Assuming that it is know ahead of time, I’d much rather get the benefit of the doubt based on the very imperfect admissions process (standardized test bias, unknown HS course rigor, wide variability in HS difficulty and grading).
Let everyone know going in that there is are limits and/or minimum GPA and grade requirements, and what the alternatives are if you don’t live up to them, and then let everyone be evaluated on equal footing.
The money spent on the first 3 semesters are not going to be wasted - those credits will transfer fairly well, unless the student is pivoting to a completely unrelated major, and even then, most of the work will count towards gen eds.
It is quite likely that schools which do direct admission to the majors (remember, not just engineering) already factor expected attrition due to changing interests, based on historical patterns. I.e. based on historical attrition patterns of direct admit frosh, they will estimate that N direct admit frosh will yield M juniors on that major. If the school also admits T junior transfer students into that major, then it must have upper division course space for M + T students per year in that major.
Of course, T may be T[sub]e[/sub] + *T[sub]i[/sub]/i. Increasing T[sub]i[/sub] to make the internal transfer process less “weedy” means that the major must admit fewer direct admits at the frosh level (smaller N to yield smaller M) or fewer external transfers (smaller T[sub]e[/sub]).
Getting into a given college of engineering is just the first step. Then you need to get into your specialty. Limited number of spots so there is a lot of competition. Weed out process there as well.
I suspect that when they look at incoming classes, colleges have an idea which kids are likely to succeed in any given major. But they don’t know for sure. Seems to me its better to give kids a chance to prove themselves on the same playing field (college classes at that college) rather than denying based on results on different playing fields (high school academic records). Some kids won’t make it into a given college within a university. That should be factored in when you apply.
Its also not like weed out classes are new. I remember them 30+ years ago.
@Dreadpirit – Sorry… transferring sucks. And even if the credits transfer, FA is usually poorer for transfer students and any merit aid is lost. That is not a good alternative.
@intparent Sure, but that is usually a worst case situation - eg you chose an engineering school for Aeronautical Engineering and have no interest in any other type of engineering, so now you want to major in math.
Usually, the harsh weed outs are for the majors that are lower capacity (for the demand) - eg Chem E at Penn State has a minimum GPA of 3.2, but there are other engineering majors you can chose if you can’t make that standard.
Usually, you are not being weeded out of all engineering, unless you really can’t/won’t make any of the cuts, in which case you have already demonstrated that you aren’t going be able to handle the work required to graduate.
In large universities, with high GPA requirements for all engineering majors there are always other majors available where you won’t have to deal with loss of FA. At engineering schools, there will always be majors with lower standards.
I think the bottom line is that students and their parents should carefully research these issues ahead of time before deciding which college to attend. Then pick what’s right for them. At least Google makes it super easy. As the ad said, “An Educated Consumer is our Best Customer”.
I really don’t like the “deliberately weedout 50% of engineering students their freshmen year” model. I never attended such schools. But I understand this model has its role. What about the kid who got a few C’s in freshman/sophomore math in high school? Should they be completely shut off from certain choices of majors in college because of how they did at age 15 or should they be given a chance too? Maybe they’re a late bloomer. I also think it’s good that we have some institutions that have more of an open admissions-esque philosophy and we give the students a 2nd chance to succeed. There are many students that can benefit from this. The alternative is that we are more highly selective at the college admissions stage. For many public institutions this is explicitly not their mission.
The good news is that in the US we have many different higher education paths for different types of students. We don’t lock people into a path at age 17. We have community colleges for students who need remediation. We also have community colleges for those who need to go to school as inexpensively as possible before transferring to a 4-year college. We have private liberal arts colleges, public flagships, and private research universities, all with somewhat different missions.
I think it’s great that we have so many different options since one size doesn’t fit all. But people have got to do their homework before picking a college.
Yes, this is absolutely right. Universities should hammer this point home. However, I personally don’t think it will change most students’ decisions much. How many of you have sat through the “look to your right; look to your left; one of these two students won’t make it” speech? I know I have a few times.
