<p>Akdaddy- I think you're missing the point--MIT admits to using affirmative action. It's fair to agree that you can't account for every single increased percentage point, but MIT's female acceptance rate is significantly higher than Caltech's, which fits with MIT's use of AA.</p>
<p>In addition, please do not take this personally. No one is making any comments about the "ultimate quality of the pool". There are so many qualified applicants to MIT that even with affirmative action I doubt the "quality of the pool" suffers much, if it all. No one is saying your daughter wouldn't get in if she were male.</p>
<p>I am simply saying that MIT is not a pure meritocracy, Caltech is, and I am proud of Caltech for it.</p>
<p>akdaddy- It does seem simplistic and is overly simplistic. But I was drawing to the fact that that ratio could probably have other factors as well. Sorry if I didn't elucidate clearly enough. I'm sure MIT's pool is filled with many extremely qualified applicants. It's just the sheer number that could (stress could, not does) dilute the quality of the pool but the presence of qualified people is definitely not lacking. The quality of females admitted...I really have no comment because I have no clue. </p>
<p>Ben- But if nobody ever saw an application and its opposite gender clone, there could also be variations simply because admission officers could react differently. For some schools that take the applications into a committee to discuss results, it matters how much your admission officer argues for you. So, how well your admission officer takes your application and how well he/she argues could also be a factor.</p>
<p>lizzardfire- I am not missing the point, I am asking the question in a different way. MIT admits to AA- agreed I have also read this. Who exactly is targeted for AA at MIT? Is it everyone but white/asian males? I see no statistics that quantifies the situation. </p>
<p>Is it not odd that Caltech admits females at a rate 62% higher than males? What is it that produces this statistic? If it is not AA as you say, why couldn't it be 30% or 90%. Or a bigger stretch, 0% or 162%? It is simplistic to dismiss this situation with the wave of the hand of AA.</p>
<p>I'm not dismissing the probability that discrepancy in statistics could be due to AA. I'm just saying there could be other contributing factors.
As Ben pointed out in a previous post, we can't be entirely sure of the impact that AA has unless we conduct an experiment with many constants that I believe would impede on the accuracy of the outcome.</p>
<p>Akdaddy, I don't have any race-based statistics about MIT's admission, so I can't honestly say. I do know that MIT specifically targets women and three groups of minorities- African-American, Hispanic, and Native-American.</p>
<p>To answer your question, no, I don't really think it's "odd". As you've frequently mentioned, the numbers themselves are not conclusive. I never said, MIT admits girls at a 162% higher rate than guys so they MUST BE USING AA. It is strongly suggestive; however, that they are. Another example of evidence for affirmative action is that MIT admit rates remain very close to 50/50 (that is, half of admits are male and half are female) year after year... the composition of Caltech's classes are much more closely linked to the ratio of applied students than MIT's. </p>
<p>It wouldn't matter that much to me if Caltech was closer to 90% and MIT was closer to 120%... why? Because Caltech does not practice affirmative action, and MIT does. That's the point.</p>
<p>akdaddy,
One reason I've heard in the past (and find vary believable) for the larger percentage of women admitted at both MIT and Caltech is that women are much more likely to self-select than men. I'm pretty sure I've heard admissions officers say before that the female application pool tends to be stronger as a whole than the male application pool. Coupled with the fact that the female application pool is much smaller, the ratio of admits to applications is going to be much higher for women than that for men.</p>
<p>Which would imply that AA is not used for female applicants. That is my point. How do you know MIT specificly targets women for AA? Is it because more of them choose to go there rather than Caltech? There is a difference between recruiting and AA. Since niether you or I know the details of the process, I am only asking that you don't claim that AA for women is a fact.</p>
<p>
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How do you know MIT specificly targets women for AA?
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</p>
<p>MIT has not been bashful about saying that one of its institutional goals is to enroll more women. It takes definite, deliberate (that is "affirmative") action to make sure lots of young women apply. </p>
<p>It may or may not have reconfigured its application review process to </p>
<p>a) avoid favoring men, or even to </p>
<p>b) emphasize characteristics that women applicants are more likely to have, </p>
<p>but that is more debatable. It's plain enough that each year both men and women are admitted to MIT, and admitted to Caltech. MIT very openly says it is in favor of affirmative action </p>
<p>as it defines that term, and it has different admission results from Caltech. Cause and effect is still debatable here, and I'm confident enough that persons admitted to either college are in all cases highly qualified college applicants, but it may be that the difference in percentages of women at Caltech as contrasted with MIT is a result of consciously different admission policies at each college.</p>
<p>
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Since niether you or I know the details of the process, I am only asking that you don't claim that AA for women is a fact.
