caltech's admissions policies are ridiculous

Colleges and Universities A-Z California Institute of Technology
1

<p>Rice and duke reject over HALF of people with over twenty 300 sats, PLUS have race-based affirmative action, PLUS have d one sport admits.</p>

<p>Caltech has NONE of these things and it basically cheats in order to make itself appear really selective. It only admits people with high SAT scores and gpa's (math and science related ec's are very secondary), admit it it's true.</p>

<p>It really annoys me Caltech plays the college admissions game to lower its accceptance rate; it ****ed me off. </p>

<p>Caltech knows that the best way for it to appear really good and rank high is for it to appear really selective, so they lessen the quality of the university (not recruiting athletes, no afffirmative action, no admitting people with low sat's but great life stories) in exchange for making itself appear really selective. Seriously, caltech's sports teams are a sad sad joke and there are like ZERO black people there; there is no diversity, so people from different back grounds can't learn from each other, and students from different races can't learn from other races. </p>

<p>Caltech is the ONLY school that goes to such ridiculous lengths to make itself appear more selective.</p>

<p>It is depressing and sickening to see the levels a school will stoop to to try to do well in the college ranking game.</p>

2

<p>Stop being a whiny baby. Caltech doesn’t do affirmative action or recruit athletes because it is committed to being a purely academic institution. After all that is what college is for - academics. Its not right or wrong. Each college has the right to select the students that it thinks are the best fit for the college. Also, a passion for math and science is VERY important in your application at Caltech. Having visited the campus, I didn’t meet a single person that wasn’t extremely bright in at least one field related to math or science. That is why Caltech admits them; not because they have high SATs and GPAs (which they do because they are smart kids). Once again, it is up to the college to decide who they pick. So grow some balls kiddo and learn that life isn’t always how you want it to be.</p>

3

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<p>Your post is complete garbage. Get back to me when the ivies report their SAT averages instead of their 25%-75% ranges. Caltech could admit anyone they wanted in the bottom 25% and it wouldn’t affect their US News and World Report ranking adversely. HYP’s legacies, development admits, people with “great” life stories, and recruited athletes all do not affect their ranking because none of the statistics they release say anything about the bottom 25%. It is clear manipulation on their part. Anyone with an elementary understanding of statistics would understand this. </p>

<p>Caltech cares about the pursuit of knowledge, something that you clearly don’t understand.</p>

4

<p>I also find it funny that the OP uses Duke of all schools as a paragon of integrity. Duke has really pioneered the warping of ethics in the admissions game. Not only did they get paid off to admit the kids of a VIP (Calvin Klein,) one of the guys on the admissions board got a lucrative postion on Calvin Klein’s board of directors out of it.</p>

<p>If only Caltech could aspire to this level of integrity!</p>

5

<p>hahahahaha this is one of the funniest things I have ever read. I could go to great lengths in pointing out the multiple inconsistencies in your logic, but I imagine doing so would be lost on you. If you had any idea of the culture here, you would both have better knowledge of our admissions processes and better understanding of the reasoning for them.</p>

6

<p>When I read the first half, I thought it was the OP was making a parody of the admissions processes of other schools. By the second half, it looks like he might be sadly misguided.</p>

<p>I guess it’s better to NOT be selective by admitting a good portion of each class based on how much their parents gave to the school or on other factors that are really not under the students’ control. After all, everyone has access to women’s crew or men’s lacrosse to get into a good college while only the lucky few have the resources to study hard in high school.</p>

7

<p>You are so wrong on so many levels, it’s sickening. No, actually, it’s comical. I totally lol’ed.</p>

<p>You don’t know the first thing about Caltech. I’m surprised you even had the meager brain capacity necessary to find and type the letters out on your keyboard to spell Caltech correctly. I can’t even imagine the misguided and delusional world you must live in to think that we admit people to increase our ranking (??), given our history and culture of admitting the smartest high school students in math and science and giving them one of the most rigorous educations in math, science, and engineering in the world. Caltech’s mission is to educate and produce scientists, not to have it’s teams appear on Sportscenter, or admit through affirmative action people who are not smart enough to do the work (and would end up failing out). </p>

