<p>I have read in many admission books that putting engineering as a major, a back door entry to enter into elite university such as Princeton, Yale, Stanford, (Columbia, Cornell, and UPenn do not allow inner transfer between humanities and engineering program). No idea about Brown. I also read that rate of amdisiion for kid seeking engineering degrees is much higher than humanities program kids? I personally know few Asian kids who entered into Princeton and Yale in engineering and later on switched their majors. This is very small data. Is this all true? Many kids who matriculated in Columbia or Penn in engineering they were not top 10% in our local school district. (School publishes top 10% group photo in the community newspaper). I am sure kids have necessary requirements such as calculus and physics etc. but many top kid’s have taken similar requirement going to matriculate in humanities. I am just wondering if this hypothesis cited in admission books is wrong or right.</p>
<p>Many years ago there may have been a grain of truth to the idea that it was a bit less competitive to apply to the engineering departments of schools like Princeton.</p>
<p>Those days are now long gone, if they ever were extant.</p>
<p>Consider Princeton, which admits somewhere around 200 or so students to engineering, give or take…(you can look it up). They really don’t have to go begging to find high quality applicants. And there arent’ all that many slots, are there?</p>
<p>The stats you mention are usually the ones that show the raw number of applications to the acceptances. You’ll notice that if you look at those numbers for MIT, it would appear that it is materially less difficult to be admitted there than at, say, Harvard or Yale. Of course, it isn’t so. Those applying are from a self selected group which excludes most of the people who want to apply as “a long shot”. </p>
<p>Speaking of “shots”, your observation about your school’s ranking and engineering admissions at Columbia and Penn says more about your school’s system than it does about the Universities ease of entry. I would postulate that your system has the deck stacked against the best math students, lumping their weighted grades together with the same weight given to the second hardest math tier. (this is what our high school did, which routinely misranked a number of our students who probably should have been bottom of the top decile, but instead were pushed lower by the improper weighting, and possibly different curves in the two sections.) Of course, that difference tends to show up in the math scores on the SAT IIs and the regular SAT. I’ll bet if you look at the math and science scores of the accepted students you’ll find they were well within the top 10% and probably top 5% of your school.</p>
<p>well, the way i’ve always seen it is like this. generally on toughest schools to get into, the engineering schools have as good, if not better stats than the liberal arts college counterparts at the school, but proportionately less students apply. so like, if you’re sats are say in that 75% range, it might be beneficial to apply to the e-school just because there is likeley less of a chance of that “we have 5 identical applicants and we have to pick one” and more like “we have 3 identical applicants and we have to pick 1”</p>
<p>so if you stats match, you might just have a better numbers game applying to the e-schools.</p>
<p>You have one correct observation. The admission rates for those who apply for engineering to the elite colleges is higher than the regular admission rate. However, that does not mean what you hope. Columbia is an example. Last year its admission rate for engineering was 26% compared to 10% for Columbia College (arts & sciences). However, 94% of those admitted to engineering were top 10% of their class compared to 90% of those for Columbia College and the middle SAT 50% range for engineering was 1440-1550 compared to 1380 to 1530 in the College. What happens is that engineering takes a higher percentage but it is choosing from a group of applicants who overall have higher stats than any other group that applies. That actually happens at most colleges which have engineering including the other ones you mention.</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s any question that a qualified engineering candidate has a somewhat better chance of getting into one of those colleges than most other applicants. Certainly Yale – which has less of a reputation in engineering than Stanford or Princeton – has been forthright about its appetite for more engineers.</p>
<p>Call me naive, though, but I can’t imagine that a student who has never really wanted to be an engineer is going to be able to present a compelling application as an engineer. Sure, lots of kids have met the prerequisites, but not that many are going to have the ECs and recommendations that look engineer-y. It’s tough enough for 17- and 18-year-olds to present themselves in personal essays; I’ll bet a fake usually stands out like a sore thumb.</p>
