<p>oldfort: I don’t know anything about science. How many kids do you think apply to college each year who have built nuclear reactors? Is this like robotics club, math team? I have no idea. If there are even close to the number who have 2400 SAT scores, I am certainly totally in the wrong for bringing it up. </p>
<p>I have been looking for a time to say how much I’ve enjoyed your posts on this thread even though I didn’t respond to them because it has all been moving pretty fast. Lucky daughters!</p>
I would imagine that it is probably difficult for some lower tier engineering schools to achieve 50-50 split, because not as many girls want to go into engineering. But for a school like MIT, they do not have shortage of applicants. By admitting 50-50 female/male, they wouldn’t be lowering their standards. I don’t believe MIT would admit any students who they didn’t think could do the work.</p>
<p>I just finished recruiting for 6 summer interns - 2 males and 4 females. They all went through very rigorous testing and interviews, and that was the result. There is one female, math major at a top LAC with 4.0 GPA. Another female from Caltech with 3.9 GPA, well spoken and excellent writer. So I am questioning this notion of men dominating STEM.</p>
<p>oldfort, it seems the point I’ve been trying to make is still not clear. Maybe your own example will help.</p>
<p>When you were selecting your interns, did you select them on the basis they “could do the work”? It sounds like not. You selected the best for the job. Am I right? Now, let’s say someone told you that you had to achieve 50-50 gender balance; that is, one female will have to be taken off the list and a slightly less qualifying male added. So what? He also can do the work! What would you say? Isn’t it what MIT doing? To make room for females, they take more qualifying males off the list. In my calculations, 316 males become losers in this effort to achieve 50-50 balance. </p>
<p>However, I’m not losing my sleep over this. I’m just stating it as a fact. When someone claims that MIT picks the best of the best, I say it’s not true. When you say MIT selects the ones who can do the work, I agree. But then any college can make such a claim. What’s so special about MIT then?</p>
<p>Seriously, maybe MIT or another elite college may want to offer said national leader and his wife admission to their college for the sake of facilitating world peace and to keep him distracted for 4+ years. </p>
<p>After all, MIT does throw some of the best college parties in the Boston area. Having the time of his life may do much to get him to mellow down a bit. </p>
<p>Maybe they can encourage him to design his own gut major…like Nuclear Philosophy or Economics. :D</p>
<p>yolochka - our challenge is that we do not get as many applicants as other firms because we are a start up. If we were Google or Amazon then maybe I could get more men with 4.0 in math/engineering/OR, and who could also chew and walk at the same time. MIT is the Google of the world and many other engineering schools are not.</p>
<p>"To make room for females, they take more qualifying males off the list. In my calculations, 316 males become losers in this effort to achieve 50-50 balance. "</p>
<p>Your hypothesis could be true if and only if the male and female application pools are of exactly the same quality. In reality, this may not be the case, one way or the other. </p>
<p>As MIT adcom has pointed out, their female applicants are often more self-selective, which could imply that they are on average better qualified. You may choose not to trust such assertion from MIT, but at least to me, it is more meaningful at a much larger scale than your observation on 15 local students.</p>
<p>PCHope, you are absolutely right! We have to make this important assumption.
