I’m not sure whether Georgia Tech does or doesn’t take major into account in admissions. I know they used to; when I applied back in 2003, we were required to specify a major on our application, and different majors had different high school requirements for admission. (I don’t remember what I put. Civil engineering?)
However, I will say that it’s kind of silly for a university that makes it easy to transfer schools within it to consider major in the application for admission. A student who wants to major in CS, for example, could just put psychology on his application, get in, and easily change his major to computer science. And from poking around, it seems that before you earn 60 credits at GT, changing your major (or adding a second one) is as easy as filling out a form at the registrar’s office.
Anyway, OP, don’t confuse acceptance rate and required SAT scores with school quality. The quality of a university is much more dependent on its outputs than inputs. GT, Purdue, UW, and VT have some of the best professors in engineering; they have cutting-edge research in the field going on; they are widely recognized for turning out some of the best engineers. Those things are a lot more important in evaluating a university than what percentage of people get in. (Remember that acceptance rate is directly affected by how many people apply, and far more people simply want to apply to Stanford, Harvard, et al. - some just want to be able to say they got in; the financial aid is way better at these schools than at OOS publics; and Stanford and Harvard spam students with their literature, including students who have no prayer of admission.)