If you get a chance to read any of the subreddits for UW computer science, for example, you will see how how the students feel about the process. Pages and pages…
@inspiration12, that’s precisely why I advised my son (and any other student who I’m advising) not to waste any time considering UW (or any other school that requires competition for a slot after admission) in the first place. There are certainly rare exceptions, those who do well enough to be offered direct admission. You don’t know however until you are fully vested in the application process. There are SO MANY other good options, why risk it?
Maybe the right mix is a holistic admission into specific major (new policy) with a threshold GPA/grade in core classes to advance each year (old/current policy). Then do away with applying to major…
@boneh3ad has a very interesting take on the issue. Thanks for posting that. Just on the ground I see and hear a lot of negatives about 25 by 25, it’s good to get a larger and more optimistic perspective of the whole deal.
Now this is the interesting part.
The only way that 25 by 25 can work out is by expanding the college, like you said, but I really don’t know how much more it can actually grow. A&M already one of the biggest campuses in the nation at 60,000 enrolled, and I think something like 15K of them are engineering students. The college of engineering is already enormous- how much bigger can you really get?
In addition, the main campus and the city of Bryan/College Station are just getting overcrowded. Both are over-capacity right now - IMO, they really seem like they were built for a student body of around 40K. It’s going to be tough to add another 5,000 or 10,000 engineers from a money and logistics standpoint, and that’s not even including growth from other colleges.
For example, right now they’re renovating one building to become some kind of freshman engineering complex. That’s going to add, I don’t know, maybe a dozen 300-seat lecture halls. That venture is going to take three years and cost I believe a quarter billion dollars. I don’t know how much money 25 by 25 has behind it, but that growth isn’t going to come cheap.
Yeah I have some reservations about the whole 25 by 25 program. When they rolled it out, I was nearing the end of my PhD and had enough connections with high-ranking faculty and some administrators that I had a few lengthy discussions on it just to satiate my own curiosity on the issue. I still think that trying to reach 25,000 students is bonkers, but overall I came away from those discussions with a far less negative opinion of the plan. It helped a lot that the plan has essentially a built-in abort button whereby if they realize the growth is unsustainable or if the legislature pulls the plug on the funding, they can scale back or abandon the plan as necessary.
The biggest problem is that they need to grow the student body and faculty in order to justify the new buildings they will need. It is also substantially easier to scale up the student population than it is to scale up the faculty effectively. There will be growing pains for sure. Overall, though, I think their goals are rather noble, and while it is risky, I got the impression that they may well come out of this looking like geniuses if they pull of what they actually envision. If they don’t, there’s still that abort button.
I had no idea there even was a kill switch on it.
Kind of a related thought - do you think there’s a need for 10,000 extra engineers in the state of Texas? Or is this just going to dilute the job market?
Shoot, I don’t honestly know. There are a lot of companies clamoring for more engineers, on the one hand, but there’s a reasonable economic argument (stagnant wages) that says the shortage is a myth. At this point I am not sure what I believe there. Either way, even if there aren’t enough in Texas, they may be nationwide. That would just require they average Aggie to be more willing to leave the state after graduation, which they are, on average, less likely to do than at most schools.
“why risk it?” Not all programs are alike and I am not sure why there would need to be blanket advice to not consider any schools at all that don’t admit directly to major. My kids were willing to “risk it” because they liked their instate options - they had no problem getting into their preferred majors . Virginia Tech, for instance, only requires a 3.0 in initial courses to be guaranteed transfer from general engineering into your top choice major . Anybody with at least a 2.0 will get into one of their top 3 choices (out of 14 choices). In addition, VT has living /learning communities, good advising and mentoring , good job placement and good diversity outreach. Not sure why it (or UVa) should be dismissed out of hand simply because they are not direct admit to major programs?
VT and UVA do appear to be much less competitive to get into engineering majors than schools like Washington. Perhaps there is less political and fiscal pressure to enroll every major to capacity there.
Comparison of automatic admit to major thresholds in schools which admit to pre-engineering:
3.5 Texas A&M
3.2 Minnesota
3.0 Virginia Tech
2.0 Michigan
Here is some more info on UVa. http://www.seas.virginia.edu/about/facts They set a decent bar for admission as a first year into engineering from the beginning . The average SAT is 1430 and most kids were top students in high school. In 2015, most kids did get into their first choice engineering major (there are 10 altogether). Civil and electrical were able to take 100 % of those that wanted that major. The ones that could not take everyone that viewed it as their first choice were biomedical (took 75 % of those that identified it as first choice), chemical (76 %), systems (81 %), mechanical (87 %) and computer science (88%). I believe you can also do computer science is arts and sciences. Students know going in that they will be applying after the first year for a specific major and will have to work hard if they want to be sure to get their desired major. Many students like being able to take the first year to explore different options .