One more thing. On average across all 4-year institutions about 40-50% of prospective STEM majors switch to a non-STEM major (or dropout). But it’s also true that about 40% of prospective non-STEM majors also switch to another non-adjacent discipline (or dropout) – like business students switching to sociology (however, one difference is that on average more people switch out of STEM fields than switch into them). You can also look at schools like elite privates where these weedout policies aren’t nearly as draconian. You see roughly similar switch out rates. So even though I personally think this way of weeding out students is cruel, I’m not sure it actually changes the end result as much as it would seem on the surface.
It depends on whether the students who are forced to switch are mostly qualified or unqualified. I also think it depends on whether they drop out of college entirely or switch to another major and end up having successful careers. I suspect that if a student was qualified but unfairly weeded out then they will probably still do fine after they switch majors. Fortunately, there are a million ways to be successful that don’t depend on what you major in.
Many 17 year olds only have a vague idea what a given career is like. Maybe they find out they don’t really like their first choice of major or that their talents lie elsewhere, or they decide they like something better. So if you’re only willing to send your 17 year old kid to a particular college if they are going to get an engineering degree then you’re always going to be taking a pretty large gamble no matter what the weedout policies are.
Sure, but not everyone whose first choice engineering major is (for example) mechanical engineering will find some other less popular engineering major like (for example) agricultural engineering or industrial engineering to be an acceptable alternative.
Yes, but not all students want to major in one of the easier to get into majors. A student who is not picky about his/her major may find alternate majors acceptable (e.g. someone may find it acceptable to major in math or statistics if s/he does not get into industrial engineering, or economics if s/he does not get into business), but not all students aiming for popular (relative to capacity) majors find less popular alternate majors acceptable. The latter students need to pay attention to how difficult their path into their desired majors will be at each school they are considering.
Sequenced prerequisites in many STEM majors (particularly the E for engineering) may mean that the window of changing into those STEM majors is limited before it becomes too late in terms of not being able to graduate on time after switching due to long prerequisite sequences, unless the student has carefully been taking that major’s prerequisites during the semesters before switching.
Perhaps the most concern are situations where the GPA threshold is high, like 3.5, in which case many solid students who earned B or B+ grades in the prerequisite courses (meaning that they are qualified) are shut out of their desired majors.
@ucbalumnus If somebody is dead set on a particular major then it behooves them to go to a school where they will be able to get into that major. There are many very good engineering schools that admit directly to major, and others that don’t have any significant enrollment controls.
No different really than any other school choice criterion. If you love the Mech E, but only 5% of the engineering class is accepted to Mech E, then you are taking a risk - even more so, if you are not in the top 10% of accepted test scores.
Nobody is hiding these fact from applicants - if kids choose to ignore them, and parents allow it, how is that the schools fault. No different than kids who don’t want to do coop going to a school with mandatory coop.
I agree. I very much discouraged my nephew from applying to Berkeley Letters & Sciences because of the 3.30 technical GPA cutoff for the Computer Science major despite the fact that he’d probably easily get admitted to UCB, ucb.
This was the result of surging CS enrollment – the introductory CS course now has about 2,000 students per year (capacity in EECS + L&S CS combined is probably about 700 students per year, based on recent graduation numbers). Only a few years ago, L&S CS was an unrestricted major, requiring just a 2.0 GPA in its prerequisites (back then, there were about 300 to 400 EECS + L&S CS graduates per year). Then it become a restricted major requiring a 3.0 GPA; more recently, the GPA minimum was raised to 3.3.
Did he apply to EECS (which would be direct admission to the major if admitted)?
Yes. He’s a very strong OOS candidate, and I estimate his odds to be 30-40% or so (vs 5-7% overall average in-state and out-state). But it’s better to take the risk upfront rather than 1-2 years down the road.
Recently his mom has been worrying about the budget cutback news. I told her I’d make some calls to look into it after the dust settles.
