Last week’s “Admissions Insider” in Inside Higher Ed contained an interesting article about colleges and universities that admit by major. The article was inspired by and a summation of a session at the recent NACAC conference in Houston organized by my friend Phil Trout, a past NACAC President and college counselor at Minnetonka High School in Minnesota. I first met Phil many years ago when he spent a year embedded in the Admissions Office at the College of William and Mary.
The session brought together admissions officers from three Big Ten (which somehow includes 14 members, with at least two more to follow) universities, Purdue, the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. All admit their freshman classes by major.
One of the objectives of the session was to illustrate that published admit rates for a university may vary dramatically by school or by major, thus rendering the published admit rate for the university as a whole meaningless, or at least unhelpful.
At Illinois, for example, 45 percent of the more than 63,000 applicants were admitted last year. But that number tells you little or nothing about an admissions process that is much more complex. If you are among the 16 percent of applicants who apply for Computer Science, the admit rate is 7 percent. For Business the admit rate is 28 percent; Education 52 percent; Agriculture and Environmental Studies 43 percent; and for Liberal Arts and Sciences, 50 percent (the article points out that there is considerable variance among majors within that category).
The article didn’t provide as much data for the other two universities, but at Minnesota the overall admit rate is 74 percent, but only 30 percent for Nursing and 33 percent for Business. Purdue admitted 53 percent of its more than 68,000 applicants, but the number was lower for signature programs like Engineering (41 percent), Computer Science (33 percent), and Aviation (28 percent).
The session and the article raise two important questions. The first is whether colleges and universities should be more forthcoming with this kind of information. I think the answer is a clear yes. Transparency should be one of the ethical principles guiding college admission. Students should make decisions based on information and knowledge rather than hope. They deserve to know how factors such as major, in-state/out-of-state, and applying early action/decision vs. regular affect one’s chances of admission.
Following the appearance of the article, I reached out on a whim to a flagship public university that admits by major and has been accused of wanting its admission decisions to be unpredictable (a discussion for a different day). I asked if the institution would consider making similar information available.
Within fifteen minutes the Director of Admissions (actual title “Associate Vice Provost for Enrollment and Degree Management and Director of Admissions”) called and let me know that admit rate information by major was available on the university website, but wasn’t easy to find. I really appreciated his call and the fact that the information was accessible. One of my pet peeves is college websites that are marketing pieces with lots of graphics but where information, even basic information, can be challenging or impossible to find. I’d like to see admit rates for majors and other relevant admission distinctions be as easy to find and navigate as Net Price Calculators are (at least in theory).
The only argument I can think of against transparency is that having that kind of information available may empower and embolden those who want to game the system. We shouldn’t make that easy, but increasing knowledge about the process at any given institution outweighs that concern.
The second, more fundamental, question is whether universities should admit by major at all. The article makes a strong case that admission by major is an enrollment management tool for those universities. It quotes Andy Borst, the Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Illinois, arguing that the practice allows the university to align faculty hiring with the needs in various academic departments, which guarantees that students can get the classes they need and earn degrees in an efficient way. He also states that admitting by major allows Illinois to enroll 30 percent more Hispanic and African American students than it would otherwise. I’m not clear why that’s the case.
Those purported benefits are outweighed by a single data point reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. 80 percent of college students change their major at least once. The average student changes three times.
Those stats suggest that admission by major ignores the fact that the great majority of students applying to college aren’t developmentally ready to declare a major at the same time they are applying to college. How many of us knew what we wanted to major in and what we wanted to do with our lives when we were freshmen in college? Fifty years later, I joke that I still don’t. I know all things I don’t want to do, but am still figuring out what I want to do, although it may be getting late on that front. I feel fortunate that I fell into a profession that is a great fit for my talents and values.
What happens to the students who are admitted to a particular major and then want to change? How easy is that to do, and does it result in students paying more because they can’t graduate in four years?
Clearly there are fields where college major is important, even essential. And there are people who at an early age know exactly who they are and how they want to spend their lives. If you are one of them, perhaps you can give the rest of us pointers. But if 80 percent of college students change their major at least once, admission by major might serve an institution well but students poorly.
And that would seem to be a major problem.