Chance me for MIT/Stanford

Colleges and Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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<p>^^Now you are skewing it the other direction, CalAlum. First of all, the student body of the Cal system encompasses a wider range of academic talent than HYPSMC. At the very top section of talent where HYPMS takes people, women do not have higher GPA/scores. </p>

<p>There is no preservation of gender balance at Harvard or any of the other top universities.</p>

<p>What Harvardfan has reasoned is correct. If self-selection does occur, than the average female applicant to MIT would have higher stats than the average male applicant. This doesn’t mean that the top 100 female applicants would be better than the top 100 male applicants. It’s a consequence of the fact that there is greater skew toward lower scoring applicants in the male group. Lower scoring female applicants don’t apply.</p>

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<p>I actually think the argument has implicitly come up at least, in that it’s been said that females self-select, which I do believe would play a role. </p>

<p>Nevertheless, you make a good point about the UC system. I do believe in my heart of hearts that colleges admit who they want.</p>

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<p>They may have a slight edge :wink: but yes, the disparities do significantly come down when you look at the best students. As an example, I think most rank 1 and 2 students in high schools I’ve seen are female.</p>

<p>But seriously, it is undeniable that females seriously considering a science school self-select – just think back to where you went to high school, everyone. </p>

<p>More to the point, though, HYP… probably don’t care about what I just said above much, given they don’t conduct an absolute GPA/standardized testing-based admissions process anyway.</p>

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<p>@Collegealum, who stated, “At the very top section of talent where HYPMS takes people, women do not have higher GPA/scores.”</p>

<p>Actually, in the top section, women do have higher GPA scores. You can find the data here (on page 3):
<a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools;

<p>According to statistics compiled by the College Board, among the students taking the SAT reasoning test in 2007 who reported a GPA of A+ (i.e., 97-100), 60% were female. Not surprisingly, given UC’s admissions practice, this is the same proportion of females now in the University of California undergraduate population.</p>

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<p>Nevertheless, this is not to me at all evidence that HYPS do gender-balancing. The top students all have relatively high GPA’s, and at that point, I if anything see there being tons of evidence against the claim that these schools even want people with the absolute highest grades/standardized test scores (talk to the billions of people on CC who have complained about their extra-high scores not being honored with admission). They look at other factors. Now there may be gender-balancing, but this certainly is not the reason to believe it.</p>

<p>The UC system is more straightforward to make such claims about. If you saw in Cal, for instance, a much higher percentage of males being accepted, given that females have higher “academic indices” or whatever on average, then it’d be clear that Cal is doing some balancing. Not so clear in the case of private schools, because nobody even knows what they look for beyond certain basics.</p>

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<p>The college board self reported information does not have relevance on MIT applicant pool, because applicants for MIT are highly self-selected. If top 10 percentile of MIT (MIT admission rate is 10% this year) female applicants have similar STAT range as male’s, it will suggest a preference for female applicants, given to the fact that male to female applicant ratio is 2 to 1.</p>

<p>Similarly, the same thing can be used to analyze each race and ethnic group to reveal the preference. I don’t believe that MIT will ever release these information.</p>

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They won’t.</p>

<p>There was hesitation on the part of the admissions office to release the info they do release on the admissions webpage, explicitly because of College Confidential.</p>

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<p>Why because of CC? I may just be thick?</p>

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<p>Because of this! Because of all this nonsense about microdissecting every scrap of information and trying to make the numbers say more than they can.</p>

<p>When they were putting together the current stats page in 2006, I think the exact words Matt said to me were, “Exactly how many flame wars will this page inspire on College Confidential?”</p>

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<p>Ah, yes flame wars are very, very unfortunate. To be honest though, those who conduct flame wars will probably conduct them with or without official stats on the MIT page, given they’ll then go off of data they collect from small sample sizes from their personal little districts. </p>

<p>Personally, I don’t know that the act of publishing stats for a school like MIT which very much admits the kind of class it wants to admit with its own standards would do too much, given the criteria for admission are ultimately impossible to spell out with precision.</p>

<p>As for microdissecting, I am myself in favor of keen analysis, just as long as people don’t start claiming things with false certainty that hardly follow from the data given.</p>

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<p>As long as MIT hides its data, one can always speculate that there is some truth to the rumor. Why can’t MIT follow the OXBRIDGE model? In a sense, the American elite institutes have not learnt their lessons in the last century when they implement anti-Semitism quota. The essence of that war is anti-high achievers or anti-merit. That war ended up benefiting some of the obscure colleges like CUNY where high achieving Jews had to go. If you count the number of Nobels coming from undergraduates, CUNY beats Princeton, Stanford and a whole bunch of other elite institutes they are not supposed to beat, even as today ([List</a> of Nobel laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_laureates_by_university_affiliation]List”>List of Nobel laureates by university affiliation - Wikipedia)). Most of those Nobels come from people who entered their undergraduates when elite institutes limited their merit enrollments. </p>

