<p>I'm just wondering.</p>
<p>Yes, it does.</p>
<p>Depends. English vs history no. Throw in engineering and yes.</p>
<p>Yes. For example, if you wanted to major in physics, your math and science grades and EC’s would be weighed more over other things and scrutinized more closely.</p>
<p>It depends on the college.</p>
<p>If there is enough excess capacity in every major at the college, then the college may just admit everyone undeclared and let them choose their majors later. But if many or all of the majors are filled to capacity, then the college may admit by major, and changing majors may require another competitive admission process.</p>
<p>A variant is admitting by division (e.g. different admission standards for the engineering division versus the liberal arts/sciences division) when one of them is filled to capacity.</p>
<p>Here’s the obvious example - say you want to go to Penn. If you want to major in business, i.e. go to Wharton, it’s going to be much tougher to get in than if you wanted to be an English major at Penn. Neither will be easy, but declaring business as your major at Penn ramps up the competition that much more.</p>
<p>The opposite is probably true at most liberal arts colleges. They’ll take a look at your declared interest, but major probably plays little role in admissions, unless you’re applying for something they have a real shortage of, say someone wanting to major in Russian and they have a bunch of tenured Russian professors sitting around not doing much. But even then, it’ll be a tiebreaker at best, you’re going to have to meet the basic standards to get in. I really doubt that most of the elite LACs will relax their standards much just to get someone willing to major an unpopular area, as they have no way of holding you to that. Balancing, e.g. women to the hard sciences, men to the social sciences, is probably more common.</p>
<p>Let’s just say that major is more often a hindrance, due to popularity, than it is a positive. It’s not something you really want to try and manipulate to gain admission, as it’s too unpredictable.</p>