"I mean that because the vast majority of caltech students are into pure sciences and the majority of MIT students are going into engineering, academic goals differ and placement into grad school is not necessarily a good point of comparison."
You're right on that. But we could still compare Caltech physics majors vs. MIT physics majors, and so forth. So a direct comparison of so called "student quality" is not entirely out of the question. I don't think anyone would deny that PhDs are virtually required for the hard sciences, hence the need for grad school. Now this comparison would require some insane data sets which I'm not even sure exist.
simfish, since you're pretty good with statistics and stuff, do you have any data on grad school placement?
To MIT's credit though, MIT is seemingly better at Med/Business school placement (since I'm pretty sure Law isn't a big thing at MIT...).
http://www.wsjclassroomedition.com/p...ege_092503.pdf
Yeah...Caltech's Med school placement isn't really that great (~5...the other 2 are probably business dudes or something). We all know why...(if you don't...take a wild guess...).
I'm also wondering...what's with this idealistic notion about vaguely defined "institutional goals." A good college should have both successful job placement and grad/professional school placement, should it not? If it doesn't, then I don't really see how these "goals" are succeeding. We
should be able to compare tangible statistics, because how else will we say definitively that MIT/Caltech admissions is succeeding or falling short of values? And like I said before, statistics don't lie - they don't equivocate the truth.
This
might be a reason that people are highly dissatisfied with MIT admissions (and I will say to collegealum, that people are; even moreso than with Ivy League admissions) - because MIT has this notion of a vaguely defined "fit" which I think, is pretty much bs. If you're from Canada, and you have a gold medal at some International Olympiad, you are going to get into MIT. I haven't seen a counterexample to this, and this could serve as statistical evidence that yes - MIT
does look for certain "hooks" and characteristics, just like Harvard looks for all-star football players and whatnot.
However, the blogs - a perceived source of frustation as collegealum has stated - makes admissions out to be some variable "fit" factor when many of us probably don't believe that. I mean, MIT has to be consistent with its admits each year right? Most of us believe that admissions is indeed a black and white thing, for example, the Ivy Leagues always take a good number of athletes, legacies, and URMs. But for MIT to go and try and "humanize" the process, is probably an overblown thing to do and ticks off a lot of rejectees that felt some emotional "fit"/connection with the institution.
I apologize if this sounds a lot like MIT bashing - I have absolutely no such intent. I'm just trying to voice what I believe is the truth, and what can define the truth. I've honestly really enjoyed the discussion.