<p>As of now, regardless of the well meaning of social rebalancing act, the core of such social engineering is placing merit in a secondary position to fulfill a superficial political agenda. It is essentially anti-merit. In fact, I have a hard time to see the difference between today’s social rebalancing agenda versus those anti-Semitism quotas in the past. The goal is the same, only the tactics have been changed. In the long run, it will be detrimental to an institution.</p>

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<p>^^I found Marilee Jones’ statement about Asians extremely disturbing. However, MIT has always had a reputation of having a very high Asian enrollment–moreso than the ivies. I would be pretty confident that there was no anti-Asian bias in the 80’s and early 90’s. I suspect that if you looked at the Asian enrollment now and 25 years ago, that might tell you if there is any new anti-Asian bias. MIT has AA, like many other institutions of higher learning, but social reingineering has been traditionally much less important at MIT than its peer insitutions. You bring up anti-semitism as driving CUNY enrollment of academic superstars. One of our greatest graduates, Richard Feynman, ended up on our campus because Columbia didn’t want him due to a quota. Compared to almost all top schools, MIT has a good record in being meritocratic. </p>

<p>The word from the admissions office is that admitted pool of men slightly outperform the women statwise coming in, but that the women slightly outperform the men GPA-wise when they are at MIT. Statistics can’t tell everything, though. I could envision a number of scenarios in which both of those statements wouldn’t mean what people think it means.
I agree with transparency, but you have to know the limitations of statistics.</p>

<p>For instance, if the admitted pool of men slightly outperform the women, it doesn’t necessarily mean there was any preference. For one, if there are more men than women than there could be more men at the very top of the admitted class and this could skew the averages slightly. (The male/female ratio is something like 55-45, I believe.) Also, the Gaussian distribution of performance for men and women tends to be different, so even if there were the same number of men and women at MIT, the average stats could be different without gender preference. There are more outliers on either end for the men; the distribution is more compact in the women. This is true at MIT, too. According to Marilee Jones, there are more superstars that are male, but the people totally flaming out tend to be male too. She suggested it was something psychological. </p>

<p>As for women outperforming men at MIT, this could be due to differences in the distribution of majors. Some majors curve harder than others, and some are known for being more difficult. </p>

<p>Again, I don’t know what the admissions office means by “slight” differences, but the “slight” differences the admissions office claims could be easily swallowed up by other factors unrelated to either gender preference in admissions or performance once they get to MIT. I could be wrong, but there is no way of knowing without more data.</p>

<p>The best evidence, however, that self-selection can be a powerful force in boosting admission rate for females is looking at Caltech. They don’t have any gender preference at all, and the admission rate for females is much, much higher than for males.</p>

<p>I think transparency is best, but with statistics you should always ask, “Why doesn’t this mean what I think it means?” Be a critical thinker.</p>

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<p>Marilee Jones spoke her mind. I am sure that she is not alone in terms of her opinion in the MIT undergraduate admission office. By the way, does any person from MIT admission office come out to disown her statement since the book was published?</p>

<p>MIT seems more progressive in comparison with other elite schools in the country in terms of merit based admission. But this is discounted by the fact that MIT does not have Division I athletic programs like other schools have. If you place Caltech as an example for merit based admission, and Stanford, the worst offender in terms of non-merit based admission as the other. MIT is progressively more resembled to Stanford than Caltech in recent years, even though the missions of MIT and Caltech are quite similar, and Stanford has Division I athletic programs. If MIT continues to fool itself to assemble a climbing team as it sees its undergraduate student body as such, it will miss the next Feynman when he knocks on the door. </p>

<p>Given on the current condition, it is impossible for MIT to release the detail information about its applicants, because there is probably some truth to the accusation. Institutes, like nations, will rise and fall. Sometimes, it takes fifty years, and sometimes it may take longer. This misguided social rebalancing policy could possibly later prove to be the beginning of the downfall of not just MIT, but United States as a country. </p>

<p>This is my last comment on the thread.</p>

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<p>Well I guess if I had to pick, transparency does seem better than lack of it. There are those who’ll be foolish with statistics, but that doesn’t outweigh the opportunity for those who’re less foolish to make something of them. A little transparency allows for people to be smarter about how they market themselves to college. Because really, I think it’d be silly to judge people solely based on how good they intrinsically are at a certain age at marketing themselves – if there is more transparency, one may put effort into marketing oneself with some direction. If there is “no direction at all” one can market oneself in with some clear degree of success, I guess I’d sense there to be a problem at the heart of things. </p>

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<p>What was the statement, I am curious?</p>

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<p>I don’t know to what extent exactly it is a problem at MIT specifically, but I’ve heard myself uttering words almost exactly like this. It’d definitely be a huge problem.</p>

<p>EDIT: In other news, I am at least happy with how graduate schools seem to be doing things. Although there’s fishiness anywhere, and I may be bitter in a few years if they completely destroy me, I think the fact that there’s little social balancing, lots of international students (I know two Asian grad students at my school with accents and everything at least, a few from Europe – very smart people) is comforting to me.</p>

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<p>You are a genius.</p>

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<p>dont give up easily!!! be optimistic to apply</p>