@Calidad2020 “Girls get EXACTLY THE SAME package as a male in the same situation. So the question remains, why does Berkley and UCLA fail to attract top female engineering candidates at the same rate it attracts male engineering candidates?”
DD1 is one of these young ladies. UCB offered her a Chancellor’s and Regents, and she almost accepted it, but ended up choosing Penn. I think the difference between her and a similarly accomplished boy is that there are just very few girls who come to college with advanced math skills already well developed (single variable, multi-variable, discrete and linear algebra) who are already functional at coding in Java and Python and can compete with the strongest boys on her own, without any help, in any subject.
A boy with her accomplishments can get admitted anywhere too, but with the competition level in CS, if he were to apply to the top 20 schools, I bet he would get into 8 or 10 of them. In contrast, a girl is probably going to get into 15 or 16 of them. Just because of supply and demand. That means that, in aggregate, all schools are going to have lower yields for girls vs. boys with that level of qualifications. It isn’t really an issue specific to UCB at all.
The “thumb on the scale” that those private schools can and probably do use is for admissions, not financial aid. Female applicants are more likely to be admitted to those private schools, and therefore are likely to have more competing offers from them, than male applicants. Reread post #120.
Isn’t that true, but only trivially true? I mean, given that this is a discussion thread in which people are debating a topic, isn’t everybody constantly trying to bring the thread around to their particular agendas?
@much2learn The issue may not be specific to UCB, but given that they (and UCLA and the other UC’s) have committed to addressing it - over and over again - and can’t seem to do that, it is interesting to ask why.
In many cases, for instance, UCB should be more attractive than Penn for engineering. Except for Penn’s Digital special major, which is well regarded, or it’s pipeline to Wall Street, UCB “on paper” beats Penn in most metrics and should, for many if not most in state students, be competitive financially. (And Penn has a higher % of women in SEAS.)
A student can only go to 1 school, so, as long as a female admit is choosing a “need only” school like Penn, they are accepting exactly the same package a similar male student would be offered. But the male students are choosing UCB over Penn more than the female students are (and Penn, despite having a higher percentage of female engineering undergrads still offers and enrolls more men than women.)
So UCB is still underperforming in this metric - especially, again, given that they THEMSELVES have identified recruitment of admitted women a priority.
It is interesting. I don’t know your specific case, (and am not asking about it) but obviously, for a CA in-state student to choose Penn over a package of Chancellor or Regents and in-state tuition, they either must have gotten a very strong need-based package from Penn (and I’m pretty aware of Penn’s need based aid - it is not as generous as Harvard or MIT) or the cost of undergrad is not a concern.
A good number of CA students would not get enough need based aid from Penn to offset the in-state tuition + Chancellors or Regents. Would most chose Penn’s engineering anyway (or is she doing CAS CS?) If so, that is poor recruitment on UCB’s part. (If it is Penn CAS CS, then that is a bit of a different animal as there is no GPA requirement for the major.)
@ucbalumnus I can’t tell if you really don’t understand the terms. We are now talking about SIR/yield.
There is no better “package” at MIT or Penn or Princeton or Cornell or Columbia for admitted females than males. It is need blind/need only at those schools.
So we are looking at 2 IDENTICAL students (financially) except one is male, one is female. The offers are the same if the financials are the same. And they can only choose one.
They have both been admitted to UCB COE and MIT (or UCLA Samueli) and MIT.
Their need package would be IDENTICAL. There is NO thumb on ANY scale.
So. They have a choice. They can attend ONE school. Berkeley will cost X. MIT will cost Y. It will be the SAME X and the SAME Y for both.
The MALE student will SIR to Berkeley in that case at a higher rate than the FEMALE student. NO THUMBS (or digits of any kind!) ARE INVOLVED. See?
Now. Why do a higher % of men choose UCB over this hypothetical other “need-only” (MIT, Princeton, Yale, Penn, Cornell, Harvard, Brown, etc.) school than women.
That is the question.
Dean Sastry, in 2011 vowed to do better with diversity retention/recruitment. But still, women SIR to UCB at a lower rate. Is it due to the school’s lack of attention to the SIR yield?
I cannot tell if you are just refusing to understand how admission preferences for gender affect yield by gender, or if you really do not understand.
Once again, if MIT/etc. prefers to admit females in engineering, that means that a highly qualified female applicant is likely to see offers from MIT/etc., UCB, and UCLA, while a similarly qualified male applicant is likely to see offers from just UCB and UCLA. So it is not surprising that female yield is lower at UCB and UCLA, because some of those female admits choose MIT/etc…
@ucbalumnus So… a male applicant that is not good enough for MIT is getting into UCB? But a female that is not good enough for MIT is not getting into UCB?
