Why You Should Never Apply to College as a Computer Science Major

The CS Slaughterhouse

You are a brilliant high school senior with a 3.9 Unweighted GPA and a 1500 SAT. You apply to the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University.

On the application, there is a dropdown menu: Intended Major. You proudly select "Computer Science."

You are immediately rejected from both universities. Why? Because you walked into the biggest slaughterhouse in modern college admissions.

The Capacity Crisis

Over the last decade, the number of students applying as Computer Science majors has skyrocketed by over 300%.

Universities have a physical limit. They only have so many CS professors and so many computer labs. They simply cannot accept everyone.

Because of this, many universities have implemented Direct Admit policies for CS. You are not applying to the university as a whole; you are applying directly to the College of Computer Science.

The Dual Acceptance Rates

This creates a terrifying reality at schools like the University of Washington:

Overall University Acceptance Rate: ~45%

Computer Science Acceptance Rate: ~3% to 5%

If you had selected "History" on the dropdown menu, your 3.9 GPA would have easily gotten you a 45% chance of acceptance. By selecting CS, you threw yourself into a bloodbath against kids who have been coding since they were 8 years old and have already built tech startups.

The Pivot Strategy

If you have a 3.9 GPA but you do not have Tier 1 coding extracurriculars, do not apply as a CS major.

Instead, look for adjacent majors that have significantly higher acceptance rates but still lead to tech careers:

Data Science

Informatics

Applied Mathematics

Cognitive Science (with a computation focus)

These majors often share 60% of the same classes as CS, allow you to learn coding, and lead to the exact same Software Engineering jobs at Google—but their acceptance rates are often double or triple the CS rate.