sakky

Yep, I think that is quite the dagger pointed at the heart of Caltech. It doesn't really matter who is accepted into a particular school. It only matters who chooses to matriculate . You can be as meritocratic as you want in your admissions, but as long as the majority (59%) of your admittees choose to go elsewhere for reasons of self-selection, then your resulting student body is effectively unmeritocratic.

As stated above, presumably Caltech only gives out Axline (and if you keep reading the pdf, President's) Scholarships to its best admittees. Yet even the majority of them choose to go elsewhere. In fact, the yield of these particular scholarship students is even lower than the overall Caltech yield.

I think a fair interpretation is that the very best applicants who get into Caltech (and hence, are also offered the scholarships) usually choose not to go, instead opting for MIT, Harvard, or Stanford, as can be seen in the pdf. Whereas, Caltech enjoys its highest yield probably amongst those students who get into Caltech but who couldn't get into MIT, Harvard, or Stanford, perhaps because Caltech admissions are more 'meritocratic' which gives certain students a better chance of getting into Caltech. Hence, perhaps the top students at MIT/Stanford/Harvard are more meritocratic than the top students at Caltech (because, again, we're talking about those students who turned down Caltech scholarships). But the median Caltech students are more meritocratic.


The corollary to that is analyzing what students want. The majority of Caltech applicants doesn't really seem to attend a purely meritocratic school. It is an inescapable fact that the majority (59%) of al admittees to Caltech choose not to go, and an even stronger majority of scholarship-offered admittees choose not to go. The implication to that is that a lot of students choose Caltech only because it was the best school they got into (or could afford), but they would still have preferred to go elsewhere. My brother went to Caltech on a President's Scholarship, and he freely admits that he chose Caltech over other schools just for the money. I am fairly sure that there are a lot of Caltech students who would rather be going to the 'less meritocratic' HYPSM, but just didn't get in (or couldn't afford it). On the other hand, I rarely hear of the converse - somebody at HYPSM who would rather be at Caltech.

But the point is this. Caltech argues that its great strength is its purely meritocratic system. Yet it seems to me that that's not what even the majority of its own admittees want. The majority of Caltech admittees choose to go to other peer schools, and I suspect that many more would like to. Or, in other words, Harvard is clearly not purely meritocratic. But that hasn't stopped Harvard from yielding about 83% of its admittees - far and away the highest yield among non-specialized schools (i.e. not counting academies). In other words, it seems to me that Caltech is sticking to a principle that not even many of its applicants really want.