Reply to Do not send your child to Pomona if they are interested in a CS degree. The major is not guaranteed

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a comparison locally, at UVa there is no guarantee that a would-be BACS major will be able to get the required pre-requisite courses or will be allowed to major in CS even if they do take all the pre-req courses.  Further, Echols Scholars at UVa will have an edge getting the pre-req courses, as their course requests are processed by Carruthers Hall before the rest of the students in the College.

I am not a big fan of a lottery system, but if there aren’t enough faculty to offer the pre-req courses to all students who want them, then a lottery is not totally unreasonable.

[b]I think the heads-up about limited CS students is fine.  Students who really want only CS should be targeting direct-admit colleges, such as UMCP does locally.[/b][/quote]

Top liberal arts colleges almost always let a student choose any major. Pomona forcing a lottery is a huge deal because it is such a break with their peers. For a school that considers itself to be on par with the top SLACs to limit access to a major is a huge black mark. The freedom to explore interests before deciding on a major is one of the major differentiators between liberal arts schools and larger universities with separate colleges as well as direct admit majors.   [/quote]
I don't think LAC's outside of California have to go through this. Swarthmore has a very similar issue with much less students in CS, where they're now rationing CS classes out to students. The only major a top LAC can handle 20%+ of its students majoring in without having to make changes is Economics.

Pomona is also near LA, which is just a very hard region to get good talent from (talent with PhDs) when they can all go into better positons. There's much less Tech in the northeast, compared to the West coast. This is why Stanford has such a ridiculous CS culture and 90% of seniors graduating have taken a CS course (16% of the 2023 class was CS majors). Berkeley direct admit CS has a 2% acceptance rate, even Harvey Mudd-47% of their graduating seniors are in some field of CS when two decades ago it would've been closer to 8-10%. Pomona, unlike Berkeley or Stanford, refuses to increase their CS class sizes beyond 30, so they can't accept anyone willy nilly into the major.[/quote]

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