Are college majors mostly uncapped in US colleges?

Are the college majors mostly uncapped in us colleges?

Before I ask my question in detail, I wanted to set the context that I studied Engineering in India where various branches like Electrical, Civil, Mechanical , Electronics would have limited amount of seats and we go thru an entrance examination which ranks all the students and based on our rank at the time of interview we would know in which department seats are available so if my rank is not very high, I may not get computer science but I may get metallurgy or industrial engineering which was not in very high demand.
Now my question is how do college majors work in US colleges? I am helping my daughter applying for colleges and in most cases, they let you choose only one or two majors so for example if she chooses Computers as first and Business as second, and if she is not selected for either of these, is she rejected all together or she get chance to go for some less sought after majors? How we can specify our preferences that probably I would be also interested in Finance or Accounting. My daughter says here they are admitted to college and not the majors. Does that mean they select the student irrespective of the choice of their majors and then all the admitted students are allowed to pursue the majors they are interested in and it does not matter how many students go to different majors.
Please advise. Monika

Much depends on the colleges she will apply. My experience is with the California Universities. For example, Computer Science is a capped major at all the UC’s and with a few exceptions, admit by major.

  1. Some colleges admit by major
  2. Some colleges admit an applicant as Undeclared and then have a secondary admission threshold with required courses and specific GPA to declare the major.
  3. Some do not admit by major and allow you declare after your Sophomore 2nd year.
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Just to add to what Gumbymom said above

  1. If you are not sure of the major, most colleges allow you to select Engineering Undeclared or Business Declared on the application. The actual major can be declared later and will depend on the GPA in the pre-requisite courses.

  2. For direct admission to majors, the US colleges allow upto 4 choices, but most restrict the choice to 2. So you cannot specify a lot more choices like in the indian schools.

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To complicate matters further, there are also colleges that do not admit by major at all. Students are accepted/rejected based on their overall application and do not declare a major until the end of their second year. They take Gen Ed or other requirements first and then concentrate on specific major classes after.

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Unfortunately, every college is different and you must research each one individually.

Many less selective colleges have generally uncapped majors, but sometimes a particularly popular program might still be capped or difficult to get into because of “weed-out” courses. (By weed-out courses, I mean notoriously difficult pre-requisite courses students must take in their first two years, which may bring their GPA too low to be admitted into the desired major at the end of their second year.) Other colleges may have no capped majors.

To show you how much this can vary based on an individual school, take University of Washington as an example. To get into Computer Science, you must indicate it is your first choice and be directly admitted when you first apply. You cannot switch into Computer Science from another major. Similarly, you must be directly admitted into Engineering to do any engineering major, then, after admission, you must take weed-out courses and apply to a specific engineering major (like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, etc.). At that point, it is possible to apply for multiple majors in the engineering college, so that if you are not accepted into your first choice, you may still get into another — for example, you may not get into the electrical engineering major but do get admitted into the applied math major.

To make it more complicated at the University of Washington, if you want to major in something other than computer science or engineering, it is not required to be directly admitted to the major. But a handful of majors offer direct admission to a first-choice major, allowing students to bypass weed-out courses in the first-two years. They still take the pre-requisites, but don’t need to guarantee their GPA is high enough to get in because they are already admitted. Direct admission is available to the School of Business and to Architecture, for example, but is not the only path to those majors.

Finally, there are “open” majors available to any student admitted to the university.

That is why it is so important to research each school and each desired major within each school before applying.

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No college can afford to allow unlimited number of its students into one of its majors. Some colleges with greater resources (almost all of them are elite privates) haven’t so far put up barrier of entry into its most popular majors. Take Computer Science, the currently the most popular major on many campuses, for example. The proportion of students who choose to major in CS is at about 40% at MIT or Caltech, and nearly 30% at Stanford. None of three schools have put up any barrier, yet. However, if the current trend continues, I don’t expect any of them will allow that proportion to rise much above 50%. They prefer not to at this time but there’re a number of ways in which they can deal with this issue if necessary.

Currently there’re different ways a college can deal with the over-popularity of a single major, or a group of majors. CMU, for example, has a separate school for Computer Science, to deal with the extreme imbalance in popularity of its CS major relative to others. Some universities (mostly public) where CS is popular have direct admissions to their CS majors. Some other colleges have barriers (based on GPA, weed-out courses, etc.) for their students to declare major in CS. Some colleges adopt a combination of these measures. The bottom line is the resources in any one major are finite at any college, even the most well endowed.

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