Does the adcom consider your second and third choice majors? Or do they just brush them off? What are the statistics of people being admitted to their second or third choice major?
Sorry if this has already been asked somewhere on CC
At the University of Chicago, as with most elite U.S. colleges and universities, no one is admitted to a particular major, and in fact no one is permitted to declare a major until the end of their first year, and no one is required to declare a major until the end of their second year. A few universities have separate applications for their engineering schools, or nursing schools, or business schools, so if you think you know what major you want you have to apply to the school in which that major is offered, but hardly any universities require separate admission to a particular major when you are applying to enter as a first-year student. (Many universities have a few majors to which one must apply after one is already a student there.)
It is unclear just how much attention admissions committees pay to the prospective major you indicate on your application, but the range of possibility runs from “very litte” to “absolutely none”. The majority of students wind up graduating with a major that is different from the one they thought they wanted when they started college, which may already differ somewhat from the major they put on their college applications. So no one takes the prospective major declaration seriously.
Where it may get some attention is if you say you want to major in some field that is relatively unpopular but academically important – like classics, anthropology, art history – and the rest of your application shows a strong commitment to that field. Not so much in what you say, but in what you have done. That may give you a little boost, because the admissions staff is under some pressure to avoid admitting a class in which no one winds up majoring in Classical Civilization. But if your prospective major is Economics, Biology, English, Math – that won’t make any difference at all.
And that’s your first choice major. No one is going to pay attention to your second or third choices, except to the extent they may help highlight something else in your application.