What exactly defines a safety school?

[ucbalumnus]

Re: second choice major at SJSU

@Data10

I expect software engineering (or nearly any major with high EI threshold) doesn’t tend to have a lot of space left over for alternate majors, after the primary major admits. And many prospective CS students do not want to be assigned to the less popular non-tech fields that do have space left over. If the student does not want to choose the alternative major, then it doesn’t work well as a safety.

On https://www.sjsu.edu/admissions/impaction/freshmen-impaction-results/index.php , majors listed with ^ are those which did not have capacity to admit those listing it as an alternate major. For 2020 admissions, it looks like all majors that had EI thresholds of 3100 or higher (including software engineering) were marked as such, while most (but not all) majors with EI thresholds of 3000 or lower were marked as such (applied math computational had an EI threshold of 3000 but did not admit alternate major applicants).