If I recall correctly Moderna CEO went to undergraduate in France.
This is the interesting part, take CalTech for example. The admission data shows high percentage of international students. I am curious how CalTech review the application from that pool? Is it then safe to say, by merits?
In the US (unlike in some other countries), we donāt have a standardized way, except in a few special cases, to judge academic merits above some increasingly lower threshold. Moreover, with so many applicants, admission processes at most colleges have little involvement by the faculty. Most AOs are simply not equipped to judge academic merits beyond a few basics.
Costs are much less in other countries. Companies can get away with paying less overseas. That isnāt indicative of a talent gap, thatās a problem with corporate greed.
So without considering the pay disparities to other countries, we do have kids studying in those fields and able to design better products. Do they spend their important development time, high school, colleges to study in STEM fields end up finding themselves inferior to students in STEM fields in other countries (especially with high tuitions)
Chips (EE), Camera(Physics), Display(Materials)ā¦ does that mean our kids in these fields even with better ability trying harder to get into competitive institutes here only to find out those fields are dominant by engineers in other countries
Most AOs donāt have a STEM background so itās hard for them to evaluate the quality or strength of STEM related achievements. Hence the reliance on 3rd party validation (example: applicant winning a prestigious award, publishing in a reputable journal, etc).
Iām not sure I understand what you just wrote and suspect that we are talking in circles. The entire point of your thread, and my response, is consideration of those āother thingsā you donāt think should be considered. The things Iām talking about, and about which you have expressed concern, are not readily, if at all, quantifiable. Otherwise, weād be in agreement.
At any rate, Iāve seen nothing to cause me concern about your theory that weāre watering down our domestic STEM talent pool because of US college/university admissions practices; and some of the experienced folks in this thread seem to suggest the same POV.
The whole iPhone design team, and itās large, is in CA. Manufacturing is all done overseas for cost reasons. My son works for a startup founded by engineers and designers that were very high up at Apple. He knows the ins and outs of the iPhone team well.
Thereās talent all over the world. Pointing out that something interesting and innovative was done elsewhere doesnāt mean we are lacking here.
While the CEO certainly deserves a lot of credit for Modernaās success, two of the key founders were Robert Langer out of MIT (born in Albany), and Noubar Afeyan, a person from Armenia who studied at MIT.
Between the two, they have founded literally dozens of successful companies, mostly in biotech. Itās just another example of combining talent to innovate, something the USA does extremely well.
AOs do know how to read essays, and can be moved by them. Thatās why the stories these essays convey often have bigger impact than actual achievements.
In my circle, students graduating in CS and EE in the US are going to lucrative start ups, and not looking to do R&D for the big corporations that outsource to other countries.
Yes, of course.
By scientists who attended universities ranked in the hundreds (globally), depending on which ranking you consult. Also, they are members of an ethnic minority group that faces unfriendly discrimination there.
And that is how toxic work environments are born.
I think you are close to hitting the nail on the head about AOs. The standardized tests here are too easy to differentiate between good and great STEM students. Too much grade inflation. So the AOs look at prestigious awards. However, such awards are strongly correlated with how rich the students taking them are. Does anyone really expect the poorer students to fly around the country to compete, or even knew about these competitions?
As someone who works in STEM at a T10, I donāt care whether a kid has such awards. How much can the results of competitions where only a fraction of the applicants competed actually tell me? But with inflated GPA and poor standardized testing, I guess the AOs do have to look at something. And if those AOs are also looking for future donorsā¦
Perhaps the students couldnāt handle the rigor in STEM will weed out anyway.
Even the ones that arenāt weeded out sort once on the job. Engineering is very meritocratic. Those with higher horsepower get higher horsepower jobs. Thereās little correlation to where they went to school.
Unless I missed it, I donāt think anyoneās explicitly mentioned the issue of inequality. A purely merit-based system makes the most sense when everyone has had roughly the same degree of opportunity. If social inequality is greater in the US than in Europe (I assume it is, but someone please correct me if Iām wrong), than it makes more sense for US colleges to take into account that some applicants are starting life many steps behind their peers and that their lesser accomplishments are due more to lack of opportunity than to lack of talent. The more egalitarian a country is, the more reasonable it is (to me at least) to base admission decisions on objective factors like test scores.
In case anyone has not noticed, take note of the numbers: University of Toronto has about 10-11 times the number of undergraduates as a prestige-private university in the US, while Canada has a national population of about 1/9 that of the US.
What it means is that University of Toronto is much less likely to have to contend with the problem of having more applicants whose typical college admission measures are at the ceiling than it can admit, while a prestige private in the US needs to find some way of distinguishing between that excess number of applicants. Even if the US prestige private wants to admit the subset with the highest predicted academic strength, it needs to do some sort of subjective evaluation of the applicants, since the typical college admission measures are insufficient due to the low (for those colleges) ceilings.
Of course, many of the students who attend and graduate from the US prestige private colleges go on to Wall Street where the money is, not science or engineering careers.
I agree. Not only are lower income students unable to compete for the prestigious awards that get students into the top colleges. Even if they could, they wouldnāt do as well as they should without the educational advantages of the well-off. There certainly isnāt an easy fix for that. But for STEM subjects, using standardized test scores still seems better than basing admission on essay writing and ECs.
It seems like many colleges in the US (mostly private ones) also take into account that some applicants are starting life many steps ahead of their peers. Itās called legacy admissions and itās a practice I have never come across in Europe. Sometimes I feel like elite private colleges in the US are talking out both sides of their mouths. Itās worth asking ourselves if holistic admissions is a practice that helps reduce inequality or rather enshrine it.