As is typical, @ucbalumnus can read my intention between the lines I typed. 
It certainly is VERY situational and I was discussing schools where the competition is so high that students are commonly denied their choice, ones like UW and A&M.
For my son’s particular situation I believe he would have received a direct admit at UW. It is the best engineering program in the PNW. Had he been a WA resident, it might have made sense. As a non-WUE school though it made no sense from OOS. There are schools with no uncertainty, that are as good or better, for less money. The bigger reason though was that he eliminated all schools that didn’t start with major based curriculum freshman year. By definition programs that require competition for a slot at a later date have very generalized curriculum. Granted it wasn’t “real” mechanical engineering per se, but it’s been shown over and over that schools that start “engineering” real or not, earlier have less attrition.
As I said, for the kids who ask my opinion, a blanket statement is probably appropriate. That doesn’t make it relevant to all cases.
Computer science numbers are going up everywhere. From the info I could see, UW only awarded 234 bachelors in 2015, surprising since there are so many big companies near there. Demand must be tough to satisfy. Even UVa, which is nowhere near Silicon Valley or Seattle has seen CS numbers rise in the engineering school. In 2015, more undergraduate degrees were awarded to CS majors than anything else in the engineering school (115). Next was mechanical (103), systems (92), biomedical (85), civil (67), chemical (46), computer engineering (43), electrical (41), engineering science (31), aerospace (31). Of course, UVa is a much smaller program , not a big engineering powerhouse .
“it’s been shown over and over that schools that start “engineering”, real or not , earlier have less attrition.” That is the info I would be interested to see out of curiosity, if you have any links or additional info to provide.
Here is a list of secondary admission requirements to CS majors at various schools, if one is not directly admitted to the CS major:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19262574/#Comment_19262574
I know the studies that @eyemgh is referencing when saying that schools that start engineering earlier have better retention. I don’t have a link off-hand, but I am pretty sure I’ve read that several places. The thing is, that doesn’t mean students have to be admitted to a specific major yet to benefit. Most of those “pre-engineering” programs that we are discussing here include one or more intro engineering courses in order to both help orient students to engineering as a broader discipline and help them decide which to pursue. Those kinds of courses can count toward this retention trend. The idea behind that trend is that students who are stuck taking only things like calculus and physics and chemistry and general education courses for several semesters before seeing anything from the engineering department are more likely to drop engineering.
We had to take an “Introduction to Architectural Engineering” course when we were freshmen at UT-Austin (taught by my dad!). We mostly had interesting guest speakers, and we also had to design and build a model truss. It was a fun class.
boneh3ad, Thanks. Those are the types of “general engineering” type things my sons took initially before applying to a particular engineering major- engineering exploration, foundations of engineering type things in addition to core math and science courses. But it is still within the engineering school, even though you are not yet into a particular major .
I don’t know if you saw this thread yesterday @ucbalumnus , but it speaks to your point on how difficult it can be to transfer into CS, at least at UCSD:
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-california-san-diego/1881773-this-quarter-you-needed-a-4-0-to-transfer-into-cs-at-ucsd.html
CS almost seems like a different animal these days from engineering, science in general. Heightened interest, trendiness, high salaries , etc. all seem to add to the frenzy.
@bonehead is correct AND that’s but one of quite a few identified strategies. ASEE is a good clearing house of that information. I’ll link a summary below along with a presentation at the ASME leadership summit regarding the Spiral Curriculum in ME at Utah.
https://www.asee.org/retention-project
http://files.asme.org/Events/MEED2013/34613.pdf
Compare the curriculum charts at UW and Cal Poly
http://flowcharts.calpoly.edu/downloads/mymap/15-17.52MEBSU.GENMEU.pdf
https://www.me.washington.edu/prospective/ug/curriculum.html
At UW they take no engineering courses first year as pre-engineers and 4 second year, still as pre-engineers. Contrast that to Cal Poly where an ME student will take 16 engineering classes, 8 of which are ME. I chose those schools for illustrative purposes only because I’m most familiar with their differing academic approaches which are close to polar opposites. I agree that even intro courses that are not major focussed are helpful. The Poly approach certainly isn’t perfect either. It’s challenging to switch majors and presumes a HS senior will know what he/she wants to do as a career. It does also seem that there are fewer and fewer universities sticking completely with the old school approach like UW.