What do students "weeded out" of their majors do?

Re: #39

Thank you for your service.

@fragbot, really? Physics as a backup major? Yikes. That sounds backwards. I don’t really know much about Physics as a major, but I know it’s not easy material.

Is it just because there are more available seats, because so many more kids go for Engineering?

For what’s it’s worth, I know someone who failed out of a Business major - I think Finance or Accounting.

He switched to Communications, and currently works as a contractor, making twice the hourly rate of all of the Engineers and Software Developers I know.

Whenever the subject of school comes up, he mentions the fact that he was too stupid to hack it in a Business major. We all just shake our heads:-)

The University of Washington Engineering Dept needs a Humanities major to edit the writing in that link in post #31. Just saying. :slight_smile:

That IS a bit odd considering the pattern of perceived rigor/difficulty is such that Physics/Math majors who are “weeded out” tend to use engineering as one of their common fallback major options back when I was in college.

That will cause older relatives who are accountants to be a bit puzzled as for many of them, Accounting was a “fallback” major/option after career/academic options in other fields…including the Humanities/Social Sciences were closed to them.

It would be more puzzling for HS classmates who went into accounting…especially those recruited out of the blue by Big-4 firms from seemingly non-related majors such as a HS classmate who was a Lit major at an elite U. None of them considered Accounting, including the quantitative aspect to be onerous.

http://www.washington.edu/uaa/advising/academic-planning/majors-and-minors/list-of-undergraduate-majors – take a look at all the grey circles.

It’s not easy material. It’s that they didn’t get into their major of choice and it’s the only non-competitive STEM major in the college of arts and sciences (I’ve purposefully excluded the anomalous college of the environment). Until a couple of years ago, math was an option as well but they too switched to being a competitive major. Given no department would want to be a consolation prize, I’d expect it to become competitive sometime in the next few years as well.

UW has done something quite remarkable–make fields that should be collaborative have premed-like competitiveness. Is this poor planning or simply “you can’t build Rome in a day?” I think @TooOld4School and @ucbalumnus are both right–institutions that large and bureaucratic are inertial, move slowly/deliberately and have disincentives to respond quickly to changes in demand. Likewise, if they did move quickly, they’d be forced to accept the metaphorical risk of creating the world’s largest petroleum engineering department. they have no real impetus to move quickly as the institution isn’t really harmed by kids not getting their choice of major. There are still plenty of kids who will apply and attend. And those who transfer to UW[BT], WWU, WSU or Oregon State when they don’t get what they want? They still paid a year or two of tuition and there are enough grateful community college transfers to pick up the slack. What nudges the organization to adapt?

Lots of kids go to a school where they get directly admitted into the program they want rather than competing to get in.

This issue is tied to the elite vs inexpensive safety issue. One advantage to your safety school is to increase the odds of either being a top student in your field, or at least complete a degree in an area of less strength, one that you enjoy the challenge.

My eldest went to elite school, admitted into a college within the uni, based on his relevant strength. When he got bored and wanted to transfer internally, he did well enough in all but one class. By the time he started the process to switch majors, and then got a D in a 2nd level course, he was a junior. He had to decide either retake the class and hope he can officially switch majors by start of his “senior” year, delaying graduation, or give up and try to complete what he started.

Given the fact he was at an elite school and the competition in EVERY major is intense, and the cost per year was high, I urged him to just take the path of least resistance and stick with his strength despite change in plans. Had he been at a state u, at lower cost per semester I would have said ok to go to 5 years. And if he was at a safety state u, likely the D would have been at least a C or B and he would not have faced the issue.

Prestige is nice, but in my son’s case it took away the ability to study what he wanted.
Between electives he did well, and hopefully a strong gre, he’ll try for a masters degree in a different field. May be at a less name brand school than his undergrad.

Our friend’s daughter started premed and majored in a STEM subject but did not have the grades. Now she is going to law school with enough merit that it costs less than her undergrad education.

@fragbot, please see post #36.

UW appears to admit and enroll a broad range of students in keeping with its primary mission to provide educational access and opportunity for residents of its state. For example, UW’s 2016 ASEE online profile shows a middle 50% ACT range of 27-33 for enrolled students in the College of Engineering (this includes all enrolled pre-engineering and direct admit students).

In addition to the newly announced program for entry to the engineering majors, I expect that UW will continue to gradually increase the number of direct admits to the CSE majors in order to enroll as many top students as possible, and eventually, perhaps up to 50% of the annual cohort enrolled in these majors will be freshmen. UW (with help from Seattle tech companies and the WA legislature) is making large capital investments to quickly expand the CSE program.

