Continuation of sub-thread of posts #124 and #129-135 from here:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19804523/#Comment_19804523
Basically, some colleges admit some or all engineering students to first year pre-engineering or general undeclared status, after which they must earn a high college GPA or compete for admission to their majors. In other schools, students who want to change majors may need to do the same thing.
I’m a bit confused because I’m not up on the other discussion.
But Purdue comes to mind.
I don’t recall any colleges when my son looked a year or so ago that direct admitted to engineering specialty. All colleges he applied to (that I remember) had some direct admits to engineering colleges but applications were made to specialty (chemical, electrical, etc.) after first year of college. Kids can also apply to engineering school after first year of college. Applying to specialties typically have minimum GPA requirements (though from what I have seen often times – especially with very competitive specialties) the actual GPA required may be higher than the stated minimum.
Definitely an issue to consider (most likely with reach schools). If you get into the school you want but cannot get into engineering and/or the engineering specialty you want, what do you do then?
@ucbalumnus @Muchtolearn @sevmom
Do you think that the universities you mentioned have always operated like this, where you have to compete the first year to get the major you want, and/or have a great GPA to switch majors at schools where you apply directly into a major? Maybe this is old news? Maybe there are weed-out concepts and/or resource allocation issues that have always existed? Maybe these universities have just traditionally wanted to ensure that their engineers and computer scientists are top-notch hard workers, well-prepared for future jobs?
Or has it actually become more competitive for engineers and computer scientists to get their desired majors in recent years, perhaps due to increased demand for certain majors or due to tight faculty/lab resources? .
If these universities have been operating the same way for decades, then this thread is really nothing new. It could just be a little intimidating to a few of us whose kids are new to the world of college engineering?
(I know that we heard the term “weed out” at VA Tech back in 2010 when we visited. The tour guide made a joke about how the business school lines up tables to recruit demoralized engineers who want to switch majors after the first round of mid-terms each fall. Not sure if that was true, but we all got the joke.)
ucbalumnus - Thanks for opening this thread. muchtolearn raised a valid issue on the previous thread that was totally related to the topic of evaluating at UCSB vs an in-state university for Comp Sci. But, I think I may have unintentionally derailed that thread by asking too many questions. I see issues about comp sci and engineering as often intertwined, especially if both majors are housed within the engineering school of a university. (Although, it may be even harder to switch between majors when Comp Sci is in a school all by itself, like at Carnegie Mellon and GA Tech, or when Comp Sci is in the arts college and a kid wants to switch to an engineering major, as at Duke.)
I wonder if a mod could move those posts into this thread?
D attended UVA. She was a Rodman scholar who did not get her first choice of majors after a tough first year. There are no guarantees for anyone. It all worked out for the best, but admissions to biomedical and systems engineering are extremely competitive. Computer science is also becoming more difficult, in large part because more students want to take basic programming classes and they are short on faculty (or were a few years ago). I believe they are increasingly restrictive on who can enroll into CS classes and when, but do your own research on this because it has been a few years since I looked into it.
Back in the 80s, I had a roommate who was an aeronautical engineer. The engineering grads booed the business college grads at graduation because that is supposedly where all the people who couldn’t handle engineering ended up (my son and some of his friends today refer to BME kids as business majors eventually). Not sure the issue is new. Maybe its become more common?
That would not be the case at UVA - leaving SEAS would mean a transfer to the College in all likelihood. Admissions to McIntire (Commerce school) is extremely competitive; one must apply for that during your second year after completing multiple prerequisites that a typical engineering student wouldn’t have.
UT Austin admits to CS students directly to the CS major but requires a minimum GPA in a series of CS classes to stay in the major. Not uncommon to see kids who don’t make the cut switch to Math since it is in the College of Natural Sciences as well. (UT’s CS in in Natural Sciences because it evolved from math as in understand it while they also offer a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Engineering college).
The GPA required does not seem especially high but from what I can tell that series of classes is tough.
This was the deciding factor for my son last year. His final two choices were UT Austin and Texas A&M. He was leaning A&M, but was direct admitted to Mech E at UT. A&M was in the midst of their roll out of a first year engineering program modeled on Purdue, and the reported number of students denied Mech E when they applied to enter a major that first year was huge, something like 75%. They’ve since tweaked the program to guarantee entry to engineering major of choice if certain gpa requirements are met I beleive, but DS is happily headed into his sophomore year at UT in his program of choice.
I believe RIT admits directly into specific majors. You can request to be admitted for up to three majors
At TCNJ, where my youngest goes, when you apply to the college you have to apply to what major you want so there are not oversubscribed majors.