<p>Also, what does it say about you if you are willing – let’s say it – to lie and cheat to get into a particular college? Why would you be that kind of person? If you have the qualifications to impersonate a compelling engineering applicant at Yale or Princeton, you could have your choice of any number of really fine colleges without faking anything.</p>
<p>drusba,</p>
<p>i think i said exactly what you said. my point was if you fit within the average profile of the admitted engineering student, you merely have a better chance of being picked than being the average candidate at the schools college.</p>
<p>Columbia states the following:</p>
<p>*** May I transfer from Columbia College to The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (or vice-versa) once accepted and enrolled?***</p>
<p>If you are accepted to one of Columbias undergraduate schools and genuinely feel that you should attend the other, you may submit an Application for Transfer Admission to the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. However, you will be competing with other transfer applicants (from many other colleges), and current Columbia students are not guaranteed or given automatic preference in the transfer admission process. We strongly recommend that prospective Columbia applicants consider thoroughly which undergraduate school is more appropriate for their interests and aspirations.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/admissions/faq/admissions.php#30[/url]”>http://www.studentaffairs.columbia.edu/admissions/faq/admissions.php#30</a></p>
<p>The situation seems to vary greatly from one university to another.</p>
<p>At Cornell, unlike Columbia, it is not particularly difficult to transfer from Engineering to one of the other schools, and internal transfers do not compete with external transfers for places.</p>
<p>However, since the SAT scores of incoming students in the College of Engineering are the highest of any college at Cornell, you would have to be nuts to try to use Engineering as a back door to anything.</p>
<p>When I read policies like Columbia’s, or see what colleges like CMU do, it makes me sad. What 17 year old is ready to make such decisions? Why a college forces kids to chose a field, then makes it hard for them to explore or move to other areas is beyond me.</p>
<p>Seems kinda anti-learning.</p>
<p>In some countries, students choose their track by age 14 (or earlier) and this determines which college they’ll attend, or which career they will train for. (Our cycling tour guide was telling me in July that schools in Austria worked this way, for instance, but there are other more extreme examples.) Not that I agree this is an ideal approach, just noting that in many ways, students in the US educational system have it cushy, in terms of exploring alternatives.</p>
<p>I think picking your area of concentration as part of the admissions process is the norm for higher education in most of the world. (And of course that often means picking it substantially earlier so as to present the best case for admission to the faculty of your choice.) I prefer our system, too, but I recognize that it depends on and reinforces the notion that 17 year-olds are not capable of making adult choices, something that is very specific to American society in the 20th Century (and beyond). In most cultures, and over most of human history, 17 year-olds know what they want to do with themselves.</p>
<p>Even in the U.S., a scant generation or two ago, a majority of older teens were in the workforce already (or maybe in the military). The higher education model in research universities and LACs – what we treat as the norm most of the time – was developed to serve an elite minority, not as a model for universal higher education.</p>
<p>It’s really not all that different now, either. Of the 17 year-olds I have known over the past few years, most have made some basic choices (am I a math/science kid? am I an engineering type?), and lots have made more definitive choices than that, choosing very practical, focused education options. The ones who haven’t often (not always) fall into one or more of three categories. They may be economically privileged, feeling no pressure to earn a living quickly and confident that they can afford graduate school. They may be intellectually privileged, kids to whom everything academic comes easy so nothing has forced them to triage interests. Or they may be immature, kids who may “find themselves” in college, or maybe not. As I said, I like the way our system works, but it isn’t normative or necessary at all.</p>
<p>newmass dad, I agree with you, but if Columbia didn’t have that policy, people would use the engineering school as a back door to Columbia College because it’s significantly easier to get admitted to engineering.</p>
<p>Also, the hard reality is that in some professional majors, such as engineering and architecture, there’s so much material to cover that a kid has to be prepared to hit the ground running as a freshman. Even in a liberal arts college, kids who want to major in sciences have to make that choice by sophomore year at many colleges because the courses in the major are sequential. Only humanities and social sciences majors have the luxury of exploring multiple fields.</p>