Under the current system, it seems the UW would rather give the student with a 27-28 ACT at least an opportunity to work her way into an engineering major and require the student with the 32-33 ACT to prove he can handle the work rather than just deny the 27-28 ACT and admit the 32-33 ACT to the school and major at the outset. After all, “60% of freshmen engineering students eventually drop-out or change majors. Over 40% don’t even make it through year one.” https://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/blog/so-you-want-to-be-an-engineer/
That’s was one approach to producing engineers and computer scientists, and last year, the UW graduated almost 1,000 of them. Although the stress level for the engineering students may be reduced under the new program, most of the 26-28 ACT group (including some “late bloomers” and “diamonds in the rough”) now may be shut out of the department entirely.

Yes, it is simply because physics has sufficient departmental capacity to be a less selective or non-selective major. That is independent of how difficult the material is.

They are also constrained by the tradition of tenure. Granting tenure means a potentially decades-long commitment to employ the faculty member, so universities tend to be cautious about expanding departments that may be popular now, but may lose popularity later.

This is probably due to a combination of factors.

A. At less selective schools, many of the students find the engineering courses and their prerequisites too difficult. This is not intentional weeding, but is sort of like weeding by default (though that occurs generally at less selective schools, since they tend to have a greater percentage of students unable to handle college work in any major).

B. At some of the more selective state flagship level schools, many have insufficient capacity to take all interested and capable students into engineering majors. Many admit frosh to a pre-engineering program and then have some level of weed-out where students who pass all of their courses may be denied their choice of engineering major. A variant is done at Wisconsin, where frosh are directly admitted to their engineering majors, but then must earn GPAs as high as 3.5 for some majors to stay in the major (see https://www.engr.wisc.edu/academics/student-services/academic-advising/first-year-undergraduate-students/progression-requirements/ ).

C. Some just chose the major to please parents or because of the starting salary post-grad and then found out it was boring or not to their liking.

Depends on major. At D2 state univ. know one that didn’t get into competitive upper level nursing (with high GPAs). These kids wanted to be nurses so transferred another school to finish that. Niece that didn’t get into upper level IB program (also high GPA) basically just stayed in regular business program but took practically the same coursework. Both these were applying during sophomore year.

Now I don’t think that’s quite the same as weeding out with hard pre-reqs in first year where you know you don’t have the GPA or interest to stay in that major. Lots of those kids just change major.

At my old engineering school (not in the US), kids who didn’t make the grade to stay in EE/EECS or Comp. Engg switched to Industrial Engg or Management Engg. I was a Chemical Engg major and switched to EECS and the GPA required to do that was pretty high relative to students’ average GPA, only because a lot of kids wanted to swich to EECS or Comp. Eng’g.

Here in the US, my boss’ son didn’t make to Haas at Berkeley, he ended up graduating with Economics major.
My daughter’s friend at Berkeley didn’t make the grade to be admitted to CS so he’s majoring in Cognitive Science with a CS minor.

A kid I know who didn’t stay in engineering switched to landscape architecture and is quite happy and doing well with that.

@saillakeerie I lol’d at that BME joke. Seems true to me! (Although there are schools whose business majors are also impacted, my nephew ran up against that a couple of times).

@LacrosseMama The issue with weed-outs at Washington is why we never even looked there. They’re the worst of the worst- a kid could spend TWO years at school and then find out they don’t get into their major as a Junior! Being out-of-state, we could not take that risk, not even for their aerospace program.

I understand that some large state schools do have a mission that requires them to admit large numbers of students. Texas A & M is like that, as well. My eldest is a grad student in engineering there, and he told my youngest Do.Not. Come. Here. For. Undergrad. Well, we already had a bit of a clue as the admission counselor for aerospace told us how to play the right cards (don’t take AP credits, take and ace the class instead, etc.)

In the end, this is one reason why my son rejected Purdue as well. They told him 93% of students get their choice- being good in math he came right back with “What if that 7% are all aerospace?”! They literally could not/would not tell him what the stats were. It came down to the schools he knew he was accepted directly into aerospace- Georgia Tech & Maryland being the top of those, so it’s not like he lacked good alternatives.

If you’re in-state it might be worth the risk to attend a school without a guarantee, but if you’re OOS it’s just too big a gamble.

^ Being at the top end of the SAT/ACT range for enrolled students can help mitigate the risk in such programs. The ASEE collects and publishes this data for many schools:
http://profiles.asee.org

How likely was it that your son (admitted to aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech (ACT 30-34/SAT 2000-2210)) would end up in the bottom 7% of the class at Purdue (ACT 29-33/SAT 1830-2070), for example?

Not likely, @UWfromCA . However, it could happen. I know this because my eldest nearly failed out of his grad engineering program due to a first semester graduate level matrices class. This is the kid who got a perfect score in math on the SAT, the ACT and the GRE. I would never have thought he’d have any trouble, ever. But it was a combination of bad advising, missing some critical information and having to up his game in grad school. It kept him out of internships, cost him a fellowship, and he was on academic probation for a full year. Screwing up in your first semester can haunt you for a very, very long time.

He did recover, but it set him back a full year. It made him more resilient, though, and that’s not a bad thing. I wish there was an easier way to learn that, though.