Taxpayers have a right to be concerned about such policies at public schools. Other colleges will benefit from the infusion of talented students into such majors unavailable to them at UCSD. Since nonacademic factors are the primary factor, one should expect academic standards to fall in those majors. That is the natural consequence.
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If these talented students already know what they want to study, why wouldnât they apply to the UCSD major they want in the first place?
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Not all talented students know what they want to study. Some change their mind. The policy may be fine from a public welfare perspective, but we should be honest about its consequences. There are tradeoffs.
If UCSD and Taxpayers accept that tradeoff, all is well. But letâs acknowledge it,at least.
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My son is an example of a student who applied to one UCSD major (nanoengineering), and by the time he was admitted, had changed his mind and no longer wanted to pursue it.
Under the OLD policy (GPA in screening courses + lottery), it would have been extremely uncertain whether he would have been able to change his major to EE or MechE (the two majors he thought he might want), and all the CS-adjacent majors were simply closed.
So he chose not to pursue UCSD at that time.
The NEW policy wouldnât have changed anything for my student.
The difference is that now it looks like they may be trying to open up a âdiscoverer pathwayâ for some students. I do not know how many spots will be available for students to change majors via this pathway, but I would guess the number will continue to be small, as it has been in the past. I expect that most students in these majors will continue to enter via direct admission, as before.
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Of course, the math matters. The standards will only fall by a measurable amount if there is a significant number of low GPA students compared to the students already in the major. AND, those low GPA students will have to actually bring the curve down after they join the major, which is by no means guaranteed. Students admitted to UCSD in the first place are very, very bright.
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Not by a lot, since most of CS at UCSD is filled with frosh direct admit and admission of external transfers, with very little room for existing UCSD students to change into the CS major. Whether that small amount of space for major changers is filled with 4.0 or 3.0 students is unlikely to make much of a difference in the overall profile of the CS major cohort there.
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And those frustrated taxpayers should let their voices be heard by voting accordingly in the next set of state elections. And lobby their representatives in the state legislature.
I never said that taxpayers didnât have a right to be concerned. Thereâs more than 1 university to attend. And if a student is accomplished enough to get admitted to UCSD, then he/she/they are likely to be able to get admitted to a whole bunch of other great colleges elsewhereâŠcolleges which will have computer science, engineering, pre-med, etcâŠsome of those even have excellent enough auto-merit scholarships to make the COA to be cheaper than attending UCSD as an in-state student.
Is it a great policy? Probably not. But forewarned is forearmed. If we were CA residents, and if 1 of my kids was thinking of majoring in 1 of those areas, it would be enough for me to sway my kid to forget UCSD entirely. Thereâs plenty of other fish (colleges) in the sea.
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Right. Unfortunately UW has similar policy as UCSD and OOS (including a CA student) is disadvantaged. So, one more college (fish) that I am aware of is ruled out for high performing students.
So, do you think an IQ test will be a good measure of a high performing test? If no, what will be a good measure for a high performing student?
Yep. Or they could apply to UNM and qualify for one of their WUE+ scholarships, which gets OOS tuition, room & board costs/year down to just over $21,000/yr.
And if youâre a US citizen, you could use your networking skills w/the UNM computer science dept to get an internship at Los Alamos National Lab or at White Sands missile range.
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I would expect the policy makes the school less appealing to full pay OOS students who want flexibility.
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Both Washington and UCSD admit most CS majors by frosh direct admission, and have very little space for frosh entrants who want to change into CS. Meaning, regardless of how secondary admission for those trying to change into CS is done, the chances of getting in are poor by that route. Indeed, Washingtonâs CS department says for those not directly admitted to the major: âif you are absolutely certain that you want to major in Computer Science or Computer Engineering and do not receive a DTM offer, you should strongly consider attending another university.â
In other words, it has long been the case that when you apply for CS at Washington or UCSD, you should treat admission to the school but not the major as a rejection.