<p>Can we agree that, based on Drusbas cited statistics, it is incorrect to say that it is significantly easier to be admitted to Columbia in engineering than in arts and sciences.</p>
<p>Years ago, I had a close friend who attended Princeton. He was a very good student leader, and en excellent athlete. He had applied as an engineer because that myth existed even then (30+ years ago). The admissions office notified the coach that if the student wanted to be admitted, he needed to switch his degree candidacy to the A.B. degree. He did, and he got in. </p>
<p>I think the original question might be rephrased to ask whether a particular someone might be admitted to a particular school as an engineer, and not admitted in arts and sciences. This is often true, I believe…but it is not correct to generalize it to say that it is “easier” to be admitted as an engineer.</p>
<p>dadx, take a look at the threads on the Columbia boards where applicants say whether or not they were admitted and give their stats. When my daughter and I did this, back when she was considering Columbia, we couldn’t help but notice that applicants with slightly less-than-stellar qualifications were sometimes admitted to SEAS, but that those with similar stats were almost never admitted to Columbia College unless they were URMs.</p>
<p>Of course, people who post on College Confidential may not be a representative sample.</p>
<p>Comparatively fewer people are qualified to apply to engineering programs, fewer are interested, and fewer apply. I think that means that the engineering admissions are less random than Arts & Sciences admissions: a greater percentage of really well-qualified applicants get accepted. At the HYPS level, a really well-qualified kid still only has a Russian-roulette chance at A&S admission, but maybe a 50% chance at an engineering admission. Is that “easier”? Sure. Is it “easy”? No way.</p>
<p>(I haven’t looked at the Columbia stats, but it occurs to me that two things may come into play: (1) Columbia’s relative prestige in engineering is maybe a couple ticks less than in A&S, it has a relatively big program, and there is a big barrier to internal transfer. (2) NYC itself may be less of a draw to prospective engineers than to prospective novelists, lawyers, plastic surgeons, or investment bankers.)</p>
<p>^ in addition i’d also say that if you could go to columbia for engineering, or cooper union for engineering, where would you be going. i’m sure that school pulls applicants away from columbia’s e-school</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I would point out that these days there are so many cutting-edge interdisciplinary fields that a 17 year-old, or for that matter the average 30 year-old, just isn’t likely to know about until he/she has been in college for a while and been exposed to them, so it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with whether or not a 17 year-old is capable of making adult choices. Most incoming students don’t know much about the options of, say, synthetic biology, or human-computer interaction, or scientific computing, or neuroeconomics. And it seems thoroughly reasonable to me that a mature person who wanted to be, for example, a biology major at the age of 17 might want to go into bioelectrical engineering by the age of 20.</p>
<p>On a related note, I find the notion of separating the sciences from engineering in terms of admissions to be out of step with the modern world. There’s so much crossover that it seems pointless.</p>
<p>I’m just shocked at the idea that engineering would be easier to get into than liberal arts. At most schools, it’s the reverse. Engin. might have a higher acceptance rate, but the applicants tend to be more qualified, so the accepted & enrolled students have higher stats. </p>
<p>Agree with Jessie re: college majors. I’ve often said that it’s difficult for a 17-year-old to think outside of math, English, foreign language, history (maybe poli sci), and science/engineering (with the latter not being an obvious choice). When you get to college, there’s everything from chemical physics to sociology to archaeology to art history or international relations… and most high schoolers have no idea what any of those entail. Makes me think that the whole experience could be improved by a reverse-distribution requirement system - make the kids take things in very odd subject areas. :)</p>
<p>My S was admitted to UPenn engineering but he was top 5% of his class and NMF, so not sure if he would have gotten in anyway. The admittance rate to SEAS was 25%. For comparison, he was also admitted to WUSTL, UIUC, and CMU where he will be attending. Turned down by Stanford and MIT.</p>
<p>for gender diversity purposes, it is likely that a female applying to an engineering school would have a leg up on the predominantly male competition. But, there is absolutely no way that acceptance to top engineering programs (MIT, Cal Tech, Berekely, Stanford to name just a few) is easier than those school’s Liberal Arts programs. At the UC’s its just the opposite – its “easier” to be accpeted to Letters & Science at Berkeley or UCLA than college of engineering. But, future egineers should not try that back-door route since it is nearly impossible to transfer into engineering from L&S.</p>