Cal Poly SLO CA: What are the easiest majors to get into? | San Luis Obispo Tribune

Cal Poly saw a record-high number of applicants for the fall 2021 term as more than 66,000 students compete for admission to the San Luis Obispo university.

However, the university has limited space for all those hopeful students, with space available for only 8% of applicants. Some programs are even more competitive and have space for just 2% or 3% of applicants.

While many majors at Cal Poly are severely impacted, not all of the university’s programs have such high demand that only a single-digit fraction of hopeful students will be enrolled.

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Some smaller departments in lesser-known disciplines have enough space to accommodate up to 30 to 40 percent of fall 2021 applicants.

Most of these lower-demand majors are in agriculture and engineering programs outside the more popular choices, and they generate numbers of applications in the tens and hundreds as opposed to the thousands. But their particular specialties are important to industries looking to make new hires.

Cal Poly’s College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences (CAFES), for example, is the fifth-largest of its kind in the U.S., said College of Ag communications specialist AnnMarie Cornejo. It has more than 4,000 undergraduate students, and is one of only four in the California State University system.

“The college offers 15 individual majors and 22 minors, some in highly specialized subsets of the agriculture industry,” Cornejo said. “While the number of applicants may be lower in some specialized areas of study, such as dairy science or agricultural systems management, than in other programs which see a large number of applicants each year, the importance of those specialized majors to the future of the agriculture industry is not lessened. In fact, our dedication to those areas becomes even more crucial to meet industry needs.”

Here are lists of the 10 majors with the highest percentage of spaces available vs. number of applicants, for both freshman and transfer students, with the number of applications received, spots available and the percent of applicants who have a space available.

Top-10 least-impacted majors to get into for first-time freshmen

1. BioResource and agricultural engineering: 97 applicants, 39 spaces available, 40%
2. Manufacturing engineering: 56 applicants, 21 spaces available, 38%
3. Industrial technology & packaging: 116 applicants, 42 spaces available, 36%
4. Agricultural business: 482 applicants, 168 spaces available, 35%
5. Recreation, parks and tourism administration: 212 applicants, 72 spaces available, 34%
6. Agricultural communication: 112 applicants, 37 spaces available, 33%
7. Industrial engineering: 198 applicants, 59 spaces available, 30%
8. Agriculture and environmental plant sciences: 278 applicants, 80 spaces available, 29%
9. Materials engineering: 211 applicants, 60 spaces available, 28%
10. Dairy science: 45 applicants, 12 spaces available, 27%

Top-10 least-impacted majors to get into for new transfer students

1. Interdisciplinary studies: 1 applicants, 5 spaces available, 500%
2. Comparative ethnic studies: 4 applicants, 3 space available, 75%
3. City and regional planning: 23 applicants, 11 spaces available, 48%
4. Manufacturing engineering: 18 applicants, 8 spaces available, 44%
5. Agricultural communication: 28 applicants, 11 spaces available, 39%
6. Landscape architecture: 51 applicants, 20 spaces available, 39%
7. Agriculture science: 39 applicants, 15 spaces available, 38%
8. Dairy science: 11 applicants, 4 spaces available, 36%
9. Forestry and natural resources: 60 applicants, 20 spaces available, 33%
10. General engineering: 12 applicants, 4 space available, 33%

For a complete list of all the majors at Cal Poly and how many applicants and spaces are available for each, click here.

Acceptance letters were sent out to applicants beginning in March and continuing through April and beyond as commitments from students come in.

Students have a deadline of May 1 to confirm whether they will accept an offer from Cal Poly.

When an accepted student declines admission, the university then turns to its waitlist to fill open spaces. That process can last well into the summer as Cal Poly works to reach its enrollment target for fall.

Last fall, Cal Poly projected that 20,740 undergraduate students would enroll for fall 2020, though 22,287 actually did. For fall 2021, the university is projecting that 21,042 undergraduate students will enroll.

This story was originally published April 16, 2021 10:00 AM.