<p>I have heard the term "impacted major" pretty often since I began using this site, but I still don't know what it means...could someone please tell me, and also tell me if there are certain majors which tend to be impacted, and what it means generally for admissions chances? </p>
<p>(I'm an English major.)</p>
<p>Oh, and I'm applying to Penn, Georgetown, Barnard, Chicago, and NYU (Gallatin). If that's relevant.</p>
<p>impacted means the number of applicant * greatly * exceeds the space available.</p>
<p>Just to give you an overly simplified definition, impacted major is what other people call "hard" majors to get into. </p>
<p>I'll use UC as my primary example.
Some majors like art, history, foreign language, and even English are "easy", meaning fairly big percentage of applicants get admitted. The stats for the admits tend to be around the average of the overall admits. In UC, the average GPA admitted (all majors combined) is a 3.5. </p>
<p>Some well-known "hard" (or impacted) majors tend to be Business, Economics, engineering, and in UCs, Communication Studies. Usually the stats for the admits tend to be WAY above the average, and has a very low admittance rate (less than 20%). People who are admitted into these majors tend to have significantly higher GPA than the average, usually above a 3.7.</p>