You know, I actually agree. MIT has more students on both sides of the distribution due to its size. (And if worse comes to worst you can always major in humanities there:)
Yet still, they make a good case for why the tests are useful to them - and some of these reasons would definitely hold for Caltech. You can’t rely on self-selection alone. Good read above.
But this is UChicago thread. I should probably bow out before the old-timers get upset with me. Again 
Or not. Many kids focus on STEM because they are wholly ill-equipped to deal with humanities. For various reasons. Intellectual arrogance/insecurity being just one.
Look at all those arrogant, insecure kids!
https://registrar.mit.edu/stats-reports/majors-count
The simple fact is that no one goes into MIT intending to major in humanities. It just is not done.
But a few people every year end up doing just that (see numbers at link above). Some, I am sure, because they found their genuine passion (contrary to popular belief, MIT has very strong humanities offerings). Others, because they found MIT STEM curriculum a lot harder than expected. You can peruse MIT Admissions blogs for some of their stories.
Yes, and beyond the statistical analysis, I think super small class size makes Caltech an even more unique flavor. There are probably more students who prefer a medium-small-to-medium-sized school over a very small or very large one.
Given the very low admit rates at both, and the similarities, there are probably a number of students who would be thrilled to get into either and would apply to both if allowed…but Caltech’s size might play a role if you can only choose one for EA. (My ‘23 scratched Caltech from the list due to size.)
Though there are likely also a number of students who prefer Caltech’s weather and/or are CA students who prefer to be closer to home.
I am very curious to see the impact on applications this year given MIT’s return to test-required and Caltech’s move to REA.
I was referring to their parents/families. 
They didn’t say they “need” the tests. They said the tests are helpful in admitting students from schools with less rigorous course offerings…which tend to be applicants who are URM, low income, and/or rural. If you have not only a 5 on Calc BC but also an A in MVC and LA, they don’t really need to know your SAT score to know you can handle the GIR. But if your school doesn’t have AP or IB math, the SAT gives them confidence you can swim, not sink.
Right. What’s Caltech’s solution to this? Self-selection?
MIT has a big emphasis on the humanities and part of their course of study. They look for kids who value both but intend to focus on STEM for their major and likely career.
In his 2.5 years there DS took enough philosophy courses for a minor (and their philosophy department is top-notch).
But it’s really funny when I am being chased around by some here for stating the obvious: all else being equal, it is easier to graduate as an English major than as an engineer.
I think Caltech’s policy is more a reflection of regional circumstances, policy, and politics. CA has been an anti-testing hub for a while. They have also been highly-impacted by test cancellations. From what I can tell, about 25% of Caltech is from CA? But more like 17% for MIT.
Both schools can admit a class of excellent quality with test blind or test optional. But MIT’s reasoning was that they may miss some excellent students who don’t have access to AP/IB/DE coursework in sciences and math. Caltech probably also believes their policy increases equity. Allowing students who cannot afford tutors or repeated testing to not be judged by a single, high-stakes test. I am more convinced but MIT’s reasoning but I can understand the other argument. I may be biased having a kid who tests well without extensive and expensive prep.
I was a Theater Major…and I 100% agree. We always said of our school that the hardest part was getting in…unless you were majoring in sciences or maths…in which case, yeah, it was hard!
I do think there is something to be discussed about anti-intellectualism and a growing sense that college is career training and all about ROI and a degree is a piece of paper to be obtained in the most efficient way possible.
There are definitely some strong kids in STEM who really don’t want to be bothered to read or reflect on humanities based topics. And I don’t have an issue with that. It takes all types to make the world turn ‘round.
But I don’t think that is the type that MIT is primarily attracting or trying to select. They are quite upfront about their emphasis on and requirements in the humanities.
Are you suggesting that mathematics or thermodynamics are anti-intellectual topics? Or that a pure mathematics degree, for example, is career training?
Ah yes! But plenty of humanities students that stretch themselves intellectually by reading and reflecting on quantum physics among other STEM topics.
Wow is all I can say.
I think I was pretty clear that there are STEM kids who enjoy intellectual pursuits and appreciate the humanities.
I was actually arguing the opposite while conceding that there are those who are focused on career training and there is a growing trend in our society to view college in terms of ROI. This is not unique to STEM majors…you will find amongst business (and business-adjacent) majors as well. I think it comes up more with STEM-focused kids (and their families) because a kid who is majoring in medieval literature or art history is probably not focused on career training and ROI…if they are, they aren’t doing a very good job at it!
Also, to make it even clearer where I am coming from… my ‘23 is a future computer science major but one who is as interested in discussing the ethics of AI as she is in the mechanics of programming. And who is considering minoring in writing. Her list was topped by places, like U Chicago, where intellectualism is valued, and MIT where humanities is baked into the rigorous STEM curriculum.
Going back to your subtle dig at humanities people, there absolutely are ones who enjoy learning about physics…I consider myself one. Again, you find a greater concentration of them at certain colleges. I went to a university that prides itself on getting physicists and poets to meet, mix, and discuss ideas.
