collegealum314

There are a couple of other reasons why someone would turn down CalTech:

1) they have the desire and are the caliber to be a prof. in science at a top school, but they would prefer to have a liberal arts education

these people might end up going when Harvard/Princeton/Stanford turn them down.

2) as it has been said, Harvard and MIT have more name recognition, particularly among those who don't know about science...both MIT and Harvard have a little more history

3.) they want academic rigor but the firehose style of disseminating information doesn't suit them. these people might be able to learn a similar amount on their own

4.) the campus --this is more of an issue for people turning down MIT, as frankly most people think the campus and dorms are ugly.

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People that I know turning down MIT for comparable schools did so for the following reasons:
1) they would prefer to go to a liberal arts school as long as it is in the top 5
2) don't like the campus
3) don't feel it is a healthy environment (i.e., suicide rate)
4) don't like the "firehose" technique of learning
5) more prestige at Harvard, and the workload is less


I don't know anybody who turned down MIT because of who they admitted or their admissions policies.

_Lotus_

(i.e., suicide rate)

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How high is this suicide rate?

collegealum314

mollieb: But if the students today are more qualified on average than students twenty years ago, which they appear to be in terms of SAT scores (modestly) and graduation rates (less modestly), then what of all of those "unqualified" people who were let in twenty years ago under the more "meritocratic" policies? Perhaps we ought to take away their diplomas.
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how does anyone have any clue what the SAT distribution is? does anyone report the mean SAT score?

Typically, only the 25%-75% range of SAT scores is reported. This enables a school to take 25% people of the class with low scores without hurting their US News Ranking. This is how the ivies can recruit athletes, legacies, and people with quirky life stories but no brain without it hurting their rankings. Also, I'll assume that you know about the "recentering" of the SAT scores and have accounted for this. An SAT score of 1400 in 1994 is the same as an SAT score of 1470 or so in 1995. (Couldn't find the exact conversion, but I think this is accurate.)

Also, is it possible to fail out of the Sloan School? I don't think so. If Business is suddenly the #4 most popular major, could that explain the higher graduation rate?

collegealum314

(i.e., suicide rate)

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How high is this suicide rate?

Well, no one has committed suicide at MIT since 2002 apparently, but it used to be the highest in the country. About 1 undergrad a semester for 5 years in one stretch in the 90's. Certainly the reputation still remains and that might dissuade people.

nightflarer

Harvard's admissions office is more professional than MIT's.

molliebatmit

I just poked around on The Tech's website earlier today. I'll try to find a more reliable data set. But as I said in my original post, the effect is modest, if it is real.

Um, I don't know about that. Incidentally, Sloan is relatively URM-poor -- URMs at MIT are more likely to major in engineering (relative to their representation at the school) and less likely to major in management.

Aedar

Lots of stuff to respond to here, I'll just do a few

1) There are simple reasons no one has mentioned that some cross-admitted students might prefer Harvard or MIT to Caltech: size (Caltech is much smaller) and location (which I guess is related to the "don't like the campus" but while I like Caltech's campus I think Cambridge >> Pasadena.)

2) I don't understand the claim that if top admitted students choose not to attend the admission policy isn't meritocratic. It might not be maximzing the number of highly-rated students who enroll, but "meritocratic" is a property of the admissions procedure, based on an idea of procedural fairness, it is not a property of the outcome of that process in terms of enrollments.

3) I strongly disagree that the quality of fellow students doesn't matter: they are the people students interact with the most, and they also serve as a constraint on the level of the class.

4) I also strongly disagree that one can learn as much taking graduate classes at a "top 50-100 school" as one can at Caltech, MIT, or their competitors. In part this is because grad student quality falls off much more quickly than faculty quality does, and this serves as a constraint on the classes.

simfish

There's also the added factor of the Internet. Now whenever one has some time, one can always head over to the MIT/Caltech website, download problem sets + solutions, and work on them in one's own spare time, in conjunction with the textbooks from the university library. Moreover, one can always ask for help at places like artofproblemsolving.com and physicsforums.com, but those sites aren't a pure substitute for real life social interaction.

That being said, the social element in those universities is often missing, since few students are purely academic in such universities (and consequently, one has a smaller pool of personalities with whom one can become study buddies with). It depends on the personality of the student as well (is the student an awkward nerd?). There just isn't the close-knit community like the Caltech house system. The very top students at state universities are generally comparable to students at Caltech/MIT, but since there aren't very many of them, it can be likely that very few will have any similar academic interests as the student.

