Popularity can be measured objectively by numbers. Coolness on the other hand, is totally subjective. A cool person or thing may not be popular, and vice-versa.

Someone I know did mix up both terms. There was some meme on LJ that measured how popular a user was. Well he was complaining about the validity of an instrument that tried to measure how cool a person was.

I think at Penn State, it's probably the engineering and business majors...and maybe also IST. Or it could just be that a lot of my friends were these majors and my perception is a little skewed.

Not necessarily on the numbers thing. Some progrms have numbers caps on the number of students who can be admitted.

I agree that numbers can be an indication, but can't be the only criteria.

Good for your dad -- it is a terriffic school.

I assumed that the biggest major was going to be in the School of Engineering, so I only looked at their website, but upon further inspection:

"For Fall 2005, the most populated undergraduate majors were, in order, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Management, and Industrial and Systems Engineering." (from some general GT website)

That's what I was thinking. The Occupational Therapy program that I was in at EMU was one of the university's best programs.. highly ranked nationally, but they only took 50 students a term. So, there were many aspiring OTs, but not many made it in. The other biggie at Eastern Michigan was education, especially Special Ed. However, they get a lot of Business students too. When I interviewed for admission to the Masters of Clinical Psychology there, one of the interviewers simply said "You had this GPA in our OT program? You'll have no problem in this clinical psych program" and spent the rest of the interview just telling me what to expect. So, the OT program was highly respected.

ETA: My son (at age 10) is currently aspiring to go to OU for a double major in meterology and telecommunications. He wants to be Jim Cantore.

At Clarion Id have to say that the most popular is Education...

After that Id say Communication, Theatre and Business...

1. Communications
2. Psychology
3. Education

I imagine ours would be Finance, Business Admin and Poli Sci.

There's a ton of pre-med students at Baylor, but that's not a major and most of them seem to drop that by the end of Freshman year.

Aside from...all those sciencey things...there are a ton of business majors here. Education is also big.

I'm from UF too... what about Poli Sci?