Einstein would disagree with you. He wasn’t particularly “well defined” at 18 and was considered well below ordinary.
Einstein probably wouldn’t be admitted with our current admission process, but I agree he would succeed anyway. What are the odds of finding an Einstein among the ordinaries?
I think if you look at Google, Twitter and Facebook, you will see very few women in positions of leadership. Thats today’s world. . Whats needed is more support for women in high tech fields. Al the women I know graduated from colleges. College is the easy part. The hard part is the actual career So be careful what you wish for your daughter, is all I can say! Its not for most, and those that are coddled, in the oh so fair gender balanced environments, are LESS able to cope with the male world at Facebook, is the problem. I hear about it all the time. This is why women start their own companies in fact! Tired of getting ranked at the bottom at Facebook!!!
. Look at the lawsuit of Tina Huang, against Twitter and read it carefully! CMU is not addressing that. I wrote to them directly about it. The gender balance thing is simply somewhat unfair to boys, who want to study engineering and now have less access to it at the top schools. I never said that girls are less qualified overall, I think they may be identically qualified. Its the number of boys who apply versus how many get in, versus the number of girls who apply and how many get in that I am apposed to, not the qualifications of the girls. They are fully qualified in most cases. I do see boys, very top math students, USAMO students, getting rejected now
when in the past, USAMO was an automatic acceptance at places like CMU and MIT in math or CS.
So I believe girls do better who go to Rose Hullman, or RPI, very male dominated undergraduate environments. And School of Mines too. The girls I know at Colorado School of Mines are so used to dealing with men, they fit right into their work environments. and do better. Thats my experience, for what its worth. I don’t have an answer about gender balance, and CMU, but I know it is not helping the girls themselves that go to CMU.
@SkepticalOfMost HP was known as a company that promoted women, especially in Boise Idaho, Corvallis Oregon and Palo Alto CA. HP cared so much about women, that they started women’s conferences, to try to retain women employees in the 1990s. I helped organize one in Fort Collins CO, and attended the Boise Idaho Conference, in 1991 or 1992. HP was highly successful company that spun into about 12 different companies. See Keysight inc which
is headquartered at the Santa Rosa CA HP location on Fountaingrove, Broadcom has semiconductor manufacturing in Fort Collins CO, in the HP building I started out in, and Agilent is still alive, as well as HP Inc and HP Enterprise.
If you owned HP stock, you would have stock in a lot of companies by now. I own it! So I have time to blog !
HP was a great company for women, ask any woman who worked there.
Most other companies do not treat women the way HP did.
So I disagree that any particular male female ratio will cause a company to do better or worse. Gender is largely a don’t care, but if any company was gender diverse, it was HP in the 1990s to present day.
Women need to get used to working with men, for most jobs in Silicon Valley. We will get there. Artificially changing the ratios hurts a lot of people. Remember that CMU accepts a large number of cash pay international students today
to make their budgets work out. I think they accept 16% international students who pay full price. Then, CMU also
has a bucket for first generation college. And buckets for race. This means that many students are shut out.
The solution would be for schools like CMU and MIT to increase the number of freshman seats.
There are >10X more applicants than spots available (at least for CMU SCS). I would guess that at least 8 out of 10 of the total applicant pool is “highly qualified” where highly qualified means test scores in the top 1%, nearly 4.0 unweighted GPA, >>4.0 weighted, large number of AP classes, etc. etc.
So how you pick the 1 out of the 8 or so that you can accept out of the highly qualified bucket?
The testing services will tell you that a small difference in score is statistically irrelevant. Something like +/-40 SAT points or +/-1pt on ACT doesn’t tell you very much when comparing student A and student B. And how do you compare the student that superscored to a small advantage after 6+ attempts vs one that took the test once or twice.
GPAs vary wildly between schools, particularly weighted GPAs that are all over the map.
So you can’t simply say that because student B had a 20pt lower SAT and a .03 pt lower weighted GPA than student A that student A is more qualified.