A truly self-motivated and intelligent student, however, can mitigate the gap. Professors at those universities can recognize talent and encourage it. The student can take graduate level courses, do additional problems by himself (remember, in math/science circles, one learns more by doing problems than by attending lectures), do research, and grab excellent recs for grad school.

lol, statement acknowledged.

simfish

On a side note, there are the students who turn down Caltech/MIT for state (often for financial reasons, or for programs the state university is specifically strong in). I know a couple of them. It's actually pretty interesting how some of them aren't the most scientifically self-motivated people out there. They usually become somewhat involved with the social scene of their respective universities, and take normal course loads (and follow normal course sequences). They probably aren't getting a Caltech/MIT equivalent education, although they're still likely to go farther than their counterparts (a "drink the firehose" curriculum wouldn't be the best learning format for a lot of people).Without the social groups, it's often difficult to maintain the motivation needed for studying at levels comparable to those that Caltech/MIT students study.

And yes sakky, I'm aware of the research that shows that average income of people who turn down Ivy for state is pretty much equivalent with the average income of Ivy league alumni. Generally though, since genetic factors play a very large role in career outcomes (as evidenced from adopted twin studies), irrespective of the institution the student attends, I don't think that the institution makes that much of a difference. Then again, student personalites may still be malleable in the university setting, and students do develop social standards that they compare with to their peers, and this accounts for most of the variance in behavior that genetics doesn't explain (source: The Nurture Assumption). That being said, we must ask the question, "just how malleable is personality from the time the student enters college and is already 18?"

We have to make the distinction between theoretical possibility and practical possibility. Theoretically, it is possible for a number of students to obtain Caltech/MIT-equivalent educations in a state university. But an important question is - is it practically possible - that is, would most Caltech/MIT-calibre students who enroll in state universities get Caltech/MIT equivalent educations given what they're likely to do in a state institution?

simfish

Die, post edit time limit, just die.

Many of these students don't have a lot of incentives to pursue Caltech/MIT equivalent educations, as opposed to incentives to be more relaxed (though one important question is - how much do students really remember from Caltech/MIT courses?). Most of the incentives come from the instructors they work in research with - and then there is the added question - are instructors likely to reward them with better recs if the students show the instructors the products of their self-study?

The other issue, in any case, is tht many of those students would probably major in physics/math in those state universities, while they would have been turned off by physics/math at Caltech. In conjunction with that, Caltech offers rigorous mathematical-based research in other fields - fields that would take courses and courses of non-mathematical busywork in a state university (though the student could try to contact instructors to do research independently of taking courses in such a field).

I apologize for intermixing the terms Caltech/MIT and Caltech. I'm a lot more familiar with Caltech, but I have to keep in mind that many Caltech students turn Caltech down for MIT and still get Caltech-equivalent educations.

Anyhow, how this is relevant to the topic - is this - if students can obtain MIT equivalent educations at state schools, then why complain about MIT admissions? But if students cannot obtain MIT equivalent educations at state schools, then that is one reason to complain about admission standards at MIT (were such students desirous of working in an environment other than Caltech's stress-filled one).

Ben Golub

Aedar hit the nail right on the head above. sakky's talk about how "meritocratic" admissions does not necessarily result in "meritocratic" cohorts is a category mistake. Meritocracy is a term that applies to admissions processes. Caltech could admit a class based on academic merit alone, have nobody accept the offer, and the admissions process would be no less meritocratic.

As for many people preferring a school with lots of girls and biased admissions as opposed to a school with a bad ratio and fair admissions, that's not a big surprise. For teenage boys, few things beat girls, and certainly not "fair admissions".

Then again, while sakky worships the market's wisdom, I'll still take a more skeptical view. Not everything the market wants is good. In the market for intro econ textbooks, what wins is dumb and dumber. Every time you remove an equation and add a picture of an economist, your book sales go up. That's why there are no major intro econ textbooks aimed at people with an IQ above 80. At Caltech, professors who want one have to write their own.

Just one small example of how blindly catering to teenagers doesn't always produce the best outcomes from some more thoughtful perspective.

