<p>From a recent Caltech graduate:</p>
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[quote]
Another sore point is pre-meds. The Admissions office sent me a whole packet on how pre-meds at Tech have all these opportunities, etc, and how pre-meds would do awesome at Tech. Which I think is ********. Sure, the opportunities exist. There are plenty of volunteer opportunities at the nearby hospital, and you can definitely be involved in great research. However, from what I remember about classes, I have no idea how the pre-meds had any free time to spare for volunteering and all the other things you have to do as a pre-med. And let's face it, med school applications are about grades. How many pre-meds do you think are going to get A's in quantum physics? In linear algebra? I know several people who were pre-meds at Tech. The few that were super stars, who were extraordinarily talented, got into med school, and are doing fantastically. But I know of others who were average students and were rejected from med school, and years out from Tech are still trying to get in.</p>
<p>In summary, I wouldn't recommend going to Tech if you are dead set on being a doctor, or if you think you might be interested in humanities.
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</p>
<p>That's one student's opinion. And, continuing to indulge in your hobby of being deeply confused, you seem to be missing the distinction between "premed" and "life sciences", which turn out not to be the same. Biology was second only to physics as the most popular major among undergraduates in the class of 2006, comprising 15% of the graduating class. ( <a href="http://www.career.caltech.edu/life/plans/BS%202006%20Plans.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.career.caltech.edu/life/plans/BS%202006%20Plans.pdf</a> ). Is that what you call having virtually no overlap with schools offering life science programs?</p>
<p>I will take your failure to answer any of my points regarding yield and discrimination as a concession. :)</p>
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Of course MIT has sold out by judging people based on their colors and their chromosomes so they can have nicer looking diversity numbers, and that's shameful, no matter what the yield ends up being.
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Oh, give me a break. </p>
<p>Is the motivation really "nicer-looking diversity numbers"? Or is the motivation from a social justice perspective -- that many people in this country believe in their hearts that underrepresented groups have faced enough unfairness and discrimination for it to be reflected in their quantitative qualifications, whatever their real qualifications may be?</p>
<p>We can all argue about the means of achieving diversity for pages upon pages. We have before and I'm sure we will again. But maligning the motivation behind having such policies is just asinine. It may be repulsive to discriminate against one group for the purposes of assisting another, but it's also repulsive to sit back and watch a group beaten down by discrimination fail to get a fair shake.</p>
<p>(Also, is cellardwellar wrong to say there are few premed students at Caltech? One of the medical students in my lab said she was one of a very small number of Caltech premeds her year -- I was under the impression that she meant less than ten. Is that incorrect?)</p>
<p>I would say that allowing some minorities that may not be as qualified initially as their counter parts at MIT may not be such a disgraceful act. Ben, you have to consider that sometimes the color of your skin, may in fact come hand in hand with limited resources available to URM's. Many URM's are first generation college students whose parents may not have the education necessary to show a good example to their kids. In other words, these kids may not have the parental support that other students may have. Stuff like taking SAT classes, parents that guide the through the applications process, etc, may not be as readily available to most URMs in contrast with other people. And that's what colleges see, sat scores, and the way you present yourself through the application, some parents even write their childrens' essays. So when you take away those initial requirements for entering college, almost anybody with a strong will can be succesful. </p>
<p>-White kid " Mom, SAT's are coming up in three weeks"
-White mom "Well that's a relief, after studying for the last two years you should do quite well. I can't belief my little Patrick is going to college already. It seems like it was yesterday when I was still breast feeding you."</p>
<p>-Mexican kid "Mom, SAT's are coming up in three weeks"
-Mexican mom "SAT's? What are you talking about? We can't be spending money on that kind of crap. This will be the last time you take them. And can't you stop studying for them? the backyard is not going to clean itself"</p>
<p>Fine it may not be as accurate as the real story, but it's along those lines. So Ben, differentiating colors may not be so shameful.</p>
<p>15% of the class? Is that like 2 or 3 people? </p>
<p>haha, jk</p>
<p>Oh and yeah I dont think there's that many people pre-med. I think you have to apply early for a cross registration program and UC "something" or hospital don't know. So that probably takes away a portion of the portion (small as it is) that wants to do premed. And that thing about the grades and med school is probably true, so rule of thumb, if you want to do premed, don't go to caltech.</p>
<p>mollie --</p>
<p>Easy things first: there are on average about 10 premeds per class at Caltech (which is still 5% of the class) and nobody ever claimed Caltech was a haven for premeds. (I would certainly not advise any but the very smartest premeds to consider Caltech.) But cardweller decided to malign in one fell swoop all the life-sciences programs too. And that's just silly, because biology is soon going to be the MOST popular major at Caltech (it's already #2) and a quite large fraction of students end up being researchers at the top level of biology. So to say that Caltech has no overlap in that area with MIT or Harvard is just inane. The only difference is that Caltech tends to attract research-oriented biologists as opposed to premed ones.</p>
<p>As for the main point, I do think the motivation behind MIT's affirmative action policies is almost entirely self-serving. That is, social justice at best a very minor motivation for this project and certainly not even close to being one of its outcomes.</p>
<p>We've gone over why again and again and again. The people who benefit from affirmative action resemble the people hurt by discrimination only in being the same color. (Here I am focusing on the racial AA only.) MIT admits rich, advantaged people of color and a big reason for this is having lots of people of color to count when that's needed. MIT (in that famous</a> Supreme Court brief) explicitly considered and rejected a justice-oriented approach, saying that if they made the criterion some actual disadvantage suffered, then there would be more nonminority victims of injustice in the pool than minority ones and then we couldn't achieve the race-balancing goal we started this program for! Indeed, the brief went on to say, most of the black people who are admitted by this program are not disadvantaged and come from socioeconomic circumstances just like those of the typical nonminority applicant.</p>
<p>If MIT cared about helping the disadvantaged through affirmative action, the school would make the hard choice of giving up some of the numerical diversity obtained by admitting rich black people at higher rates, and it would use those spots to help kids who have suffered actual social injustice. MIT's explicit refusal to do this inescapably implies that MIT cares more about having nice numbers to show than actually helping people who have overcome difficult circumstances, and that's very icky.</p>
<p>Ben:</p>
<p>I am not conceding anything. Your posts on AA are so pathetic they are not worth responding to. Others have done it better than I have. Over 65% of MIT students are on financial aid, so clearly they don't just admit rich black and white kids. If your idea of the ideal college experience is a star trek convention it is clearly not very appealing to most.</p>
<p>I don't want to get into further Caltech bashing. That was not the purpose of my post. It does remain that it is a very unfriendly place for premeds and I have not seen a reasonable case of anything otherwise. Four HMS admits in 12 years with UCSD leading the list at 9 is somewhat laughable. I fully realize that not all biology majors continue to med school. It is nevertheless a major function of most biology departments and to claim otherwise is disingenious. The fact that Caltech puts its own graduates at serious disadvantage is a clear concern to many students interested in the biological sciences. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/uploads/File/premed2007.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/uploads/File/premed2007.pdf</a></p>
<p>Larch wrote:</p>
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[quote]
Many URM's are first generation college students whose parents may not have the education necessary to show a good example to their kids.
