<p>I apologize if that question has already been asked/answered before, but how hard is it to get into your major of choice at MIT ? Specifically, are there majors where the number of applicants is consistently higher than the number of available places in the respective course ? What percentage (if any) of first-year students fail to get into their first choice for major and have to settle for a second or third choice ?</p>
<p>You can declare any major you want. You won’t be turned away :P</p>
<p>There’s no limit. You just choose and get it. I think something like 40% of the people choose engineering.</p>
<p>Piper and Resilient: Thank you for your reply. I’d like to understand better though how that works in practice.</p>
<p>If for example 20% of freshman class chose one particular major, let’s say EECS, wouldn’t that put an extraordinary pressure on existing resources available in the EECS department (faculty, labs, class size, etc.)? Conversely, if another course were picked by, let’s say, less than 1 % of the freshman class, wouldn’t that department’s resources be essentially idle (relatively speaking) ? </p>
<p>I guess my question is how MIT manages to allocate resources efficiently across the various departments for undergraduate education specifically without having at least a rough estimate of the maximum (or the minimum) number of students that may be accepted as majors in each course . Although I believe you, I find it difficult to understand how, with finite resources per department and unequal demand for different courses, it is possible to guarantee that no major application will ever be turned down.</p>
<p>From my understanding, the numbers don’t tend to change drastically year-to-year. They can take the history and allot the resources appropriately. You do sometimes get situations where, say, some juniors will be turned away from a class because all the seniors have to take it first.</p>
<p>I will note that there have been limits in the past. When Course 20 was newer, it reserved the right to keep people from entering the major because they didn’t know if they’d have the resources to keep everyone in. This restriction was removed last year, though (and to my knowledge, no one was actually kept out - it was a precaution).</p>
<p>@bruno - </p>
<p>AFAIK the scenario you described has never occurred. If it did we’d figure something out. In practice, there are no bottlenecks for departments.</p>
<p>You can see the enrollment statistics per department [url=<a href=“Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar”>Statistics & Reports | MIT Registrar]here[/url</a>] – look for the files that are called “yreport”. You can see that the demographics for each major do indeed change over time (for example, there were 363 EECS majors in 1998, but only 212 in 2008), but the change is generally small each year, allowing the departments plenty of time to adjust.</p>