<p>@RainingChexmix, Accepting girls and boys at the same ratio will only make the situation worse since the girls will also be discouraged (girls may be intimidated among so so many boys). Lower matriculation rate for girls is another reason/need for higher admission rate. </p>
<p>@3togo, As I mentioned before the problem is unique to MIT and Caltech since they are technological institutions unlike other universities it is possible balance it among various majors. (I don’t think it has anything to do with MIT’s openness; it is all in common data set). As a matter of fact some of the public universities (e.g. CAL) have more girls than boys but it closely resembles the application pool and hence it is not seen as a problem. The reverse favoritism (favoring boys) is generally seen only in small LACs and that too in arts majors but these colleges are small enough that they don’t draw attention. (It will be interesting to see if the ratio is skewed at the whole college level)</p>
<p>In the end it is what it is and we need to look at it objectively without resorting to political spins.</p>
<p>@Mollibatmit: Regarding geographical AA, the correct terminology is geographical diversity and is just another goal to give the student body a broader perspective. The idea is that intelligence (or whatever is needed to succeed) is spread/found (not necessarily uniformly) across the boundaries like race, gender, geography (including countries) and wealth and the universities are trying to get best samples from each. (Quotas would make it ugly though)</p>
<p>I fully understand the purpose – I’m just trying to understand why there’s so much less vitriol surrounding measures to increase geographic diversity than there is surrounding measures to increase gender or racial diversity.</p>
<p>Because of the number of people affected. male/female - 1/2 the population is affected. Geography - only high population/high performing areas are affected. I hear kids lament all the time that only X number of kids were accepted from their school. Ok, so maybe 10 kids from that school were affected, and only 100 schools nationwide have a similar problem. Not a large sample set.</p>
<p>I don’t think that the issue of admissions preference for athletes is primarily an issue of race, at least at the Ivies. A lot of the athletes are in sports such as crew, fencing, lacrosse, field hockey, and water polo. I think of these sports as preponderantly white. Also, quite a few of them are played in the East Coast boarding schools, so it seems to me to be a case of privileging the privileged.</p>
<p>You realize that when people starting whining that they didn’t get in because of those pesky minorities, they’re acting unrealistically entitled, right?</p>
<p>If you want to point out actual flaws in my justification, feel free to do so.</p>
<p>I’m happy the ordeal is over!
Now, I’d like to comment on geographic diversity. I’m going to show data that suggests that AA based on geographic diversity is a myth.
Spoiler alert: data-based conclusions follow :)</p>
<p>Btw, I don’t want to take credit for these links. Someone else posted them on cc initially.</p>
<p>2010______<em>#freshmen</em><em>#HS graduates</em><strong>HS graduates/MIT freshman
Massachusetts </strong> 99 <strong><em>64,040</em></strong>_ 647
Connecticut______<strong><em>21</em></strong><strong><em>38,120</em></strong><strong><em>1,815
New York*</em></strong><strong><em>81</em></strong><strong>182,880</strong><strong><em>2,258
California</em></strong><strong><em>148</em></strong><strong>375,070</strong><strong><em>2,534
North Dakota</em></strong><strong><em>2</em></strong><strong><em>7,160</em></strong><strong><em>3,580
Wyoming</em></strong><strong><em>1</em></strong><strong><em>5,510</em></strong><strong><em>5,510
Nebraska</em></strong><strong><em>3</em></strong><strong><em>19,640</em></strong><strong><em>6,547
Iowa</em></strong>_______<strong><em>3</em></strong>_<strong><em>34,580</em></strong>_____11,527</p>
<p>*the previous years there were more MIT freshmen from NY; e.g., in 2009 there were 1,925 HS students per freshman.</p>
<p>I understand these are students who matriculated, but I see no reason why students from rural areas are less likely to matriculate to MIT than students from Ca.</p>
<p>How does that data imply geographic diversity is a myth? It certainly implies there are no strict geographic quotas and is possibly suggestive that geographic diversity does not play a huge factor but your data says nothing about the qualifications of students.</p>
<p>Isn’t a it a little presumptuous to think that for the whole state of Iowa there are only 3 HS students who are the caliber of MIT students? Are you saying rural states can’t produce bright students at the same rate as coastal states? What’s the problem? Are they dumber?</p>
<p>When you have small numbers there is certainly a lot of year to year fluctuation and there could easily be more MIT caliber students who choose not to attend MIT even if admitted. It is also almost certainly the case that in the aggregate preferences are to stay closer to home for college (hence Stanford has many more students from California than MIT and MIT has many more students from Massachusetts). I think a desire to stay close to home explains some but not all of the discrepancy. </p>
<p>That being said I think it is definitely the case that there are more high achieving students on the coasts. Most really elite high schools are on the coasts so even if average performance is higher in the Midwest than on the coasts high achieving students may be clustered on the coasts. High skilled immigrants are also clustered on the coasts as well and if a significant percentage of students are children of these groups that can really skew the numbers. I also think there are significant agglomeration effects to achievement as well that help explain this.</p>
<p>Well, in that case, there’s also no race-based affirmative action at MIT, because there are fewer African-American students (9%) than there are African-Americans in the US population (12%), and more Asian-American students (30%) than there are Asian-Americans in the US population (5%).</p>
<p>molliebatmit, this is a clever argument. We know that underrepresentative minorities are behind in achievement, and this is explained by many objective factors. What are your explanations for a would be underachievement of students in the Midwest? MIT brags that it doesn’t care that much for test scores and advanced coursework, but looks for passion and talent. Why do you think students from the Midwest would have less of that than Massachusetts students? </p>
<p>UMTYMP student
An interesting explanation, but not very logical. Where those MIT caliber students from Midwest would go closer to home, given that they were admitted by MIT? What are their choices? University of Chicago is probably the only highly selective place, but it’s not STEM focused.
