<p>^ It seems you don’t understand what it means to admit the best people. In the eyes of MIT admissions, it’s about the people who will do the most with the opportunities given to them - because once they get to MIT, they will be surrounded by amazing opportunities.</p>
<p>Race, sex, fiscal situation, high school attended, etc, play a role in how much opportunity they had. It’s not practical to judge people based on their opportunity, but by what they did with what they could do. It makes Admissions’ job harder, but ultimately more fair.</p>
<p>And it’s exactly why MIT won’t turn into a regular college.</p>
<p>Yup, people try to justify in many ways. I was trying to justify it in pure a practical business perspective. BTW, I am glad to know from various posts that MIT prepares students how to defend themselves . As one adcom member from another top university revealed, about 50 to 60% of the applicants can survive the rigor of the work at these institutions and they have a great flexibility of assembling a class by choosing what they need without losing quality too much. After all running an educational institution is a business, especially a private one. Girls may ‘think’ boys have better opportunities in life in general especially when it comes to STEM education and the boys ‘think’ girls have better opportunities at MIT. In the end it makes no difference. As individuals we have to just make the best use of the opportunities that are showered on us. I am sure that is exactly you will do at MIT (assuming you are a current student). All the best!</p>
<p>And I think my way is more practical than yours MIT wants alums that go on to continue the Institute’s reputation, as well as alums who will be able to give back to the Institute. Giving opportunity-seeking people the proper tools is a spectacular return on investment.</p>
<p>MIT is an opportunity given to very few girls, relative to all girls. Opportunities for boys in general is far greater - MIT can’t fix that. But through seeing past background and instead picking ambitious people, it can work towards narrowing that gap. Among the other benefits.</p>
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<p>Amen to that! Many successful people lost the crapshoot and didn’t get into MIT. That’s how they did it ^_^</p>
<p>I’ve been told there is. That’s how they refine what to look for over the years.</p>
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<p>That doesn’t make sense. The female pool may be smaller, but it contains by percent more qualified applicants than the male pool (for reasons I can explain if you’d like). There’s no reason to arbitrarily limit a pool.</p>
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<p>That’s because people don’t take offense to someone from Montana “taking their slot”. MIT strives for a lot of diversity amongst its qualified applicants and succeeds in doing so, but for whatever reason some people find minorities and women offensive.</p>
<p>and I’ll add this one … why aren’t there complaints about how males are over admitted to virtually every other top school (especially the LACs) where males are the minority candidates … but MIT draws complaints about how it admits women.</p>
<p>I’m really at a loss of why MIT admissions seems to be ground zero for admissions complaints on CC. By whatever measure of admission merit … less legacy preference. less athletics preferences. more PELL grants and less preps. more ethnic diversity (including more Asians), etc … MIT may not be perfect but seems to lead. Yet somehow MIT has become the focal point for discussions about what is wrong with admissions … I find it incredibly odd.</p>
<p>I wonder if it’s because MIT admissions is more open and transparent than most other schools. I think the blog posts that some of the admissions officers have put up have given us a very intimate access to their personalities and their emotions while reading applications. It’s humanizing. Humans are flawed and humans can be wrong, and more importantly humans can be convinced and swayed and persuaded to change, not at all like the faceless, emotionless, unaccessible black boxes that most admissions departments and processes of admission seem to be.</p>
<p>At the risk of sounding arrogant – and that’s truly not my goal – I think one of the reasons MIT takes so much heat for its admissions is because it rejects many of the nation’s top kids. I do think that this is necessarily so – there are too many great applicants and not enough spots. But because of this, there are probably more lots of highly-qualified candidates (and their parents) who are disgruntled with their rejection, and take to CC about it, which is how this thread got started (and continued).</p>
<p>MIT is not unique in this; all top schools must reject highly-qualified applicants just because there are too many. But more people seem to think that they deserve MIT than deserve HYPS, perhaps because MIT is a tech school and they’re “tech” people, while HYPS are more general, and seem harder to predict admissions-wise. So when people who are strong in math/science get rejected from MIT, there’s a desire to understand why – and race/gender/geography/money/high school/any discrimination is generally blamed.</p>
<p>This. I think it is the fact that there is just more data to go over and more information available to scrutinize.</p>
<p>this year, it does seem as if MIT admissions has become a “stand in” for “elite school admissions.”</p>
<p>Also, just the tech part of the admissions gives people the sense that it is a “place” where the allegedly objective stats “should” matter more. </p>
<p>When I went to grad school, at orientation they said that the percentage of Women in the incoming class skyrocketed to 22% that year.</p>