A lot of the discussion seems to be premised on the assumption that more qualified students were being passed over for political correctness and less qualified students were being selected. I don’t see that unqualified students are being selected. I think the adcoms have a very difficult task of picking between students with effectively equivalent quantatitive metrics.
Are they passing over qualified candidates, yes, probably 7 or 8 qualified applicants for each one that got accepted. Are they deliberately taking less qualified or unqualified applicants, no… I believe they know more about what it takes to be successful in their program since they have doing this years than most of the know-it-all parents who have at most 2 or 3 go-rounds with the process and tend to be biased heavily (iwe have the MOST competitive high school, etc).
Is it unfair, sure, they are having to pick one of 8 so it going to seem unfair to 7 people. It’s not a 100% based on quantitative metrics. Otherwise kids could just skip all the essays, etc and just retake the SAT over and over until they get that superscored 1580 and then be done with the whole process.
Each school has to pick the class that they believe will best achieve their mission and goals. I would suggest you read the GaTech admissions director’s blog. He talks a lot about how they have a mission and goals for their school/class and how they endeavor to architect an incoming class that meets their institutional goals. There were a couple of very good entries back in November on this topic.
Comparing math scores of males and females in such a narrow band does not enable an outsider or an admissions officer evaluate a highly talented STEM applicant. 75% of MIT’s accepted class scored above a 750M and an 800 Math II SAT score only puts you in the 79th percentile. On the old SAT one wrong answer dropped your score from perfect 800 to a 770. Testing is a money making business and just a necessary step for candidates able to apply to these highly selective programs, not a yardstick to differentiate one exceptional candidate from another.
http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats
https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/sat/pdf/sat-subject-tests-percentile-ranks.pdf
Admissions officers are building a living/learning community. Each university population is unique in the ways students are taught, socialize and the types of opportunities they are seeking. No one is discounting the need to have an ethnic and geographically diverse student population, so I’m very surprised that an even male/female ratio is frowned upon. As a female engineer in one of the fields with less than 15% female undergraduates (today’s data, lower in the 1980’s) raising both a girl and boys, I’m happy to see that there are campuses where our children can dive into their STEM fields and also have a balanced social experience. Let’s face at a total cost of $75k/year x 4 years, I’m paying for the educational depth and the social emotional growth. I remember the first years of engineering school with a ratio pf 7 to 1; lots of antics by a predominantly socially immature male population. UGHHHHH…
I still see what we call “the lowest common denominator” behavior when too many high school boys are together at one time. And yes, a corporate environment will not be necessarily equal, but it is drastically improved from the late 1980s when the large majority of male engineers, programmers, managers, executives, members of the board had never worked with or interacted with female counterparts in college or at work.
I just went to an admitted event session and they said that scs this yr is 50% female, and the admitted women had higher test scores and gpas than the men (both are really high ofc). I think what this means is that there are SO MANY qualified applicants that the stats remain high even when the acceptance rate for women is twice that of men- so no girls getting in are unqualified, you were admitted cause they knew you could handle cmu. HOWEVER I think until female applications catch up, scs should be 60/40 as 50/50 really rigs it against men who have just as good stats but were simply not the right gender. Due to the ridiculously low acceptance rate admission becomes somewhat of a crapshoot, and maintaining 50/50 makes the odds ever so worse for us guys.
@JonTargareyan I disagree with your logic for the 60/40. All colleges should aspire to shape their classes in as diverse a manner as possible: diversity of gender, race, ethnicity, cultural, ideological, talents and interests, etc. Gender is a small part of that, and there’s nothing wrong with trying to achieve a ratio that matches society as a whole.
@shortnuke no because then you are putting kids at a disadvantage for factors beyond their control. I agree promoting diversity is a good thing, but making the odds for girls getting in to be double that of boys is frankly a little unfair in my opinion. It’s just being taken a bit too far in my opinion. What’s needed is a more gradual increase in the female % as their application numbers also slowly climb.