the MCA cut off is higher for Aerospace, making it the harder admit even though a higher percentage of its applicants get an offer.
I don’t think anyone is claiming to know the REAL numbers. The method @Gumbymom advocates is a rough way to get a relative idea of selectivity knowing the picture is incomplete.
This is why the MCA (which as far as anyone knows may not even be the same anymore) is important to historically catalog. Yield is immaterial. Numbers who apply is immaterial. It’s a single go/no go metric that applicants can test themselves against. The whole “chance me” concept is a crap shoot anyway. The MCA is about as close as you can get.
Now, what you do with any of that data…I think it’s pretty safe to say that trying to backdoor into a tougher admit than you’re qualified for seems to be poorly conceived. This OP though seems to be a strong candidate for any major.
@holmes2000 DO NOT FORGET to include Algebra, Geometry and Algebra II that you might have taken in middle school on your application. It’s THE reason high stats students get rejected. Neglecting that drops the MCA 500 points!
:-S
@holmes2000 First I said I doubted you were trying to “backdoor”, but if you follow the CP threads you also know people try it and it is getting riskier and risker, I just wanted to make that point. Second my opinion was you are a competitive student for engineering at CP. In 2017 CP accepted 26.6% of the applicants for engineering, however, their very high 2017 acceptance rate led to the extreme overcrowding and is likely go down next year to their average over the prior 3 years of 22.6%. They have not yet released enough information for me to figure out how much each college/major is ove renrolled. Percent accepted only tells you so much, you also need to know how you compare to the average student (and the student at the 75 percentile if possible, but CP doesn’t give the 75th percentiles by college or major). For the new 2017 class the average weighted GPA for freshmen in engineering was 4.16, meaning the AVERAGE engineering student has almost the highest possible GPA for engineering since they only count 8 semesters of AP weighted grades. Average ACT was 32 and SAT 1467. Hopefully you have all the extra points for math and science, plus the added 50. These go up almost every year. Again by using the projections by major on the link Gumbymom sent you can see how many applicants there were for each major and the number cal poly wanted to attend. It will let you know which are the most competitive.
You said DO NOT forget to Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra II from middle school. But, there wasn’t a place for that!?
@Twinmma: According to Cal State apply you put the middke school grades for Algebra/Geometry classes under 9th grade
https://help.liaisonedu.com/Cal_State_Apply_Applicant_Help_Center
If you have any other questions, you should start your own thread.
@czs1994, the overall acceptance rate for the CENG is meaningless as the range is probably between somewhere in the upper single digits (BME and CS) to close to 100% (IE and manufacturing).
@eyemgh I feel if you are going to answer students and tell them their chances you owe it to them to be more accurate. Yields are not as important to use as acceptance rates in my opinion so I will focus on them. We have 2016 real numbers. I will use them to show why I dislike what you and others are advising. In 2016, over all, the multiplyx3 method estimated a 27.9% acceptance rate not that far from the actual 29.5 so reasonable for overall. When we get to individual college estimates it is pretty far off for half of them, for AG it told students to expect a 61.3% acceptance rate vs the actual of 43.4%. For Arch it estimated 57.4% vs. the actual 38.2%. CSM 17.9% vs. 29%. It was closer for CENG 21.3% vs. 23%, CLA 28.5% vs. 32%, and OCOB 28.1% vs. 31%. This has an error factor of 8% to almost 50%.
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If you use average acceptances over the prior 3 years, yes a different calculation each year that takes about 10 minutes to make, I would have the following comparisons: AG 44.6% acceptance rate estimate vs. 43.4% actual, ARCH 41.9% vs. 38.2%, CENG 26% vs. 23%, CLA 33.8% vs. 32%, OCOB 33.1% vs. 31%, CSM 31.2% vs. 29%. The error rate this way is far less.
I agree that MCA is best but it confuses people, and many make mistakes when calculating it. Some don’t get that some majors need a minimum of 4800 while other majors need a 3700, without even trying to explain the non-MCA points which can drop those numbers by 1000 points. I think you have done a great job trying to come up with the MCA averages needed to be accepted, but you get such a small number of participants per major and can’t be sure the calculations are right, personally, I gave up. Using the average gpa and test scores for the college and the average acceptance rates per college seem to be just as close. But even then more overestimate their CP weighted GPA than get it right. Do you know if the calculation the computer makes shows to the applicants? If so that is extremely important for students to check and know.
@eyemgh In 2017 there were 67 out of nearly 17,000 applications for mfg and yes it probably has a fairly high acceptance rate for the 22 students they planned on attending. Certainly not a major I would focus on. For IE, there were 239 applications, although still too few to worry about, it is almost twice as hard to get in considering they only planned on 50 enrolling. The very small majors are a bit of a wildcard. I don’t think even BME and CS are single digit acceptances, the enrollment rate is double digits for every major but CS and CS enrollment is over 8%. The enrollment rate is fairly low for Engineering due to it being a safety school for those whose first choice is and Ivy, Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford and other schools with better recognition, but I would say the AVERAGE acceptance is x but CS is the hardest, and Aero Eng and BME and even ME are likely lower.
All I’m saying is that citing the average acceptance rate of a college does not strike me as “accurate” when there is such a huge variance between majors. It’s vastly optimistic about the most selective admits and vastly pessimistic about the least. How does that in any way represent accuracy when we know for a fact that there are such huge variations in actual acceptance rates between majors?
@czs1994, I just reread your responses above and unfortunately they don’t make any sense to me. You are making claims about knowing acceptance and enrollment rates for individual majors. That would imply you have access to yield numbers for individual majors. If that is indeed true, it would be very helpful. Do you?
That said, it still only tells part of the story. At a school like Stanford where students compete in a single pool, you can guesstimate chances based on previous averages. You can’t do that at Cal Poly. The application pools are not homogenious. Some are quite a bit more stacked with strong applicants than others. For example, and I don’t have data to back this up since I’ve never found a breakdown by major, but let’s say ME and Psychology had the exact same acceptance rate. I would not presume they are equally easy to get into. I’m assuming the ME pool to be stronger and this a tougher admit.