Aedar

LOL!!!
The -really- sad thing is that our son's teacher for AP econ doesn't seem to understand Mankiw's text, I guess Mankiw will have to go farther down market with the next edition

Mikalye

Oh, so much to respond to

For SAT breakdowns that go beyond 25%-75% from MIT admissions, the best I have seen is here: http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/...cs/index.shtml
While mean scores are not reported per se, one can produce a pretty close estimate of mean scores from this data set. (which is left as an exercise for the reader).

OK, I agree with Ben that the meritocratic nature of admissions is a quality of the admissions process rather than related to matriculation. However, Sakky is completely right when he says that having a meritocratic process is largely irrelevant to having a meritorious class, because you simply cannot ignore matriculation.

This reminds me of an exchange quoted recently on Jane Espenson's blog, where she recalls an episode of "Perfect Strangers" where Balki is testifying in court:
Lawyer: Do you notice anything odd about this photograph?
Balki: It is borderless.

Balki's statement is completely true, and yet completely irrelevant. So is having a meritocratic admissions process.

In the context we are discussing, consider the completely meritocratic and fictitious Lower Kennicut Region Technical University in Kennicut, Iowa. This hypothetical college publishes precisely the GPA and scores necessary to get in. Indeed, it accepts all students with a SAT I Math and/or verbal scores >700. And yet, despite a completely transparent and meritocratic process, the college ends up with mean scores below 500, and with no admittees with scores above 700, because those students DON'T WANT TO GO. Meritocratic and meritorious are largely unrelated.

MIT is looking for a meritorious class, and to get that, they are willing to sacrifice some of the meritocracy, but not much.

I am an EC (an interviewer) and worse, an international one, where the admit rate is roughly 4%. Now that is even scarier than it sounds, because the US rate is bouyed up (or more correctly down) a bit by a number of students without much of a chance of getting in who are applying as a "reach" school. That doesn't happen very often with the international applicants. With one or two exceptions, everyone I have interviewed in the past 5 years has been extremely academically gifted. And yet, I know that MIT is going to only take 1 out of 27 of these extremely bright people.

So given these capable, distinguished, bright, likely to be rejected students, how does MIT pick them. The match criteria on the website sound fluffy and yet, in my experience, they are the surest indicator of whether people get in. And I can tell you, it was a big surprise to me when I started interviewing, but you can actually easily tell how well someone matches the school, quite a lot of the time.

I have met several bright, capable students with stunning scores who simply could not work with others. They by and large won't get in, but read any of mollie's posts on problem sets to see how happy that kid would be at MIT.

There is the (perhaps apocryphal) story of the applicant who brought their teddy bear to the interview, and all of the interviewer's questions were discussed with the bear at length before the candidate answered. The EC's report wondered if the candidate had the emotional maturity for MIT.

I have met a few folks who are robots, who read physics textbooks as a hobby and have no human friends to speak of (most of these won't get in, the most brilliant sometimes will).

In a purely meritocratic system, one that only looks at the numbers, most of these kids, some of whom may be quite damaged, will get in. Many of them may then be unhappy.

MIT has enough academically qualified applicants to fill their incoming class several times over. A purely fair, but entirely unsatifying system might be a lottery. Instead MIT tries to admit based on the match criteria on the website, and what they are actually looking for is for students who will be happy at MIT and who will thrive on the MIT experience. Literally how well they match MIT.

Caltech's meritocratic admissions do not really consider or care whether the students will be happy and thrive on campus (which is of course why many of them don't), merely whether they can do the work.

Is Caltech's system more transparent? Yes.

More meritocratic? Yes.

Better? In my opinion, not by a long way.

Edward A.

This speculation about whether or not Caltech's more meritocratic admission procedure results in more academically capable students actually going to Caltech is silly. Surely the average SAT scores of matriculated Caltech and MIT students are published somewhere.

sakky

Sure, the process would still be "meritocratic". But so what? The end result would not be a meritocratic class which is what ultimately matters.

Again, as a case in point, I would repeat - I find Berkeley's admissions to be highly meritocratic in the sense that if you have the numbers, you will get in. You rarely have the cases at Berkeley where somebody with superstar numbers gets turned down whereas somebody from the same school with much weaker numbers gets in. But I would strongly hesitate to say that Berkeley's student body to be highly meritocratic, relative to the top private. Again, this is because a lot of top students who get into Berkeley will choose to go elsewhere.

Aedar, you said it yourself - what counts is the quality of the students, and by that, I'm sure you mean that quality of the students who matriculate , not just those you admit. Who cares about the quality of students who are admitted but choose not to enroll? How does that help the school?