<p>Caltech is about intelligence, something you sadly lack. </p>

<p>Does a mod or someone want to regulate on this piece of garbage? I don’t think a thread with an OP spewing ridiculous accusations and false assumptions and responses laughing at this poor moron has any merit or place on this board.</p>

8

<p>Maybe I did not articulate my point clearly enough.</p>

<p>The bottom line is that when judgin the quality and prestigiousness of a university, the college’s selectivity is the most important factor, especially in the USNews rankings. It’s no coincidence that the most prestigious universities, Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc. are also the most selective. The USNews rankings DEFINETELY need to give the non-Caltech colleges a handicap in regards to their selectiveness. If Rice, Emory, UNC, Vandy, and all the other top schools utilized Caltech’s admissions policies of not giving preferential treatment to athletes or URM’s, they would be even MORE selective than Caltech and would be ranked much much higher.</p>

<p>I ahve heard people say so many times “Oh, Caltech is a much better school than UNC (or UVA, Lehigh, etc.) , after all, it is much more selective and the student body is much more qualified.” It annoys me so much when people say that because if other universities used Caltech’s admissions policies, they would be more selective.</p>

<p>It just irritates me when people judge schools by how low their acceptance rates and how high their SAT ranges are I mean, Rice is and has been expanding a lot in the last couple of years, and if it hadn’t, its acceptance rate would be way lower than it is right now (like twenty-four percent). People who keep judging universities by how selective they are would have thought better of Rice and thought it “more prestigious and better” if it hadn’t expanded, but seriously, regardless of whether Rice’s acceptance rate is 25 percent or 14 percent, it is still the same school with the same faculty, campus, etc.</p>

<p>I’m basically against people claiming that Caltech is incredible because it is so selective; however, I do realize that it has many valid reasons for being thought of well, such as small class sizes and good teachers. </p>

<p>Also, don’t think for a second that Caltech doesn’t think that its lack of minority students is a problem. READ THIS.
NAS - The National Association of Scholars :: Articles Caltech Competes 04/14/2009 Peter Wood</p>

<p>“What about now? Caltech remains an interesting case in American higher education. It clearly wants to retain its high academic standards, but it is also trying desperately hard to get on the diversity bandwagon. It has its own Office for Minority Student Education which focuses on “support services and programming for minority students.” It has its own Diversity page, with links to diversity news.” </p>

<p>“Caltech made great efforts to achieve seemingly meager results. Those efforts were of course rooted in the beliefs enunciated in the 2001 “Diversity Statement.” And behind that statement, in turn, lay the sense of embarrassment that the University’s academic excellence existed in a sphere of human endeavor cut off from the great ideological project in higher education of the last quarter-century: getting the racial numbers right.”</p>

<p>Caltech actually supports affirmative action according to this article, but it is so hellbent on keeping its selectivity down. Why? The answer is obvious, because its high selectivity makes it more highly ranked and prestigious.</p>

<p>Have I made myself clear NOW???/</p>

<p>I don’t hate Caltech, and I never applied there. I considered applying there and it was among my top choices for a while, but I later decided that I didn’t want to go somewhere so small and focuses on math science.</p>

9

<p>Why are you judging a school based on its selectivity? We don’t consider ourselves a good school because we are selective. In fact, most undergrads probably couldn’t tell you our current acceptance rate- after you get in, the admissions department becomes completely irrelevant. Our quality comes from the success of our graduates and the respect our programs have among other scientists and engineers.</p>

<p>You also don’t know other things about Caltech. How could we become less selective (admit more people), and keep the same class size? We are already at capacity for the number of undergrads, and no plans, room, or desire to increase. </p>

<p>If I thought you were ■■■■■■■■ I wouldn’t respond, but I think you are severely misinformed about what Caltech is.</p>

