Applying for unpopular major help with admissions?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am not sure if this comes through in other posts but, to me, is the essential point:

Depends on if kid is applying to a particular school directly and what the specific university’s policy is on switching between schools. My kid is arts and letters major (applied to school of arts and letters) at a place that is virtually impossible to transfer into school of business. Applying arts and letters would not have been good idea if he truly only wanted to be business major.

But other schools have different process. And house various majors in various schools (data science is one that you can often take in multiple schools). The devil is in the details. You need to check the specific schools to which your kid will apply.

Good advice here.

[Anonymous]

Depends whether or not the school admits directly to the major. In that case it may be easier to gain admittance to an undersubscribed major BUT May be very difficult to change majors later so you don’t want to overplay your hand. May be more useful to express interest in a particular less-common major if the student applies to a school where they declare major later (ie Arts and Sciences). I would research very carefully.

[Anonymous]

Presumably the whole point of this exercise is to get the child admitted to a more selective school. If the child is not inherently interested in the subject, it would take a lot of pretty unhealthy and devious behavior to get the app in line.

The college admissions culture is toxic. Think about the long term welfare of your child and what you are communicating about the importance of a particular college result. We are raising humans, not just college aspirants.

And if the child is truly interested in STEM, why not encourage them? You don’t know what your kid is capable of until you help them to pursue a path they have chosen for themselves.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Presumably the whole point of this exercise is to get the child admitted to a more selective school. If the child is not inherently interested in the subject, it would take a lot of pretty unhealthy and devious behavior to get the app in line.

The college admissions culture is toxic. Think about the long term welfare of your child and what you are communicating about the importance of a particular college result. We are raising humans, not just college aspirants.

And if the child is truly interested in STEM, why not encourage them? You don’t know what your kid is capable of until you help them to pursue a path they have chosen for themselves.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:LOL. They don't let your freshman just switch majors, OP. You can't run that game, they are on to that one. Your kid could double major, or minor, but a double major requires departmental approval. Paperwork, signatures from department heads. There isn't a guarantee.

Yale does. You don’t have to declare a major until Junior year, although most do earlier. Only a few majors have separate admissions, such as art and architecture but not stem fields or engineering, and they happen sophomore year.

Yale doesn’t have highly ranked programs in the typically impacted majors like engineering and computer science. They’re trying to get more students into these majors rather than limit - Berkeley being probably the most extreme example with around 2% acceptance rate for computer science major.