None of your hypotheses seem to explain the fact that Midwest is very underrepresented at MIT, which leaves us with a simple explanation that MIT doesn’t practice any AA with regard to geographic area.</p>
<p>Look at Harvard and Yale: their counts for Midwest have been steadily decreasing. Stanford and Princeton seem to make an effort to enroll more Midwest students (based on eyeballing - I might be wrong).</p>
<p>There are more, better-qualified, candidates on the coasts. With the highly specialized prep schools/boarding schools/whatever. Also the college frenzy is a cultural thing on the coasts and in these highly competitive areas (again, not in the midwest).</p>
<p>The data you provided only presents the number of students enrolled from those states, NOT the number of students who applied or the number of students accepted.</p>
<p>The number of kids who apply from a state like Montana or Nebraska will be a fraction of the applications from a coastal state for a variety of reasons. A major reason, from my experience, is that people in Midwestern states just care a lot less about the name on a college. Prestigious colleges aren’t hyped up, and many qualified students don’t apply simply because they don’t WANT to go to one.</p>
<p>MIT says they look at applicants in context, and from my experience, this has been true with regards to geographic diversity as well. Yes, the coastal areas are much more competitive and have different resources and opportunities available to them. It would be unreasonable to expect that the student from the rural Midwest has participated in Intel, Siemens, or international competitions, etc. So, they probably look for other ways that these students have shown their passion and interest with the resources that are available to them.</p>
<p>I say this because I come from a rural area and feel much like my high school resume was much less impressive than a lot of the students here - though that doesn’t mean I was necessarily less well prepared.</p>
<p>That said, there are a very large amount of students here from Chicago - an area IMO more similar to the coasts in terms of competition and college culture and producing larger amounts of applicants.</p>
I think this because I am from the Midwest myself, from a middle-of-the-road suburban public high school in central Ohio.</p>
<p>I agree with wellthatsokay and unicameral above – striving for a top college spot is not as prevalent in the Midwest as it is in other regions of the country. About half the students from my high school go to college, but virtually everyone goes to an in-state public. Only a small fraction of students from my high school, and from high schools in my area, apply to out-of-state colleges at all, let alone to highly selective out-of-state colleges. Top students from my high school generally went to Ohio State with merit money. It’s not that they couldn’t have gotten into a higher-ranked school, but they generally didn’t apply. </p>
<p>Relatedly, students from my high school did not work to build the sort of profile that is typical for an applicant from the coasts. The guidance counselors and teachers were not familiar with the process for applying to top schools, and there was not a lot of guidance germane to the concerns of people who wanted to apply out of state. Balk if you want, but as a high school student, I had no idea that it was possible to a) do research in a lab; b) participate in a national science fair (I didn’t hear the word “Intel” until I went on my admitted student visit to MIT); c) participate in math contests (I didn’t know they existed).</p>
<p>As a result, students from my high school rarely had competitive applications for top schools, even when they did know enough to apply. A friend of mine in my year and I were the first two students ever admitted to MIT from my high school. There was a student a year ahead of us who was recruited to Harvard for football, but I cannot think of a single other student in my class or the three classes ahead who went to an Ivy League school or somewhere similar. </p>
<p>I do not think that students in the Midwest suffer from failures of intelligence or potential, but from failures of awareness and failures of access. (I think the same is true, to varying degrees, for underrepresented minorities, for students of low socioeconomic status, and for women in STEM.)</p>
<p>I am also from the Midwest (Minnesota) and can largely attest to what molliebatmit said. I suspect a lot of this comes down to major urban areas being overrepresented compared to everywhere else. In Minnesota, essentially all the top math students are either affiliated with the University of Minnesota or one particular high school both of which send decent numbers of students to MIT. In addition to those a couple of other high schools also routinely produce students who do well in science competitions but that is not the norm for the vast majority of the state. MIT still takes students from the rest of the state but not in huge numbers hence the overall underrepresentation.</p>
<p>^Yes – a lot of this is actually an urban/rural divide rather than a coast/non-coast divide.</p>
<p>I’ve been reading with interest some recent work by Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery (they of the revealed preferences survey from a few years ago) showing that high-achieving low-income kids, especially in rural areas, aren’t applying to “achievement-matched” colleges. Their most recent paper is on an impressively effective intervention to increase the number of these students who apply to selective schools.</p>
<p>I think that the opportunities for students in the Midwest vary a lot from area to area and also from school to school. molliebatmit describes a number of the communities in the Midwest. However, in others, there are frequently Intel semi-finalists, if not finalists. </p>
<p>Ages ago, when I was in high school in the Midwest, I conducted independent research and participated in science fairs. I read about an interesting biological phenomenon in Scientific American, and when the biology teacher assigned a science project, I asked if I could work on that. The two biology teachers helped me with the acquisition of supplies for the project. They also did something that I doubt would ever happen anymore: During my last two years of high school, they allowed me to work on the project unsupervised in the biology lab after school, and also during study hall, when I had one. For that matter, the fact that the school had a separate biology lab is probably unusual. This was not a university town, but the people of the town were fairly education-focused.</p>
<p>“A study released by researchers at Harvard and Stanford quantified what everyone in my hometown already knew: even the most talented rural poor kids don’t go to the nation’s best colleges. The vast majority, the study found, do not even try.”</p>
<p>The study described in the op-ed is the Hoxby and Avery one molliebatmit mentioned above. I think the op-ed is also somewhat unfair to competitive colleges. There’s simply no way selective colleges can visit every high school unlike the army which has far more resources at its disposal. Elite colleges already send lots of mailers to students who do well on any sort of standardized test as well although if a student only takes the SAT/ACT once during their senior year that won’t necessarily be much help.</p>