does choice of major affect chance of acceptance?

Applying to College
1

<p>i'm interested in bio and languages, particularly Italian and Spanish. I could major in one or two of these. does the major I announce to the colleges affect my chances at being accepted?</p>

<p>I suspect your answers will be yes and no, but if you could tell me why yes or why no that would help.</p>

<p>I will only apply to schools that offer all 3 majors. they range from the most selective liberal arts colleges to large state schools.</p>

<p>(I've seen UCalifornia stats for transfer student acceptance rates, but cannot find any on freshman admissions. Any help here?)</p>

<p>Thanks for your help.</p>

2

<p>Yes but it varies year to year as to what they’re looking for… In general it’s harder to get into schools for engineering I believe. I don’t think bio vs italian vs spanish will make to much of a difference… the best choice would be to pick the one closest to your extracurriculars.</p>

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<p>Thanks, URI. My thinking was that because there are fewer applicants in Italian that might make the app stand out in a way that a neuro app cannot. Or that the 690 in math might look better for an Italian major than a neuroscience.</p>

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<p>Here is a link to all the UC data you could ever want…</p>

<p>[University</a> of California Office of the President](<a href=“http://www.ucop.edu/news/studstaff.html]University”>http://www.ucop.edu/news/studstaff.html)</p>

<p>And YES, major matters. I am not familiar with the particular areas of interest to the OP. I can tell you the following: S applied for a major with an acceptance rate between 8% and 11% for 2013. The overall acceptance for his particular UC published in this chart is 39%.</p>

<p>So yes, major matters.</p>

5

<p>For UCs, it depends on the campus.</p>

<p>For example, at the Berkeley campus, each division (L&S, CoE, CoC, CED, CNR) may have a different threshold for admissions. Within the CoE (College of Engineering), each major may have a different threshold for admissions. L&S does not have different thresholds by major, and all L&S frosh enter undeclared, but some majors are enrolled to capacity and require a higher than 2.0 GPA in prerequisites to declare.</p>

<p>You can expect that if a division is more competitive in frosh admissions, changing into it after enrolling will be difficult, requiring a high GPA to do so.</p>

<p>Other UC campuses and other university may handle it differently.</p>

<p>For example, San Jose State (a CSU) gives each major its own admission threshold:
[url=&lt;a href=“http://info.sjsu.edu/static/admission/impaction.html]Info.sjsu.edu[/url”&gt;http://info.sjsu.edu/static/admission/impaction.html]Info.sjsu.edu[/url</a>]</p>

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<p>This information about the UC system is intriguing. One untested observation I take away is that popular majors MIGHT get more scrutiny, such that Nutritional Health is going to require a higher GPA for admission to the major because interest is high at that school and capacity always has limits. Thank you for pointing me to it, ucbalumnus and dietz199. At a particular institution, one would think, the popularity of a major and capacity of a department will be different from that of another institution, perhaps suggesting that admissions officers at a particular institution might favor one proposed major over another but that there is less likelihood of there being a national bias for one proposed major over another. One MIGHT have to take it institution by institution.</p>

<p>Does anyone know of stats on institutional admission decisions based on proposed major at non-UC institutions?</p>

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<p>I know that Cal Poly SLO’s admissions are definitely driven by the applicant’s choice of major. You have to declare on your app.</p>

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<p>I think we might see more of this in the future, DzDad, because institutions are feeling pressure to have no more faculty members in a particular department than they have a need for TODAY, regardless of how many students they might have had ten years ago or last year–or expect to have in the future.</p>

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<p>It wouldn’t be hard to find schools that have those 3 majors. Some schools (Brown) don’t reply on your major as an admission factor. Others have impacted majors so it would be a factor, but I think you get to put an alternate major down. There are going to be a lot more BIO majors at UC’s than language majors. I doubt choosing Spanish vs Italian is going to matter.</p>

<p>You do not have to pick a major that aligns with your EC’s!</p>

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<p>I’d like to figure this out too. I’m interested in Duke and Vanderbilt for engineering, but I’m considering applying to the colleges of arts and sciences instead of engineering because it seems like it is easier to get in non-engineering…</p>

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<p>True, the more selective majors vary from school to school, as individual schools have different levels of major popularity relative to department capacity.</p>

<p>For example, University of Washington’s CS department is apparently quite undersized relative to demand for the CS major, so students not admitted to the major as frosh face an extremely competitive admissions process to declare the major (supposedly needs a 4.0 or near 4.0 college GPA). But Berkeley’s L&S CS major needs only a 3.0 GPA in prerequisite courses for undeclared students to declare (and recently only needed a 2.0, but demand has increased recently), and Stanford’s CS major does not appear to have any restrictions on declaring, despite enormous enrollment growth in the introductory CS course for CS majors.</p>

<p>Note that, in the San Jose State example, the CS major is more popular than the similar software engineering major, as reflected by the higher standards for frosh and transfer admission to the CS major.</p>

<p>Regarding biology, at Berkeley, two of the biology majors (molecular and cell biology and integrative biology) are among the largest majors on campus, but do not require any more than passing the prerequisites to declare, as they are not at departmental capacity. It is not just popularity of the major, but also departmental capacity that determines whether a major is hard to get into.</p>

<p>CS and engineering majors might, on average, be more impacted, because CS and engineering PhDs have good non-academic job prospects, so non-academic employers may try to lure them away. In addition, usually good job prospects at the bachelor’s degree level may reduce the graduate student (TA) -> PhD -> faculty pipeline in CS and engineering relative to majors like biology and foreign languages and literatures. But the average may not apply to an individual school.</p>

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<p>If that is the case at the given school, it may be difficult to switch into engineering after enrolling (e.g. you may need a very high college GPA in the lower division courses for engineering majors). There is no “free lunch” gained by applying to a less popular major and trying to switch later, since you would face another admissions process to change to the more popular major.</p>

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<p>I believe UCSD does not admit by major.</p>