Does applying to a less popular major improve your chances?

AAdmissions readers at selective colleges notice when a department will be thin, and every year some families try to use that fact by applying in an undersubscribed major. The logic is arithmetic: a college that admits a class across dozens of departments sees thousands of would-be biologists and economists and only a handful of would-be classicists or geologists. Stand in the short line, the theory goes, and you will be noticed.

The arithmetic is real, since a classics major is rarer than a business major. The trouble is that readers in the Stanford office we learned from had seen the strategy many times, and they could tell an interest from a positioning move, so a family that picks a major for its scarcity is betting that nobody checks.