By Christopher Pimentel, March 17, 2026
With college application season underway, the Cal Poly Pomona Choice Program looks to help rejected students find new majors and new pathways to their careers.
Senior Associate Vice President of Enrollment Management and Services Jessica Wagoner proposed and developed the Choice Program, which was introduced in the fall 2023 application cycle. The program looks to give applicants wwho could not be accommodated in their primary choice major alternative majors closely aligned to the department they applied for, according to Wagoner.
After accepting the offer sent by the dean of the college where the program they originally applied for is housed, applicants get immediate acceptance into the new major they chose.
The first wave included 700 offers to incoming freshmen class, according to Wagoner,Of those, 162 applicants responded and only three declined as of March 7.
The program includes are five waves of offers to those applicants. At the end of an application cycle, the program makes up about 7% of the incoming freshmen class.
The dean of each college meets with the Office of Admissions to discuss which majors qualify for the Choice Program on a yearly basis. Not all majors are automatically selected for the program, and some have been rejected since they don’t closely align with any of the heavily impacted majors at Cal Poly Pomona, according to Interim Director of Office of Admissions Traci Lew.
“The application does tell a student to select an alternate major, but think of when you were 17,” Lew said. “You don’t know what you don’t know yet. There are also a lot of people in your ear saying, ‘Oh do this,’ ‘Oh this is the backdoor,’ or ‘Oh this is another way in.’ So, sometimes alternate majors aren’t necessarily well thought out by first-year applicants.”
Lew and Wagoner understand some students can be wary about majors and careers they have never heard of. So, after receiving the letter about the Choice Program and how applicants have four to five alternative majors they can get accepted to, they are also given descriptions about each major and the fields they lead to, according to Lew.
However, some students argued the descriptions provided were no help and plan to use this opportunity to transfer back into their intended major later on.
“The descriptions of each major were not very helpful, and I had to do my own research to find out which major was best fit for me,” said CPP applicant Ashwin Ranjit. “I accepted the offer because I respect the Cal Poly Pomona engineering program overall. After narrowing down my options to industrial engineering and manufacturing, I chose manufacturing engineering. My goal is to meet the transfer requirements and eventually transfer into mechanical engineering after one to two years, since mechanical engineering has always been my intended major and arguably the best engineering program CPP offers.”
Though Wagoner and Lew mentioned a student’s admission is guaranteed, there is no guarantee they will get accepted to a new major if they switch. According to Wagoner, out of all the students who switch majors at CPP, only 3% of those students were affiliated with the Choice Program.
Overall, the program looks to reduce the number of students in high impacted majors, so more classes can be available for students while also helping students get on the right path toward their dream job, according to Wagoner.
For more information on the program, visit the CPP Choice webpage.
Feature image courtesy of Christopher Pimentel Jr.