10

<p>I lol’d.</p>

<p>In the end you phrase your argument in that you’re dissatisfied with Caltech’s acceptance rates, but this is really an issue with their intended class size rather than how they accept people. Regardless of the selection criteria, Caltech is still only going to accept a small number of people because of the small class size (an attribute you pointed out as a positive point). In fact, opening up the selection criteria (reserving spots for a football team, minority kids, some rich guy’s kid, etc.) would only increase the number of applicants and further drive down acceptance rates. Of course, you probably assume that we should just expand, but as usually argued in similar arguments about expanding Caltech to include <insert department=“”>, we don’t care if people “would have thought better of [Caltech] and thought it “more prestigious and better” if it [had] expanded”. (Also, my impression was that Caltech’s acceptance rates were higher than its peer institutions, so go complain at them.)</insert></p>

11

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<p>Yes, but you are still not making any sense.</p>

<p>Caltech’s selectivity has been hurt in the rankings by its admissions policies more than it has been helped. People know that without stellar scores and GPAs they have a very poor chance at admission at Caltech, so they don’t apply. This drives down the number of people applying, and makes it look less selective than it really is. Selectivity in the US News and World Report Rankings is defined as the # of people accepted divided by the # applying. </p>

<p>If Caltech opened up their admission policies and admitted people because they donated money, were athletes, had quirky essays, or had “great” life stories, that would mean that a lot more people would think they had a chance. So a lot more people would apply. If Caltech did this only for the bottom 25% of the class, that means they would not be hurt at all in the rankings. The SAT scores factored into the US News rankings are only the 25%-75% range. So hypothetically if their bottom 25% all got zero on the SAT their ranking does not go down at all. The only way a school is possibly hurt by doing this is in the statistic describing how many of their admittees were in the top 10% of their high school. But this is a pretty low bar compared to what Caltech’s standards are.</p>

<p>I think MIT’s selectivity has probably been increased for these very reasons. Before, people thought if you got a “B” in math or science you were toast. Now, because they sometimes take these people, a lot more people apply. Hence their selectivity goes up.</p>

12

<p>Let us look at the numbers. Here are the acceptance rates for various top tier colleges for the class of 2013. </p>

<p>Stanford - 7.6
Harvard - 7.1
MIT - 10
Princeton - 9.7
Yale - 9.7</p>

<p>Now compare that to Caltech’s 15.2 percent this year. That is more than twice Harvard’s and exactly twice Stanford’s. Now if we were just arguing about messing with the selectivity numbers to discuss which colleges purposely cater their admissions to lower them, we’d discuss the fact that schools like Harvard and Stanford do WAY more advertising promoting their school and encouraging kids who very obviously have no chance at being accepted by telling them that the word “holistic” means that very under qualified students still should waste their $75 because theres a chance. </p>

<p>But forgetting that, I’d like to point out some incredibly illogical statements about what apparently makes a university desirable. You resent Caltech because it doesn’t give preferential treatment to otherwise under qualified candidates for totally non academic reasons? Are you serious? That’s the exact opposite of what a university should be doing and frankly Caltech seems to be the only top school that doesn’t do this. I’m not trying to be offensive or anything but I truly can’t understand how one could argue that an academic institution not giving preferential treatment for non academic reasons is somehow the wrong approach. </p>

<p>And for the record I don’t think you understand how Caltech makes its admission decisions because it’s not based on who has the highest SAT scores. To the best of my knowledge, being just a prefrosh, Caltech makes its decisions based on who they think are the smartest at math and science and who have the most potential and passion to become leaders in the scientific community. Now how can you tell me that lowering their standards would make the school better when Caltech has been doing exactly what an institute of higher learning is meant to do by consistently producing the worlds scientific leaders since it became Caltech despite having the same total alumni as my local state school has in 1 year? I’m sorry. I just always thought that the problem with higher education in this country was the exact opposite: that the actual academics seem to take a backseat to the “hooks” and things that make you “interesting” and “diverse” in undergraduate admissions.</p>

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<p>Obvious ■■■■■ is obvious.</p>

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<p>There was a time when all schools would have been embarrassed to be doing what they do today (even though it was done in private) and the Caltech system (more typical of elite schools in other nations even today) the presumed gold standard. There was a time when affirmative action would never condone accepting people with test scores 100-200 points below the previous averages. Nor would they say openly that legacy acceptance or athletic preference was virtuous. Or even claim that the ludicrous statistic that a low acceptance rate, no matter how lousy the overall pool of applicants is, somehow indicates quality.</p>

