<p>during the application process, is MIT more lenient towards students who apply for an econ major than an engineering major, perhaps?</p>
<p>since mit doesn't admit you into a major or into a particular school (science vs. eng vs. arts&letters, say) i'd be surprised if they did differentiate. but i don't actually know one way or another.</p>
<p>The answer is 'no'. Otherwise, everybody would just apply to the most lenient major just to get admitted, and then once they're admitted, switch to the major that they actually want to be in.</p>
<p>Yeah, sakky's dead-on. There is no "backdoor" to get into MIT.</p>
<p>I don't know... I expressed an extremely strong interest in linguistics, which is an excellent major, but one which attracts fewer students, and I wonder if it helped me get in. MIT must be concerned with diversity of major as well as geographic, ethnic, socio-economic diversity. A prospective student planning to major in a more "exotic" field would probably get a closer look.
One could argue that MIT wishes to accept only students who can handle the workload (what's the point of accepting someone who will flunk out within a year) and that if economics was perceived by MIT as a less rigorous major, MIT could afford to lower its standards when it came to admitting economics. However, MIT has far more capable applicants than it has spaces, so unless an interest in economics is astonishingly rare, general aptitude, diversity, match, and extracurriculars must play a much, much greater role in admissions decisions than prospective major.</p>