<p>I was being sarcastic about the gem since I thought it was a horrible thing to say to a rejected applicant, i.e., hey there were five of you I could have chosen from.</p>
<p>If they are considering most applicants as being equal and one can displace another, what is stopping the adcoms from filling an entire class with either boys or girls? To the neutral observer who only looks at those who have shown up, it would look like Caltech admitted only 32% girls in 2011. Looking at the numbers here, we can see they admitted 272 but only 80+ showed up on campus.</p>