The triumphalism of science, scientists and the scientific method are hardly new things in the world. Seventy-five years ago C.P. Snow spelled it out and demonstrated it personally in a famous essay called “The Two Cultures,” to which the literary critic F.R. Leavis made a withering rejoinder exposing Snow’s complacency and pretensions.
We are seeing something like that enacted on this board, though Snow’s great theme has returned, as Marx predicted of all human actions, more as farce than as serious human conflict. The scientists, being Supermen of the academic world, are held up by The Vulcan as so omnicompetent that while they of course center their lives on science for that very reason, they can also make a sort of hobby of humanities and of course run rings around the plodders who think those are the studies of ultimate importance. If the science proves too hard for any would-be scientist he can always retreat to this lesser place suitable for the failures, the unambitious, the kids who are going nowhere.
One of the reasons Chicago undergrad edcation is and has long been a lightning rod in these culture wars is that it aspires to cut across this divide. That’s what the Core is all about. The ideal at the U of C is for the humanities not to be an afterthought for STEM kids, nor for courses in science and math to be gut courses for the non-STEM. The ideal of a liberal education is to know enough and have enough imagination to envision the world from multiple perspectives, as a whole person. Snow had the right idea, even if he himself was a poor specimen.
I think of my old apartment mate, a math prodigy from his earliest days who went on to have a very distinguished mathematical career. HIs favorite course at Chicago, whose readings he internalized and which formed his conception of the greater world outside his mathematical studies, was Karl Weintraub’s History of Western Civilization. In the same spirit Paul Alivasatos, a Chicago undergrad who became a distinguished chemist, nearly majored in the Humanities and took the bare minimum of undergraduate courses in Chemistry. It is not surprising that he recently became the President of the University of Chicago.
An alert and inquiring mind is a humble one, often not an easily categorizable one. I would respect the grizzled STEM veterans who visit our board rather more if they could find a way to imagine some other form of education than their own preferred models.
«Both at the time and since, FR Leavis’s lecture critiquing of CP Snow’s “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution” was and has remained a byword for excess – too personal, too dismissive, too rude, too Leavis. Whatever view they have taken of the limitations and confusions of Snow’s original contentions – and Trilling, among others, itemised a good many – commentators on this celebrated or notorious “exchange” (if it can be called that: there was little real give and even less take) have largely concurred in finding the style and address of Leavis’s scathing criticism to be self-defeating. Aldous Huxley denounced it as “violent and ill-mannered”, disfigured by its “one-track moralistic literarism”. Even reviewers sympathetic to some of Leavis’s criticisms recoiled: “Here is pure hysteria.”»
Ah, good stuff, good stuff. And thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we can now bicker and bask in each other’s one-track moralistic literarism in real time!
So thanks, marlowe1, contrary to how it might seem I take great pleasure in reading your contributions. 
The Chicago core does allow easier math and science courses for non majors, similar to the core or general education requirements at most other colleges (but not MIT).
http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/mathematicalsciencescore/
http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/biologicalsciencescore/
http://collegecatalog.uchicago.edu/thecollege/physicalsciences/
Thanks for bringing up that piece, old vulture. It is well worth reading. Your quotations do, however, give the wrong impression of its gist. In fact it is a very positive reappraisal of Leavis’s critique, both as to its substantive points and the quality of the writing. Those dismissive remarks about its hysteria, excessiveness and unfairness are brought up only to demonstrate the immediate response, one which this commenter believes to have been superseded over time by greater appreciation. As he rather unkindly says, the reputation of both Snow and Leavis declined following their deaths around 1980. However, Snow’s has never come back; Leavis’s has.
What I principally remember of both sides of this monumental exchange was the pedestrian flabbiness of Snow’s prose style, the turgid confidence with which he voiced the complacent banalities of the time - the march of science creating an ever better world - and accused all those humanists who dared not get on the bandwagon as retrograde luddites soon to disappear from history. Leavis’s response to this was some of the most crackling energetic and, yes, sarcastic prose ever written, worthy of Swift himself. To me as an aspiring student of literature it was thrilling. Consider the opening sentence: “If confidence in oneself as a master-mind, qualified by capacity, insight and knowledge to pronounce authoritatively on the frightening problems of our civilization, is genius, then there can be no doubt about Sir Charles Snow’s.”
That’s red meat in its own right, but it just gets better after that. In essence, as this piece accurately describes it, the purpose here does, however, go far beyond knocking the pomposity and mediocrity of a single man. Leavis is truly fighting to preserve the values of an older culture, one in which the measure of value is to be found in the heart and soul of individuals grappling with the problems of life and society. You could call this literary culture, but it is more than that. One last quotation from the review itself:
Snow had presented the contrast between the scientific and literary cultures as being in part about the different responses to the industrial and technological revolutions. While the natural Luddites merely rail, the scientists get on with the business of improving the material conditions of life. The existence of the individual, Snow had added, expansively, ends in death and may therefore be considered tragic, but progress represents the onward sweep of humanity collectively: as individuals, “each of us dies alone,” but “there is social hope.” Yet what, Leavis asks pressingly, “is the ‘social hope’ that transcends, cancels, or makes indifferent the inescapable tragic condition of each individual?” Where is such hope to be found except in the lives lived by particular persons?