This is the interesting angle to me. As the various ranking lists move toward weighing “social mobility”, perhaps UCSD wants to do that at a micro level, within Colleges or within majors.
I don’t see a huge issue with this. We already see many discussions on here about choosing the college with direct admit vs weighing the challenges of secondary admit, especially for the harder admit majors (Engineering, CS, Nursing.) This seems an extension of that kind of thinking.
At the end of the day, UCSD will not suffer from lack of First Time Freshman applications.
The policy described here is for major changes. Students with strong academic records in high school are already well positioned to be admitted directly to these majors.
I think you might not realize that under the old policy, it was already unlikely for students to be able to switch to several capped majors at UCSD. Some of the capped majors required a lottery in addition to 4.0 GPA in the screening courses. Some of the capped majors were actually closed, with zero spots for major changes.
I don’t think this policy is perfect. They may need to tweak it going forward. But the old capped major change policy at UCSD wasn’t working well, either.
Why should children of parents who didn’t go to college be punished?
Why should they not have the same quality of care and education from age 0-18?
Why should they not have the same opportunities for enrichment growing up?
Why should they have worse health outcomes?
Why should they have to handle additional responsibilities like working and taking care of family members while going to school?
Why should they deal with issues relating to housing, transportation, and job instability?
Why should they have no personal models to help guide them through the process of preparing for college (including doing all the things that other families know to start doing earlier on because they’ve known what it takes to get in and succeed in colleges)?
Why should they lack the financial safety net to afford and complete a college education that is provided by the accumulated wealth of individuals who have attended college, particularly if their parents (and grandparents and so on) were also denied the opportunity to get an education?
The bulk of students that come from first generation/low income families have had to deal with the above issues all of their lives. And their big break is that if they’re able to get into UCSD and afford it, that if they change their mind about what they want to major in that they’ll have a leg up on the people who also change their mind but never had to deal with the disadvantages listed above for the majority of their lives. Even if this isn’t the system I would have necessarily set up, the “unfairness” of it definitely won’t be keeping me up at night.
Students who entered undeclared and declared their originally intended major.
Students who entered undeclared and declared a major other than their originally intended major.
Note that some changes of declared major may not be due to student choice, but being weeded out of their original declared major, and some undeclared students declaring a different major from their originally intended major do so after being rejected in secondary admission for their originally intended major.
I’m not playing Devil’s Advocate. I’m simply stating facts.
The fact that their parents had a degree provided an advantage.
You seem to think all students who have X GPA or X test score are more “hardworking” and put more “heart and soul” into their studies than students who have X-.3 GPA or X-1 test score. That is such a tremendous fallacy I’m surprised anyone who thinks logically still believes it. It’s also a fallacy to assume X Test Score is a better indicator of the ability to do well in college than X-1 Test score.
So, they replaced a bad policy with a worse policy?
Frankly, the simple answer here is to increase capacity of the majors that are in high demand. Hire more professors and TAs in the popular areas and reduce in the low demand majors.
Not to mention “do well in college” may not have much more meaning than earning the degree / graduating. There are plenty of students who graduate college with a 2.5 or 3.0 and become the boss of all the 4.0s.
Yes, I agree that we should create a society where everyone has equal opportunities. But are you really addressing the problems that you mentioned by locking out non low income, non first gen students from major change? May be this way you put some more low income, first gen students in CS majors, but you are not really solving any societal issues, but only creating resentment. As you probably already know that first gen and economic hardship already is factored in the college admission process.
Agreed. But UCs and State of CA have decided to deploy their money elsewhere. I assume UC Regents set the policy and they are by and large political appointees.
You can’t reduce tenured faculty size in low demand majors. I think Math is not a high demand major but all engineering majors need some math education.
With the new policy they are not reducing the number of CS majors. The policy is explicitly about reshaping who gets in rather than how many gets in. There is no practical way for any UC to offer unlimited seats for any high demand major as much as I agree with the objective of offering as many seats as demanded by students.
With tenure, universities are reluctant to expand and shrink departments.
Also, CS and engineering faculty hiring, unlike in many other subjects, must compete against industry. For engineering, there is also need for sufficient lab space and the like. Nursing has similar constraints.
Previously, I believe that all students were locked out of changing into CS majors at UCSD.
It is possible that the new policy is an attempt to create a limited “discoverer pathway” for students who may not have had the same opportunity to explore these subjects and career paths in high school (and therefore wouldn’t have applied directly to the major).
Some other universities with extremely popular CS majors (such as UCB, UW) also restrict the number of students switching into these majors to very few, but try to allow for a limited number of “discoverers.”
I understand that the policy is about who gets priority in major change. You may have better information, but it appears to me that top UCs have not hired more faculties to keep with increasing demand in CS or UCs in general.
There are teaching professors ( i am not sure if they are tenured). Harvard used to call them “professor of practice in teaching” or something. I know UCB math has some of those.
Do professionals in the industry like to teach courses on a part time basis? Like somebody from tech companies teaching some CS courses.
I think there are ways to hire more faculty to improve general access in high demand majors. The university has to prioritize it though.
From my understanding, with the way the UCs are set up, there is not enough space in the high-demand majors at the high-demand campuses. Thus, there are individuals who are going to get locked out of switching majors (if there’s even any space to have people switch). So, there will be individuals who are going to get the short end of the stick. UCSD’s policy here is that FGLIs aren’t going to get the short end of the stick in this particular case.
So if a non-FGLI Californian can’t switch majors into UCSD’s CS prrogram, then maybe they have to switch to a non-impacted Cal State CS major, or maybe try UC-Merced or Cal Poly-Humboldt. Alternatively, maybe they take advantage of WUE and go to U. of Montana or Montana State or Boise State or U. of Idaho and pay about the same in tuition as they would have paid at a Cal State (and significantly less than UC’s tuition) and get their CS degree from one of those institutions. So they’re not blocked from getting the degree, they’re just blocked from getting it at their first choice institution.
Thanks for the detailed explanation above. Now that I think of this, I have to agree the CA Govt and UC Regents have been absolutely brilliant in crafting their UC admission policy. It does produce their intended outcomes.
Meanwhile, despite CA having the best tax base, we have lagged behind K-12 education by many measures.
Yes, there are teaching professors (and lecturers) in UCB CS (see Teaching Faculty | EECS at UC Berkeley ) among the overall large number of UCB CS faculty (see CS Faculty List | EECS at UC Berkeley ). But hiring them faces the same constraints as hiring other faculty, meaning that they are competing against industry as well as other colleges and universities.
Usually, this means adjuncting in specialty courses where an industry perspective is useful, rather than teaching core major courses.
Anybody who doesn’t like UCSD’s new rules is welcome to not apply and not attend. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of other 4 yr institutions across the US where one could, for example, study computer science or be a pre-med major.