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Absolutely. The UCs (generally, not just UCSD) are pretty awful for people who want flexibility to explore different majors and change their mind if theyâre interested in any high-demand majors. When combined with the high out-of-state costs (about $74k/year now, I believe) and no significant merit aid available, most people donât find it a very attractive combination.
But this was the situation before UCSD announced this policy on how it will prioritize requests for changes of major. So the fact that it was close to impossible before and is still pretty much close to impossible means that this new policy doesnât really make that big of a difference in the situation at UCSD.
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Itâs not unusual for large selective public universities to limit access to these high-demand majors, either through direct admission with limited major changes, or through competitive secondary admission. We see people on these boards struggling with the same concerns for many other universities. This is not at all just a UC thing.
Also, each UC campus (and each college within the campus) has its own policies.
When my son was comparing these policies last year, UCSD was the most rigid, both in terms of the difficulty of changing to high-demand majors, and limited access to classes in other high-demand majors.
He picked UCB partly because it is quite flexible for major changes within the college of engineering, and has better access to classes in other engineering majors.
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Oh, I totally understand that UC is not the only university system that does this. But since this was a convo about UCSD, thatâs why I talked about UCs. 
But when we have posters who come on and theyâre not sure if theyâre interested in engineering or business or CS and those majors are in three different colleges, Iâm generally not going to recommend colleges that are at/above capacity in those fields.
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It seems all UC campuses are restricting major change to CS/CSE because they have capacity issues. If UCB is allowing major change to CS/EECS, even if it is only within their COE, then that is really commendable. Locking out first year students of major change seems to be a bad policy to me. All UCs should perhaps fill 75% or less of their seats in CS/CSE in the first round and let 25% be filled through major change.
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Yes, COE is super flexible and the reason they are able to do this is because the hurdle to get into COE is far higher than the hurdle to get into L&S.
I think Berkeley has a pretty good model in place now although it took them a lot of handwringing to get there.
- Create a path for people interested in CS + humanities via Letters & Sciences/CDSS
- Create a path for people interested in CS+engg via COE
Within COE:
- Have a high admission threshold for all majors
- Fill most EECS slots via direct admit
- Have a viable but difficult path with no cap for people to switch from another COE major to EECS
- Explore ways to create a hardware focused major to relieve even stress on EECS enrollment
Within LS/CDSS
- Fill most CS slots via direct admit
- Eliminate the 100% GPA driven declaration model that created stress and diadvantaged those who didnât have specific backgrounds (e.g. math competiton experience)
- Create a holistic discoverer path to allow people to declare CS
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This is very good on part of UCB. But how do they control against students selecting perhaps one of their least selective COE major with the intention to getting in and then changing to EECS? One way to control against this kind of behavior would be to make first year science classes more rigorous. In any case, I would take the trade-off against locking out first year students from major change.
All the COE majors are selective, and the number of total students admitted to COE majors is small enough that it doesnât present a practical problem for some of them to switch to EECS. I am sure they also allow for some of this to happen when admitting students to COE.
Some students do legitimately change their minds and switch to EECS if they become interested in it later. Last year at this time, my son was certain that he did not want to be an EECS major, but now he is switching so that he can study EE⊠itâs really fortunate that UCB is so flexible.
In addition to what @tamagotchi said, the process to switch is clear and difficult.
For switching to EECS, historically it required a 3.3 in âNâ EECS courses and a 3.3 Technical GPA across all technicals to become eligible. Here N = number of semesters and should be at least 2 and not more than 4.
Remember that in COE each student has to take 2 techs each semester. So assuming no overlap, they would need to take 4 current major tech + 2 EECS techs and get 3.3 at least in each of those buckets.
Letâs say you donât get into the EECS courses needed and apply at the end of 3rd semester then you would require 6 current major techs and 3 EECS courses since N is 3.
Based on typical grade distribution, the switcher needs to be better than the median COE EECS student to gain that flexibility.
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