Perhaps both Cal Polys are depending on student self selection, similar to how they and other CSUs largely depend on student self selection into various majors (including engineering majors, nursing, etc.) rather than more subjective admissions criteria intended to find which students have high school achievements related to the majors. Given the CSUs’ historic mission to provide accessible education, they may be reluctant to go too far into criteria beyond basic college preparation (the well known a-g requirements) that may not be as widely accessible across high school students (although CPSLO does give bonus points for more advanced math and foreign language than the a-g minimum).
The Munger Hall design with its mostly windowless bedrooms basically trades away the bedroom windows in order to get higher density on a given size piece of land. Of course, either way, an architect can do some nice art and design work on it, but whatever art and design work is done does not affect the basic tradeoff chosen.
There was a previous thread on the subject: Proposed Munger Hall (4,500 student dorm) controversy