<p>That a ■■■■■ can come here and argue as if Caltech should be on the defensive is, sadly, testimony to how debased the college admissions game has become.</p>

<p>If ever another nation comes to overtake the US in the perception of providing quality training for undergrads, it will be because of the self-inflicted wounds of our arrogant admissions policies.</p>

15

<p>You say: “If Rice, Emory, UNC, Vandy, and all the other top schools utilized Caltech’s admissions policies of not giving preferential treatment to athletes or URM’s, they would be even MORE selective than Caltech and would be ranked much much higher.”</p>

<p>I’ll give you a hint: if every school used the same criteria, then the top people would always get into the top schools (and all schools), the middle people would get into the middle schools (not the top schools), etc. As long as a school is upfront with their policies, I see nothing wrong with any of these methods. So much of Caltech is whether someone will survive the core curriculum. Thus, they can’t really lower standards too far for athletes or URMs. Caltech is centered around academics and thus, they need to have academic central to admissions as well.</p>

16

<p>“Or even claim that the ludicrous statistic that a low acceptance rate, no matter how lousy the overall pool of applicants is, somehow indicates quality.”</p>

<p>If this is so ridiculous, why is it one of the main criterions for the USNews college ranking system? Also, you all extremely conveniently ignored the article I posted a link to that states that Caltech is concerned with its lack of minorities, but they are too concerned with maintaining its high selectivity to correct its situation. Maybe you don’t tout Caltech’s selectivity as one of the things that makes Tech prestigious, but many many other people do.</p>

<p>If you think that Tech does not care about maintaining that top 6 ranking in the USNews college rankings system you are just kidding yourself that top ranking makes it attract a lot of applicants.</p>

<p>Caltech is centered around academics, but so are all the other top schools so that is no excuse.</p>

<p>I really have no problem with Tech’s admissions practices I just have a problem with people thinking Tech is so prestigious and incredible because it is so selective, when other colleges would be more selecctive than it if they used Tech’s admissions practices. Seriously, do you think it’s just coincidence that the most prestigious universities, Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc. are also the most selective?</p>

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<p>Caltech doesn’t use Affirmative Action, but they are interested in getting more minority applicants to apply to the school in the hopes that some will be of high enough quality to be accepted. The minority office is also there as a support center for minority students who currently attend the school. It can function in a way similar to a Women’s Center or a GBLTQ Center at every other school.</p>

<p>Maybe if your problem is peoples’ perception that Caltech is good because it’s selective you should start talking to people whose opinions aren’t solely influenced by one number in a for-profit magazine.</p>

18

<p>If we admit that we’re a crappy second-rate school that only looks good because we unfairly admit the top of our applicant pool, will you go away and let us do science, and use this board to talk to people who actually want to come here and do something?</p>

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<p>quote: If this is so ridiculous, why is it one of the main criterions for the USNews college ranking system? endquote</p>

<p>The fact that this criterion is one of the main criteria of US News, is further testimony to the weakness of the US News rating system. As is its use of graduation rates. A weaker school that flunks out a third of its students by maintaining high standards should be thought better of than a better known school that passes everyone no matter how little they learn. But that is not the way the rankings are done. Both Caltech and MIT could improve their scores by simply eliminating C’s and lower grades. Almost no professor I know would consider that an improvement yet that would tend to raise the measured ranking in US News.</p>

<p>The real problem is that all the top universities know that the US News rankings are flawed but they don’t want to develop a better system because it would undercut the soft monopoly of the better known schools. A true objective ranking that couldn’t be gamed or manipulated would make it easier for an unknown institution to rise up and displace the market leaders.</p>

<p>Indeed, the best known schools would prefer there were no rankings whatsoever.</p>

<p>Thought experiment: If all rankings would be banned in the US for eternity, the big names would win. Even if they became objectively worse, it would be hard to demonstrate to the general public. As it stands, a flawed, highly marketing-focused ranking has become dominant because imperfect info about top schools beats having no comparable info whatsoever.</p>

20

<p>Well, I needed a laugh. But undergraduate admissions is only the tip of the iceberg! If only Caltech weren’t working so hard to maintain its selectivity at the faculty level, I’d be there!</p>