Freshman orientation in 1971. After a University wide presentation, Freshmen engineers broke off to a session with Col. Devens. He started off with "you all just saw a nice artsy film about campus life here at Virginia Tech - well you all can forget most of that because you are Engineers and you will have to study. Look to your left and then look to your right - only one of you will graduate in Engineering."

His numbers worked out about right as I recall - my graduating class in Engineering was about a third of the entering freshman class.

I was from out of state (MD) and out-of-state enrollment was limited to 10% in those days and admission was fairly selective. On the other hand, it seemed that most applicants with any kind of a decent Virginia HS record could get in - but if you couldn't hack it, VT would flunk you out in a heartbeat. I always figured that they did that because of the wide variation in the quality of high schools in VA, that they would give in-state students a chance, but they had to prove themselves.
[Post edited by Hokie in CT at 12/18/2017 02:42AM]