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</p>
<p>That's a charming story you tell, and that's exactly what schools that practice crude number-balancing hope you'll think. The truth is, however, that the vast majority of the URMs in question here didn't have to deal with anything like that, and are in fact just as rich and come from families just as educated as the average white applicant. (Click on the link in my previous post to read this for yourself, in a brief by MIT!) If MIT had Mollie's admirable goals in mind, then it would ACTUALLY pay attention to disadvantage as opposed to color of skin.</p>
<p>But you can see how well the program manages to trick people like you, who make the (slightly racist) assumption that minorities are naturally disadvantaged by the values of their families and so they need the help and so it's not so bad. When people see MIT's nice-looking diversity numbers, they assume that those are all victims of injustice being helped and think good thoughts about MIT. In reality most of them rode to good preschools in Lexuses just like their classmates. </p>
<p>MIT, in this respect, obviously cares about looking good, not about being good. If helping the disadvantaged were the motive, it would reject some of those black kids who don't need any extra help and focus instead on poor Eastern Europoean immigrants (for example). The problem is, those aren't conveniently color-coded, and so it's harder to wave them around at other people to show how diversity-minded you are.</p>
<p>I'm really going to have to stick up for Ben on this one. He's not anything like this (;)) in person.</p>
<p>Dinner?</p>
<p>cellardweller --</p>
<p>Cheap shots at Caltech won't get you out of being embarrassed for saying ridiculous things. You claimed Caltech's life sciences aren't a major draw, and they are. Caltech focuses on research and not premed, and the graduate admissions statistics for research biology programs for students coming out of Caltech are second to none. I don't know what your obsession with premeds is, but Caltech has a different focus. While the caricature of premeds is not completely accurate, they typically do not care about the underlying concepts as much as grades, and that's very much at odds with the spirit of Caltech.</p>
<p>For offering an education in the life sciences with research opportunities second to nobody, Caltech is unsurpassed. You tried to lie and say otherwise in post #11 and I had to set you straight. But now that's done.</p>
<p>As for AA, you yield-lovers obviously have no good response to the Jew story so you resort to personal attacks. Yield-increasing tactics aren't always good, and you have no argument to the contrary. :)</p>
<p>Nice chatting with you.</p>
<p>Reading collegeconfidential at work... I wish it weren't so :(</p>
<p>pebbles -- dinner yes. email to arrange things. and stop reading cc.</p>
<p>Well I was kind of talking from personal experience.</p>
<p>Oh and sorry to disappoint you, but I never got the lexus I asked my mom for.</p>
<p>I've got so much lint on my sweater oh man</p>
<p>mrrr? but you are sweet for defending me thanks :P</p>
<p>On the academic boot camp...</p>
<p>it might be true that the average caltech student gets more work than the average mit student, but I think people should still have enough time to pursue their personal goals, research, sports, starting a business, whatever. And yeah, its kind of stupid that Caltech gets some of the best students, then fails to adjust grades properly so as to not disable them from grad school.</p>
<p>caltech student "I got a 2.1, but I went to caltech, which means that is more difficult than other schools, I conducted some studies to see what a 2.1 at caltech would be at yale, and after doing a linear regression, it turns out that I would have gotten a 6.0 at yale, AND if I do a quadratic regression, it turns out I could have gotten an 8.0! "</p>
<p>2.1 is respectable :o</p>
<p>Ben:</p>
<p>Was it being rejected from MIT that made you so violently anti-AA?</p>
<p>Frankly I don't see any connection between you Jew story at Columbia in the early 1900's and the low yield at Caltech currently. This has nothing to do with MIT and everything to do with Caltech. Are you implying that a low yield is a desirable goal, that making life miserable for the poor souls that do enroll by not graduating large numbers of them and making it hard for those that graduate to get into professional schools are all worthy objectives? I can't see how! </p>
<p>Since over 70% of Caltech admits decided to enroll at HYPSM, by your own standards, Caltech would have sold out as well had these women and URMs matriculated at Caltech rather than preferred MIT or Harvard. It is not that Caltech does not admit women and other minorities, it does, it simply can't get them to enroll.</p>