| One of the most lamentable trends in modern academia is the desire to encourage non-academic diversity while simultaneously promoting a norm of few drop-outs. The result is inevitably the lowering of minimum academic standards and the unwillingness to fail students.
Thus, top schools which have a reputation for selecting good students can exploit their reputation by accepting less academically qualified admits -- especially those below the 25th percentile, whose scores are never reported in the common datasets -- in effect, "blessing" academically weaker students who make it through the program. Conversely, the US News style ratings which penalize schools for having low graduation rates actually damage lesser known schools with the cojones to maintain high standards and simply flunk out students who don't make the cut. Caltech's rank has suffered from this rating bias as well as the tendency to rank SAT scores by using the median and not the average (not counting the post 1994 recentering which compressed SAT scores at the high end, thus rendering fine distinctions less meaningful). It is almost certainly true that students (say 60th percentile) at a good state school would be able to graduate with at least a 3.0 from HYPS in some (carefully selected) majors if admitted. The same is not true for Caltech because of its core.
Nonetheless, Caltech soldiers on, and has tended to limit its inevitable compromises at a time when its "style" is out of fashion. |