CWRU, my alma mater, has a single door admissions policy where you get admitted to the Univ and you can major in whatever you want.
Texas A&M now requires the students to duke it out for admission into their major after the first year. We were told “A 3.5 should be enough to assure entry into the major of your choice.”
@MOMANDBOYSTWO , UVA has had first year general engineering since at least 2005 when son entered there so this is nothing new. After his first year, he moved into systems engineering which was a competitive process (as @sabaray noted) but he did well his first year so had no problem getting his first choice of major. Son at VT started in 2009 . Engineers start with general engineering so that is also nothing new. He never mentioned any kind of “weed out” culture at VT but he did very well there. The reality is that some kids won’t make it in engineering or decide it’s just not for them, regardless of the school they attend.
I think lower ranked engineering programs such as those in the Ivies admit directly. I could be wrong.
At Duke you are admitted to the engineering school. You can major in whatever area of engineering you want.
Both TCNJ and RIT had admissions rates of less than 20% to Mechanical Engineering this year. While my son was accepted to his second choice major (another engineering discipline) at both schools, he was told that transfer into another major later on would be highly competitive. Since he was accepted directly into the ME major at several other schools he chose one of those programs. As both my husband and I are ME’s that started out as EE’s (we went to different schools) we thought it was important that he attend a program where he could easily change major within engineering. When you start getting into the details of the different disciplines it is easy to find that it is nothing like you envisioned. I didn’t want him to have to transfer to pursue his passion. I did find this issue to be more common among the public schools. I think RIT was the only private he applied to where it was an issue.
@sabaray @deb922 That other thread is linked by OP in first post above. You could skim through that. It got shut down by a moderator who felt we were going off track.
Some examples: UCB, UCLA, UCSD, UIUC, some majors at Washington. The latter three may admit a student who is not admitted to the intended major into a general undeclared status; if the student enrolls as such, s/he will face a competitive admission process to enter the major.
These restrictions are typically due to capacity limitations, since departmental capacity cannot change that quickly (it can be limited by number of faculty, graduate student TAs, labs, and other facilities). So changes in student interest will affect how difficult it will be to enter a given major. Some of the schools may have operated like this for years, but the level of interest may have been low enough for some majors in earlier times that they may have essentially open majors or close to it.
For example, computer science has seen an explosion of interest in recent years, so that entrance to the computer science major at some schools has gotten significantly more difficult in recent years.
@eiholi I think you are wrong. From our research & visits, Ivies (and Duke, Vandy, USC, RPI, RPI, Lehigh, Bucknell and a few other private engineering colleges) seem to be very flexible about declaring and switching majors, and you are not usually immediately slotted into a particular major - just a particular school, like Engineering or Arts & Science. But, at Cornell and maybe the others, they like engineers to try to pick a major by the end of freshman year just because there are a lot of required classes to complete in four years. And, by the way, Cornell is an Ivy that has a highly ranked engineering school…
Carnegie Mellon, GA Tech, UCSB, South Carolina, and Clemson seemed to admit directly into a major, although maybe some kids came in as undecided engineering. Not sure how hard it is to get into desired majors from undecided at those schools - or to switch between an assigned major to a different one. Sounded hard at Carrnegie Mellon, but maybe it is easier once accepted to the college overall (Son was told in his waitlist letter that it would be virtually impossible for him to ever get his top choice major… )
Son requested Comp Eng and Comp Sci at UCSD and got slotted into General Studies instead, which meant he would have to compete to try to get into his desired majors. He was rejected by UCB OOS and waitlisted at UCLA, so even though he had to ID specific majors on his UC application, we are not sure if anyone gets direct-admit into engineering majors at those schools or not these days.
Slightly off topic: Most schools told us that complete switches into engineering from liberal arts are a little harder and less common than switching out of engineering into a liberal arts arena. As some of you have already said, business schools within top public universities are also becoming quite difficult get into, especially if not direct-admitted. One girl in son’s class this year picked UT over UVA because she was direct-admitted to business at UT but would have to wait until junior year to know if she could study business at UVA. She was accepted OOS for both.
@carachel2 Wow. I would be buying champagne if either of my kids got a 3.5 in engineering freshman year. Sounds like a high standard at Texas A&M.
@saillakeerie Never heard that one about BME - Business Majors Eventually. Pretty funny! And your post #2 nailed the reason for this thread.
Regarding udub, a quick perusal of their reddit page will convince you of the competitiveness of all STEM majors (sans physics which has open enrollment and probably one of two other minor ones). Remarkably, the inability to place in a major at udub is affecting Western (notably CS) as there are numerous transfers after a couple of years to get the major they wanted.