That seems like it would be gender discrimination and in violation of 209, no?
I mean, if the standard is best in the world, and Stanford, UCB and MIT are considered (by some) best in the world, how can a student (regardless of gender) not be good enough for MIT or Stanford but be good enough for UCB?
And, of course, we are also hearing about Mudd and Penn as well as other schools.
So now we you are suggesting that UCB discriminates AGAINST women. That is against the law.
And, of course, as far as SIR/yield, you still have not explained why a higher % men than women would take an equal offer from UCB.
But I think you are slowly starting to unravel the mystery. UCB is accepting men that can’t even get into MIT. And then recruiting them more aggressively, and therefore juicing the SIR/yield numbers.
“UCB is accepting men that can’t even get into MIT.” Of course that’s true… Most people aren’t getting into MIT. The male valedictorian in one of my son’s high school class with a 2400 SAT did not get into MIT. That is nothing unusual…
@sevmom except, of course, if UCB is ONLY accepting women that have the stats to get into MIT but is accepting men that cannot get in MIT, that is a problem.
@ucbalumnus is subtly suggesting that MIT is accepting “less deserving” female students. His continued jabs at women students who get accepted to the most competitive engineering schools in the country are despicable, but also to be expected as we are seeing it is part of the UCB culture.
Rather than look at what the issue most likely is: poor admission metrics on the part of UCB that disqualify excellent female students for arbitrary reasons that likely are not good predictors of college success, he is trying to weigh the issue as MIT or Stanford “watering down” (aka “thumb on the scale”) for female applicants.
It is transparent and dishonest, however, as those students still perform well at the best colleges in the country, graduate at a high rate and therefore are, by definition, good candidates.
The problem is not that MIT has a “thumb on the scale” or is offering “better” (identical!) aid packages. It is that UCB has antiquated, inaccurate metrics to admit students and has poor outreach to recruit female students once accepted.
It is the willful blindness on the part of many involved in the process to see and address these two obvious issues that will keep the UC’s behind the curve on this issue for a long time.
MIT has more than enough “deserving” applicants. It doesn’t accept ANYONE that isn’t deserving. In that pool, it may very well be true that there are fewer women, because fewer women apply. If the school then wants a 50-50 class, it has to admit more women than men, not because they aren’t equally qualified, but because they have so many qualified applications that they have the luxury of choosing between them based on gender rather than merit. UCB is restricted by law from doing that but stealing the top girls from MIT by offering them more financial aid doesn’t help the overall numbers of girls in engineering at all. Most other engineering programs (like the one my daughter attends that is much more lopsided than 50-50) don’t have this luxury. They run out of qualified women before they run out of qualified men, because there are fewer women applying–they admit all the top women, all the top men, and fill in the class with whoever else meets the minimum requirements, and there’s simply more men. So once again, how do we get to the point where the pool of female applicants to engineering programs is the same size or bigger than the pool of men, as it is in other disciplines?
I’m not sure it matters that the pool of female applicants to engineering programs necessarily has to be the “same size or bigger than the pool of men” at this point. Even moving the numbers in a positive direction is a start, by getting more girls interested in math and engineering at an earlier age ,and supporting the girls that do show an interest.
No, suggesting that MIT/etc. discriminates in favor of women seeking engineering, thus giving them the edge over enrolling women in engineering over UCs, which do not.
Obviously, you refuse to be informed so that you can continue your uninformed ranting about UC. Enjoy your continued ranting.
@Calidad2020 "@ucbalumnus is subtly suggesting that MIT is accepting “less deserving” female students. "
I would not say less deserving, but I would say they are somewhat different. DD’s impression is that many of the women have some catching up to do in the hands-on CS area, but many men with good CS experience are less prepared to compete in the classroom at such a high level of rigor across a range of subjects, and to maintain the attention span/executive functioning level needed to effectively manage a CS schedule that has 20-60 hours per week of homework and projects in addition to their classes.
I don’t have the link right now, but it has come up multiple times on the forum.
The male applicants for Berkeley EECS was 4 times over the females in 2015.
Based on @ucbalumnus ‘s last post, I don’t think he’s coming back AGAIN, not at least for a while.
ucbalumnus has already addressed it multiple times before, and I think @Parentof2014grad summarized it well in post #132. There were simply fewer female applicants, and “they run out of qualified women before they run out of qualified men.”
It matters because moving people from where they are stellar to where they are less stellar is not in their interest and likely not in the interest of society either. More women in engineering may mean better designed products, but it entails losses of women from other fields and the effect of that needs to be taken into account.
