Quote:
Correlation does not imply causation unless all other factors are ruled out.
Most applicants don't even consider a school's admissions policies on whether they matriculate into the university or not. Instead, they think about the student life there. Many of them have heard about the substantial number of discontent students there - as well as the heavy workloads that stress students out. The school must resort to meritocratic admissions becasue its workload is an intense one that not many students can handle. Now, is this workload the reason why Axlines decline their scholarships? We don't know. Some of them may be confident in handling the Caltech material, while some of them may not be so confident. Caltech's curriculum isn't the most flexible curriculum, and it may be that the Axlines desire more flexible curriculums.
It's not Caltech's admissions policies that Caltech prides itself on. It's the research, the rigor, the core, the honor code, the science. The rigor and the core demand a strictly meritocratic admissions policy.
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I agree, but however you want to call it, at the end of the day, what Caltech has to offer is, for whatever reason, not appealing to the majority of its admittees, and is evidently
really not appealing to its scholarship winners. You talk about rigor, you talk about the demands of the core, you talk about science, you talk about all that stuff, and I agree that those are Caltech's core competencies. But again, for whatever reason, a lot of admittees apparently find other schools more appealing.
You talk about scholarship winners perhaps shying away from Caltech because of the workload. Well, first off, I would argue that the mere fact that you got a scholarship serves as a signal that you are probably one of the stronger admittees in the class. Hence, I think that's a pretty good sign that you can handle the rigor of Caltech, at least more so than the average Caltech admittee who didn't get a scholarship.. A more likely interpretation is that these top admittees just
don't want to handle the rigor, and would rather go elsewhere. There's a big difference between "can't", and "don't want to". Those top admittees tend to have more options (i.e. getting into some or all of HYPSM) compared to the average Caltech admittee.
I'm quite certain that there are some people who chose Caltech simply because it was the best school among the peer group of HYPSMC that they got into, and that they'd rather be going to one of the other ones but just didn't get in. Note, I'm not saying that a lot of students are like this, but there must be some. And were it not for these students, the Caltech yield rate of 41% would be even lower than it is.
But anyway, the point is that whatever the core tenets of Caltech are, evidently they are not consonant with what
even the majority of its own admittees really want. Hence, Caltech is standing for something that does not seem to have a tremendous amount of demand. It reminds me of numerous infamous cases in business history where firms persist in selling products with features that customers don't really want, and yet insisting that customers
should want those features. For example, I seem to recall how BMW persisted in refusing to sell cars with cup-holders even though customers told the company again and again that they wanted them, because BMW engineers insisted that customers should not want cupholders.