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<p>Oh can you give me the source again … I thought there were various easy ways to measure both (income tax statistics?). </p>
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<p>But this thread is directed at the CC demographic I suppose. And as far as graduation rates for CC students go, and given the high number of students who switch majors when they decide what they would really want to do, I would assume that what you are actually going to graduate with is better observed by what you plan to have a major in your 3rd year, not your first year.</p>
<p>[aside]Also, is the only “interesting paper” thing you can say about that paper, or its field? 
I find the approach very exciting … I hope to draw upon it in the future. Most work with computational linguistics has not been unlike a grown-up version of fitting a regression line to existing data and using that to extrapolate predictions. But working ground-up with evolutionary biology may ultimately provide us means of not just having machines accurately process human language, but various other communication systems as well. In the future, biolinguistics will have widespread implications ranging from grammar pedagogy for students attempting to learn a language, to greater success at deciphering cell signals. I quite suspect that the same "chaotic communication " principles [governed by math] that tell embryonic cells to give you ten fingers and not twelve are the same [perhaps by convergent evolution] principles for human universal grammar, or for how immigrant children in colonial environments create a unified creole from the various collection of substrata and superstrata languages present, despite individually disparate influences. Communication/linguistic engineering, now there’s a thought; after all, the particular effects of a polypeptide sequence depends not just on the eventual quartenary structure of the unified protein it will be incorporated into, but on interactions with other proteins. As far as trying to produce “designer proteins” goes, it’s not hard to see the feedback issues that this can cause, and it spells one thing: chaos! But we have weapons to help us analyse this chaotic soup – the existing tools linguistics and the social sciences have pioneered to analyse how unified effects of a group may emerge from the disparate signals individual elements give to each other.[/aside]</p>
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<p><em>sigh</em> </p>
<p>I had forgotten about that.</p>
<p>I guess I’ll have to go over to my school’s specific subforum later and ask. But it also strikes me that this paradigm would be rather inefficient and problematic even for students who started out with engineering at the very beginning. For example, you have students who transfer to an engineering track from other schools, or the guaranteed-transfer program that some flagship schools have in partnership with state community college systems. Couldn’t you also just take a placement test, or submit various theses or papers demonstrating your proficiency in applying math to engineering problems?</p>
<p>I know that the fourth (3rd? I have no idea what the difference is) tier school I dual-enrolled in, the calculus and linear algebra classes I was in had both econs and engineering students in them. Of course, I’m talking about a local university here, but surely there must be something in place for cross-compatability? If you’re publishing papers on Riemannian manifolds and nth-dimensional packing problems surely they won’t make you take Calculus I again?!</p>
<p>I suppose I will have to create a thread for my own specific situation later. But as far as students constantly switching between very dedicated tracks goes (medicine, law, engineering, etc.), I thought that was pretty common.</p>