yagottabelieve

There are indeed applicants who seem to outrank other applicants who do not do "great things" once they get into a top-ranked (or even a lower-ranked) school. You hear about these people all the time. Why would so-and-so who was a superstar HS academic, EC, etc. be struggling? The answers vary. But it would be difficult to argue that the (statistically) lesser-qualified admit who wound up graduating was somehow (actually) lesser-qualified than the superstar admit who did not. (Especially since the goal of the admissions committee seems to be to admit the people who are most likely to graduate.)

In MIT's case, we do not know how the admissions committees interpret the essays or interviews, but I imagine they use them to try to gauge how well the student is likely to function in the MIT environment. This certainly has a bearing on how likely the person is to graduate.

Ah, but if they're all applying to the same set of top-ranked schools, they're not necessarily going to accept MIT ... I don't know how this factors into admissions, however. But it could be like university faculty hiring. Someone on CC posted something awhile back about not being able to recruit URMs to a low-tier university because if offered a position at a top-tier university as well, they'd almost certainly take it.

jzzsxm

Here's my take, short and sweet, ready?

Nowhere does it say that MIT accepts the best and the brightest.

Never have I heard anybody affiliated with MIT say that they want the smartest kids only.

MIT is very difficult to get into, and part of the reason is because it's hard to pin down exactly what MIT looks for. If all it took were academics, MIT would be easy to get into.

MIT accepts students who make it diverse and interesting, not people who make it brilliant, the two just happen to coincide for a majority of cases.

MIT is not competing against schools like CalTech, it plays its own game and picks its own students, it does its own thing, and has its own successes.

mcb52

I personally know one of the "less-qualified" acceptees you're talking about... Sure her scores aren't that great, but want to know why? Because she has a disability. She's got stellar ECs and everything, and her scores are still above-average. There's more to 'merit'/'qualifications' than just numbers, you have to also learn how to interpret them in context (this sounds kinda like statistics now).

mathboy98

"Ah, but if they're all applying to the same set of top-ranked schools, they're not necessarily going to accept MIT"

Well yes, but I think you see my point, which is that MIT could make it a lot easier for a certain kind of applicant to get in if it wanted to. And I'm pretty sure a certain kinds of people really would go to MIT over any other school if they got in. For instance, quite a few EECS majors I know. Of course there are other top schools, but you can imagine quite a few top engineering students would find it hard to reject an MIT admissions offer.

"Here's my take, short and sweet, ready?

Nowhere does it say that MIT accepts the best and the brightest.

Never have I heard anybody affiliated with MIT say that they want the smartest kids only."

The short and sweet take does what I tried to do in my long post pretty much as well, and is a good one. As long as top people end up somewhere great, and as long as quite consistently, MIT classes are very high caliber, I don't think one can argue the school's doing a bad job. People *can* suggest improvements, but these need to correspond to general admissions philosophical statements...

I think far too many people don't understand that it's a waste of energy trying to precisely and exactly correlate where exactly you get accepted to how strong of an applicant you are. The right attitude seems to be that if you get accepted to a great school, kudos to you, but if you don't get accepted to a particular one, look forward to another. Nobody's saying that you're not a smart student if you don't go to MIT...go somewhere with other smart people, and make the best of your undergrad years if you really care that much.

yagottabelieve

I don't have the data available on how many people applied to at least two top-tier schools with the intention of going to MIT if accepted, but perhaps someone else does. It strikes me that many people state other schools such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, CMU, etc. as their first choices, even if they apply to MIT as well.

mathboy98

Not untrue, and in no way would I suggest otherwise. I am talking mainly of engineering students. Obviously some will end up at CMU, Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford...and some even at Ivy Leagues. My point is that MIT could increase the number of both accepted [and likely incoming] students of a certain kind, and deliberately choose not to.

yagottabelieve

Where else did they apply? It strikes me that even among candidates considering engineering studies, people who apply to MIT also apply to CMU, Stanford, Berkeley, and other top engineering schools. It's not clear that for these people, MIT is the clear #1 choice. Even here on CC, you hear about people who've turned down MIT when accepted to other schools.

mathboy98

Yeah, I understand this, it's what I stated in my last post -- I certainly know there are several good engineering schools. If you reread what I've written, it'll be clear that I don't think everyone getting into MIT will attend. My point is different, and mainly is to hopefully discourage people from wildly, thoughtlessly condemning any given system, which seems to happen all too often in a thread like this.

blairb91

Big Brother 1984, It has been a couple of years since you've said this statement, but I was reading this thread and just had to comment.

"I don't doubt your application was pretty. Infact, if I wanted a school that'll take me on the basis of how pretty my application was irregardless of the actual effort I put in high school, I would've gone to Harvard."


Irregardless=NOT A WORD


I just had to say something, because I feel you were being a jack*** to sklog.

Maxwell1864

I'm an MIT alum, EECS (course 6) class of 1968, so have had 40 years to consider what it meant to attend MIT. At our 40th reunion there was general agreement that most of us would not be admitted in competition with today's applicants - even though our class of 800 was 20% smaller than today's entering classes. For most of us, being an MIT undergrad was the hardest thing we've ever done, yet all of us would do it again in a heartbeat. Of course, people who attend reunions self-select and those who have great memories might tend to be over-represented among reunion attendees, but I was on the reunion committee and talked to a random sample of about 100 former classmates and those who didn't come simply had conflicts or couldn't afford it in this economy.

What impresses me about this thread is that a significant number of very smart, very articulate, and impressively open-minded people with ties to MIT or Caltech have invested an enormous amount of time in this debate about admissions policy. I hope some of these posters will consider jobs in MIT or Caltech admissions because I think their voices are cogent and passionate. But like all jobs that try to predict the future, college admissions is extraordinarily hard. And there is obviously no single approach that can be proven best.

I was a professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Physiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for 17 years. I sat on the MD/PhD admissions committee for most of that time. I've seen a lot of extraordinary applicants and I hated having to choose among them, but I would never advocate making such choices on pure numerology. We just wanted to admit the "best" men and women we could get. But we all accepted that "best" was decidedly subjective. Furthermore, this subjectivity is vital both for the school and the applicants. It's why people, not machines, make these decisions best.

So my bottom line is that the wit and civility and keen intelligence that characterizes this thread (at least the 18 pages I read) would be far better invested in solving bigger, more pressing, problems. The real world is in trouble; we need you out here.

collegealum314

[10 char] ..........

pebbles

"MIT Admissions" is a singular noun. Can we please not bump this thread anymore it bothers me every time.