(Berkeley is truly a public jewel and a national treasure, but their budget ping-pong game gets old after a while. Friends of mine on the faculty have lived through several iterations and left in frustration. I’m also not a big fan of the difficulty of switching majors within engineering. Fortunately, my nephew has a great EA choice in hand. We’ll see.)
Let’s face it, the people who built things like Facebook which is all about helping people communicate, or Google, which is about helping people find information, or Microsoft, which is about helping people communicate via presentations, docs, etc, or eBay which is about bringing together buyers and sellers, all have fallen flat on their faces because they didn’t know anything about dealing with people.
Oh, and don’t forget, that obviously a company like Google which is highly desirable and has 54k employees also fell flat on their faces because they can’t manage those employees due to their inability to deal with people.
Let’s all praise the advertising geniuses who gave us the Walmart Fat Girl Costume campaign or the Victoria Secret “Perfect Body” campaign since they obviously are so expert in knowing how to deal with people.
Not sure why you want a STEM person to interpret French literature. Don’t you want them building safe bridges or applications instead? Do you criticize French literature majors for not being able to design a safe bridge? LOL.
And to go one step further, I find it a bit sad to read the chance me threads which have some variation of “I really want to go to Reach school, but my grades are not great, didn’t do great on the SAT (had a cold that day) but (fill in the rationalization)”. I get that people want to be encouraging, but some one should help them ask the question “if you get in, would you succeed…is there a place where you can do better?”
If by some chance they get into that Reach school, they need to be prepared that that is only the first step - they may be weeded out of their dream major after a year and they would have been much better off going to a school where they could properly develop their skills.
Each of these companies have stressed the importance of their non-STEM people in turning projects that were essentially “by computer geeks for computer geeks” into something that could actually appeal to most people.
You actually believe that eBay, Facebook and Google were just “by computer geeks for computer geeks” until the non-STEM people came on board to save them by creating something that can appeal to the mass market.
Now that is funny!
And no, they never said it was their non-STEM people who could make something that could appeal to most people - or do you really think Eric, Larry, Sergey, Marissa and all the other creators and scalers of those companies weren’t STEM? What do you think the mix of people in important roles for stem/non-stem are in those companies? Or even just the sheer volume?
More importantly, it seems that there are people who don’t the concept that there are STEM people who actually have skills that are not confined to “computer geeks” because they depend on stereotypes of who these people actually are. They don’t need the non-STEM calvary to come in to turn them from niche geeks for geeks to mass market.
It’s not that simple. Several studies have found that SAT adds little to the prediction of academic success in college beyond a measure of grades + course rigor. Average class grades are usually correlated with selectivity (for example, a reach may curve a particular class to B+/A- and safety may curve that class to B-/C+). And the “weeding classes” as described in this thread are usually notably less common at highly selective reach colleges.
In recent years, some highly selective colleges seem to be going out of their way to encourage students to stick with engineering/CS, particularly female students, rather than weed them out. Many reach type schools encourage students to collaborate with one another instead of compete in engineering (students are encouraged to do problem sets in groups, group labs, group projects…). I wouldn’t assume a “look at the student to your left, and look at the student to your right, … one of you is going to drop/fail out” type atmosphere or atmosphere that the original poster described. Many highly selective private will also increase major size to accommodate however many students want to do the major that year, rather than adjust “weeding.”. For example, Stanford has let the number of CS majors quadruple in recent years, as well as engineering school majors more than double.
Perhaps most important of all is the fit of the individual student. Some thrive as the big fish, others get pushed to new heights when surrounding by amazing people. For some students, the reach is the better choice. For others, the safety is the better choice.
Of course, many (but not all) highly selective private schools are very wealthy and can increase capacity (or had unused reserve capacity before) in most majors as they get popular. That is what enables them to avoid having to choose between having to admit by major or “weeding” students out of majors that have run out of capacity.
We talk a lot about possible grade inflation (and how using a grading curve could impact it), but when you tie performance evaluations (for non-tenured faculty) to student success, we have a fairly clear link.