<p>Here is another thought: Accepting the best students (whatever that means) may not produce the best graduates. If everyone was a top engineer (in whatever field), and they all thought the same way, then it is much less likely for the kids to have an “ah ha” moment when a new perspective is realized, or even to learn how to think differently.</p>
<p>I don’t agree that someone significantly less qualified should be accepted, absent other factors. But, usually each kid has something unique about them that adds to the class. Each kid meets the minimum threshold, and something unique about the kids is seen by admissions. If MIT whittles the applicant pool (lets say 20,000 kids) down to 8,000 truly qualified, and from than picks 500 that are truly outstanding in their own right, that leaves 700 kids to “round out the class”. How do you differentiate between the remaining 7,500? Is an SAT score of 2,400 really that much different from 2,200? Or a 4.0 kid (unweighted) from a 3.9 (especially if the kid got the low grade in PE)?</p>
<p>One of my kids went to school for voice, where the exact opposite in m/f ratio exists. The schools could offer dirt FA to women, but will bend over backwards to get men. Discrimination? </p>
<p>If having a better balance of M/F makes for a happier class, doesn’t that help the school because happier kids do better?</p>
<p>Exactly! And the variety of life experiences/perspectives is important for students’ personal growth. I definitely think that having a balanced gender ratio makes MIT a happier, emotionally more mature place.</p>
<p>The mean women’s test scores and probably grades are higher than men’s, but at the tail of the distribution near the top, men still outnumber women. For example, at the ivies, there would be no need to have affirmative action for males.</p>
<p>People do, but you’re right, it comes up less often.</p>
<p>I think it is because rejected applicants don’t actually know anyone personally from a geographically underrepresented state who was accepted. That is, the kid in homeroom who got in is not going to be from Montana.</p>
<p>1.) It is tech-focused, and as poetgirl said, so objective stats are expected to matter more. The characteristics and achievements of a great mathematician prospect is easier to describe and verify in an online discussion than a great writer. Also, it is much harder to have an online argument about admissions at ivies because ivies take so many different types of people. I think people should be able to still argue about it because you do expect a fraction of the student body at any school to be ‘academic candidates’, but the discussions become easily muddled.</p>
<p>2.) MIT admissions is more transparent.</p>
<p>3.) It has a history of being more meritocratic than the ivies, thus people are more disappointed when it doesn’t live up to their ideals. MIT was Daniel Golden’s original model school of meritocracy in admissions before he discovered Caltech.</p>
<p>4.) MIT admissions philosophy has changed in the past 10-15 years.</p>
<p>Also my impression is that the number of cases where geography plays a significant factor in admissions is very small. The other reason I think race based AA gets the most attention is that it’s the most related to public policy. There are prominent court cases and ballot initiatives regarding race based AA but much less of that regarding other preferences (presumably because other preferences only need to meet the much less strict rational basis or intermediate scrutiny tests).</p>
<p>That may well be true, but you don’t have to move much farther down the food chain to see a lot of evidence of affirmative action for men. At a place like Vassar, which struggles to keep its classes at least 40% male, it’s widely accepted that different standards apply to male and female applicants.</p>
<p>Sure, although Vassar was an all-female school until relatively recently, so I think that is a bad example. I’ve heard Kenyon College has affirmative action for males. I doubt that schools like Amherst, Pomona, or Williams would need affirmative action. I don’t know about slightly less prestigious LACs like Bates or the Claremont Colleges.</p>
I think that’s true. I think there’s also some factor of relatability – someone from a high-powered east coast suburb can see that there are fewer resources available to the kid from Montana, but people are less willing to admit that there are significant barriers to college application excellence based on race or gender, or, more disturbingly, that part of their own success is attributable to their race/gender.</p>
<p>@PiperXP #223
Some explanations/justifications are closer to the truth (than the others) and some explanations/justifications are invented to make people believe they are special.</p>
. As one adcom member from another top university revealed, about 50 to 60% of the applicants can survive the rigor of the work at these institutions and they have a great flexibility of assembling a class by choosing what they need without losing quality too much. After all running an educational institution is a business, especially a private one. Girls may ‘think’ boys have better opportunities in life in general especially when it comes to STEM education and the boys ‘think’ girls have better opportunities at MIT. In the end it makes no difference. As individuals we have to just make the best use of the opportunities that are showered on us. I am sure that is exactly you will do at MIT (assuming you are a current student). All the best!</p>
MIT wants alums that go on to continue the Institute’s reputation, as well as alums who will be able to give back to the Institute. Giving opportunity-seeking people the proper tools is a spectacular return on investment.</p>