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</p>
<p>For many people the strongest piece of evidence that there is attention to gender, as lizzard said above, is that the admit pool at MIT (before any recruiting of admits takes place) consistently rolls out to almost exactly 50/50, despite persistent variance in the applicant pool. That would be extremely unlikely to come about through a process which does not take gender into account -- and indeed, it is not a trait observed at Caltech.</p>
<p>Since admissions is by nature a secretive business, these kinds of inferences are, alas, the best we have.</p>
<p>tokenadult, as I have mentioned to Ben Golub on the MIT threads, I am not convinced that citing Tech articles from 1986 (the date on your first citation) is a good support for arguments about current-day admissions processes.</p>
<p>Recruitment and encouragement do not equal AA. MIT clearly puts effort into recruiting QUALIFIED women and minorities. There are two MIT engineering students in our high school today, who are traveling the country to encourage women to pursue engineering as a career regardless of the schools they are interested in. This might not be so unusual except for the fact we live quite literally in the middle of nowhere Alaska. Traveling to tiny remote communities shows a commitment to diversity. No other top tech school has, to my knowledge, done anything like this in our area. Bonus- it's far warmer here today than in Boston! Proactive support for students not traditionally drawn or supported in technical fields is a far cry from the traditional meaning and intent of AA.</p>
<p>akdaddy -- you tell a plausible story. It's better recruiting at the applicant level that increases the number of women and other minorities applying, and then admissions can be closer to fair. Unfortunately, this story seems to have nothing to do with the facts.</p>
<p>MIT's</a> applicant pool continues to split 73% men/27% women, almost exactly like Caltech's. So the recruitment and encouragement must not be working all that well. Most of the engineering still seems to be done in the admissions phase, and that's good old classic AA.</p>
<p>
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tokenadult, as I have mentioned to Ben Golub on the MIT threads, I am not convinced that citing Tech articles from 1986 (the date on your first citation) is a good support for arguments about current-day admissions processes.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I agree with you that the article from MIT that I Googled up is not the most recent, but is there a more recent article with a contrary factual statement from a knowledgeable source?</p>
<p>Why is it so hard for MIT proponents in this discussion to admit MIT practices AA? It is a good thing! Given that all the accepted students are qualified, and that is something everybody seems to agree in this discussion, I don’t see any problem with the admissions engineering the Caltech advocates in this discussion criticize.</p>
<p>A pure merit based system is in my opinion unattainable and, from a market point of view, undesirable. It is unattainable because there are no reliable metrics to rank the applicants from 1 to N. I would also find a pure merit based system undesirable because as a consumer of an expensive higher education (in my case as a parent) I would expect for my son or daughter opportunities to meet as many people as different from them as possible, and this includes girls and minorities. Again, the premise for this argument is the assumption that everybody that gets accepted to a school that uses AA, in this case MIT, is cable of doing the job, taking advantage of the opportunities the school offers, and will contribute something unique and valuable to the community.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of respect for the way Caltech chooses its incoming class; after all, my son is currently a student :-). I just don’t agree with the people that think that Caltech's is a better admissions system. It is does a great job given the type of institution they are.</p>
<p>I believe that the freshman admission policy of Caltech and MIT reflect their own character. Caltech chose to be a small highly selective institution and thus need to overcome its lack of quantity by constantly better its quality. The small size gives the institute its collegiality ,a supportive enviornment and its creative atmosphere. The small and highly selective incoming freshman body also allow Caltech to require rigourous core curriculum through which advance instructions are built on. I suspect that one of the founding fathers, Noyes, who was the acting president of MIT prior to his joining Caltech envisioning a better institute of technology thought this through. Caltech simply can not afford preferential treatment in its freshman admission.</p>
<p>artiesdad -- that's a cogent observation. Affirmative action is good in many ways, as you described. It would be bizarre if you could get all the benefits without any sacrifice. So the process pays attention to what color your skin is (for example) -- that's part of the cost. It seems hard for some proponents of MIT-style admissions to admit this because it makes the process seem less perfect, and obviously the process must be perfect in every way.</p>
<p>Newton's laws are "perfect in every way." Okay, they aren't <em>perfect</em> perfect, but in effective terms, they are perfect. Affirmative action results in a "perfect" 50/50 ratio, so in some sense it might be considered perfect. Much of the time, engineers can afford to be religious about certain things. It seems to work for MIT; at the very least it achieves their goals. Perfect enough is perfect.</p>
<p>IMO, the situation is somewhat different in cutting-edge science. You blindly fumble around, going many years employing assumptions which could turn out to be wrong. Scientists have to be constantly questioning whether their ideas regarding dark matter, or cosmology, or string theory, are actually true. Some ideas just aren't perfect enough to be considered perfect.</p>
<p>In my mind, MIT can set its own priorities. If I happen to be admitted to MIT and go there, I know I'll have amazing experiences there; if I don't go there, it will still be OK. I don't feel very religiously either way regarding AA. Nevertheless, I have to wonder how safe it is, at this point, to consider AA an "effectively perfect" solution.</p>