However, do you really want to trust MIT adcom’s assertions over mine? Do you also trust blindly assertions from drug manufacturers? At least they have to publish their research on drugs they promote, however biased that can be. We know that a lot of medical research is corrupted because so much money is at stake. Think of what is at stake in admission to top institutions. Only when they publish stats that can help us make informative decisions about quality of apps by gender, I will rest my case, if it turns out I was wrong. But they won’t publish such stats. Do you wonder why? :)</p>
<p>^^^Because they don’t have to. If you do not like their admission policy, you could take your business some where else. Let your feet do the talking.</p>
<p>I do not have urgent reasons or convincing evidences not to trust them. </p>
<p>In our two local high schools, which are more of Ivy/Stanford chasing kind anyway and on average sending 2-3 to MIT each year, I have not heard complaints that MIT is favoring lower-quality female applicants. </p>
<p>In your own post, you have stated that your local female MIT students have been doing just fine, which seems to show that MIT has not done too bad a job, doesn’t it?</p>
<p>I know I’m repeating this for the 10th time already, but you, PCHope, probably don’t read previous pages. My point all along has not been that the lower qualifying females are able/unable to graduate from MIT, but that more talented boys are not given this chance, and thus, potentially, an opportunity to become a leader in STEM. To those of us familiar with gifted/talented education, a term “underachiever” has been used to describe such lost opportunities. This is, potentially, a loss to the society, not just that boy.</p>
<p>oldfort, let me make my decisions myself. Actually, in this case, my son is making decisions where he wants to apply and will make a decision where to matriculate. I am only stating my personal opinion, which, I believe, is appropriate in this free country. I’m so thankful I live here, not in the place where amature nuclear reactor builders rule.</p>
<p>Yes, I have read your earlier posts, and understood your points. I just do not completely agree with your assertion that somehow the more STEM-talented boys have been deprived the opportunities of greatness at MIT or any other schools. </p>
<p>In my own academic career, there is no question to anyone in my field that my three best doctoral advisees (out of several dozens) were two female and one male (URM). They are all tenure track faculty in top STEM departments, two in US and one in Europe. Yes, it is small sample and thus probably should not be generalized. Neither should one generalize from observation on 15 HS students.</p>
<p>PCHope, but both you and I, just like most people, make our conclusions based on personal observations. We can be influenced by published research, but even then, if the research goes contrary to our beliefs, we tend to disregard it. In this case, there is no research available on the effect of recent MIT policies to admit more females and minorities. These policies are too recent to do any research. And I doubt that MIT will ever admit they are wrong, if this is the case. Just like tobacco industry will never admit they were wrong. </p>
<p>All we can do is guess at this point. Thus, my guess is just as valid as yours.</p>
<p>one more thing. We all know females are just as capable as males in terms of STEM. However, giving examples of established female scientists is irrelevant to the discussion of recent MIT policies. These female scientists received their education in times when there was no AA for them. I’ve been discussing the effects of recent AA policies, that we can only guess at this time.</p>
<p>This is one of the most ridiculous assertions I have read in this thread (or this entire site, for that matter). To suggest that there are these incredibly deserving boys whose lives will amount to nothing without an education at MIT–and that the entire world will be the worse for their rejection–implies that ONLY MIT can properly train future STEM leaders. If that were true, MIT would only take MIT undergrads for its masters’ and PhD programs, no? Not to mention, if a young man has the potential to be a leader in STEM at MIT, surely he has the personal traits to rise to the top–to LEAD–at CalTech or Berkeley or Illinois or Carnegie Mellon. The level of “talent” or leadership you speak of is not likely to be thwarted by a single setback at age 17 or 18. Real leaders find their way to real leadership along many different paths.</p>
<p>^Sally, your post made me laugh - you are so right. Several of us have been saying such similar things albeit perhaps less frankly than you have :).<br>
<p>Missed this little gem when I was typing. Now we are comparing MIT, the Only Institution Capable of Producing Future <em>MALE</em> STEM Leaders of the Universe, to the tobacco industry?</p>
<p>Sally, you are reading too much into my words. But you seem too excited to listen to any clarifications I could provide (such as I was talking about possibilities and chances), so I refrain and let you calm down :)</p>
<p>No, it’s you who completely missed the point. “Contributing to collaborative scientific endeavors” isn’t the only measure of success. (It’s about as narrow-minded as those on CC who think that money-made-on-Wall-Street is the only measure of success.) </p>
<p>Take my friend from MIT, as an example. Without giving away too much info, she did global strategic planning for a major US consumer product goods company, then was the head of interactive marketing (when interactive marketing was new), and now is the marketing leader for East Asia (where she currently lives with her family). She’s got a great corporate job, she makes a difference, she loves it, she’s successful in that world and if we’re counting, she does well financially too. What kind of odd bird would suggest that she isn’t “successful” or that she wasn’t “worthy” of her MIT education because she isn’t in a lab inventing the cure for cancer or developing the next new energy source? She took her MIT education and used it. I’m really sorry some people define success super-narrowly – but that’s not MIT’s problem.</p>