<p>Just out of curiosity. I was wondering if there are still much more male applicants than female applicant.</p>
<p>Yes, there are still more male applicants than female applicants, but the accepted class is approximately at gender parity.</p>
<p>Note that this does not necessarily imply that females have an advantage in the acceptance process.</p>
<p>Look at here:</p>
<p>[Fresh</a> faces on campus - MIT News Office](<a href=“http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/class-of-2015-0907.html]Fresh”>Fresh faces on campus | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology)</p>
<p>no. they do not.</p>
<p>^I guess that means no they do not have a SIGNIFICANT advantage.</p>
<p>They appear to have an advantage because less apply. Since twice as many guys apply as girls, they have to accept two girls for every guy to maintain gender equality.</p>
<p>Advantage? Not really. If you aren’t qualified for MIT, you aren’t qualified for MIT.</p>
<p>^But, for example, Caltech does not practice gender-based affirmative action, and female applicants are still accepted to Caltech at a higher rate than male applicants. </p>
<p>There are fewer female applicants to tech schools, but those who apply tend to be strong contenders – there are fewer female applicants in the left tail of the applicant pool.</p>
<p>Well, at the risk of igniting a firestorm, if MIT truly did not practice gender-based affirmative action because the women who apply are more qualified than men in the first place (hence, a selection effect), then MIT could prove that once and for all by implementing an admissions process that was entirely gender-blind. That is, all applicants would be instructed to submit admissions packets that reference themselves only by an anonymous identifying number rather than by name, including removal of all gender-specific pronouns from essays and LOR’s. Gender-specific EC’s such as football or cheerleading would obviously be trickier, but I suspect that MIT could probably conceive of an ingenious solution for that (i.e. perhaps with a 2-stage admissions process where in the first stage, adcom officers would only be allowed to see that somebody participated in an unspecified EC and then have to make a conditional accept/reject decision right then and there, and only afterwards, in stage 2, could they see whether that EC was either football or cheerleading and hence whether the applicant was male or female. If they now want to change their admissions decision after stage 2, they better have a good reason why.} MIT could implement the same policy for race-based affirmative action (which, let’s face it, MIT surely runs). MIT being MIT, I’m sure that they could develop a context-specific software algorithm that could blind all applications automatically before they reach the adcoms’ desks. {After all, MIT produces countless ingenious pieces of software code every year, so why not this?}</p>
<p>Lest anybody take this to be an outrageous proposal, I would point out that such a blinded admissions policy is not dissimilar to the blinded peer review process used by academic journals that many MIT students will come to know. The goal of blinded peer review is to reduce bias. So if blinding is good enough for academic journals, shouldn’t it also be good enough for the admissions process? </p>
<p>That would serve the salutary purpose of taking away the excuses of all those men who persist in thinking that some women got into MIT just because of affirmative action.</p>
<p>I would say yes.</p>
<p>I think that any woman applying to a top engineering school is coveted more than a male.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That’s probably true. The same way that any man applying to a top liberal arts college is coveted more than a female. These days, the average ratio of women to men in liberal arts colleges is 60:40.</p>
<p>Liberal arts colleges may covet qualified men, but they generally don’t lower their admissions standards to admit them. If they did, that ratio would be closer to 50:50. What evidence do you have that a top engineering school would lower its admissions standards to admit women?</p>
<p>My daughter was the only student accepted to MIT from her high school among a group of 12 that applied in 2007, all boys. Actually, the only people who made comments like, “It probably helped that she’s female, don’t you think?” were men and women of my own generation. No student at her school was really surprised at that outcome. She graduated with a major award from MIT’s physics department and is now in a Ph.D. program in physics at Harvard, where she joined a research group one year early. I wonder when those sorts of comments will stop coming from the AARP set?</p>
<p>
A noble goal, indeed.</p>
<p>Of course, it all depends on the meaning of “significant.” Reasonable people may differ.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Um, I think there’s lots of evidence that they DO lower their admissions standards for men (i.e., lower test scores and GPAs – not dramatically lower, but lower). And in some cases the decision may be being made NOT to lower standards enough to get a 50-50 class, which might involve dramatic differences, if one can achieve 55-45 with only modest differences. 60-40 seems to be a kind of tipping point: if males fall below 40%, you start losing both male and female applicants in large numbers, and yields plummet.</p>
<p>One of the challenges for MIT – and one of the indications that what’s happening isn’t a simple question of holding women to a lower standard – is that MIT’s yield for women accepted is 10% lower than its yield for men. Of course, that means that MIT has to accept more women to get into the ballpark of equality. But it’s also an indication that the women MIT accepts have other attractive options. In the case of MIT, that generally means the Ivy League or Stanford, or a competitive merit scholarship to a top public university – which in turn means that these women are succeeding even in contexts in which they tend to be penalized rather than helped on account of their gender.</p>
<p>Just like the other top schools, I suspect MIT gets at least 5000-6000 qualified applicants who can do the work. Having fewer female applicants in the pool helps the females since MIT is aiming for gender parity. It does not mean that MIT is not rejecting a bunch of qualified female applicants too. They only have a 1000 seats available with 6000 applicants who can hack it at MIT and a bunch get rejected as part of the elimination process.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>i hope soon.</p>