<p>I doubt that there is a certain number places for kids in each major each year, but I do think that admissions officers try to keep a general balance in the incoming class. In the highly unlikely event that every single of the top 2,000 applicants that all “should” be admitted to the university are all intended English majors, I seriously doubt that they would admit every one of those kids instead of admitting a variety, even if the others weren’t as “good” of applicants. Now I use this scenario for only demonstrative purposes and I’m in no way suggesting that there are only 2,000 applicants that “should” be admitted. (I have talked to a couple of the admissions officers at my school, Yale, who have said that they could admit all the waitlisted kids and waitlist all the admitted kids and no one would know but them. They also said that out of the ~30,000 applicants, only around 5,000 are NOT academically qualified, leaving 25,000 applicants to seriously consider. I add this only to show that there are so many competitive applicants that it would be hard to not have a reasonably balanced class and that AdComs probably don’t have to spend much time worrying about the mix.)</p>