<p>I’m perfectly calm, yolochka. I have read enough of your posts now to understand that this is personal for you, because you have a very high-achieving STEM student–male–who hasn’t yet heard back from MIT, and you are anxious. He sounds as though he has potential to do great things wherever he ends up. Don’t waste your time worrying about some girl or minority who could potentially “take his spot.” They’re not. If he doesn’t get in, it could be because MIT sees more value in some other MALE student. In any case, he is probably going to need to go to grad school anyway, so if I were you I would encourage him to take the best financial offer he gets and save what you can for the MIT PhD program (which for all we know he won’t even have to pay for, if he is that gifted). Good luck.</p>
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<p>I’ll leave it to you to figure out why having an approximately 50-50 gender balance is more appealing to potential students than having a balance of hair colors, height and so forth. If you need a study to figure this out, then there are some real problems here, and MIT admissions isn’t one of them.</p>
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<p>Guess what, yolochka? 95% of applicants to MIT aren’t going to be “given that chance.” Is it your contention that the number of “deserving” applicants knocking at MIT’s door exactly equals the number of beds they have?</p>
<p>And anyway, this sounds more Yale School of Drama than anything else - to suggest that the bright kid who gets rejected at MIT is never going to contribute anything anywhere. Of course, he’ll go onto Columbia or Stanford or Caltech or UIUC or Carnegie Mellon or wherever and do great things at those places. And if he doesn’t? If he is such a precious seedling that he can only bloom at MIT but will wither away elsewhere? Well, then he’s not really all that impressive, is he?</p>
<p>This isn’t like gifted education in elementary or middle school, where not getting into a gifted program means that the kid who is ready for calculus has to suffer through the agony of being restricted to a classroom where they are still working on 1+1=2 and his talents are wasted. There are brilliant people doing brilliant things at all of the places I mentioned plus many more. There is no problem, other than one that people have made up.</p>
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<p>You don’t think it’s the least bit odd to define “top institutions” so narrowly? Are you really unaware that there are a lot of top institutions in this country that offer tons of resources? This isn’t the old country, where there are only a handful.</p>
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<p>But mathematically it doesn’t MATTER if the pool of women applicants to MIT are more qualified, equally qualified or less qualified. They desire to achieve a 50-50 gender balance and therefore that means they will have to accept women at a higher acceptance rate than they do men. Oh well. Such is life. </p>
<p>And let’s face it - the only way you can argue that someone you know is less qualified is if you base qualification on SAT / GPA. MIT doesn’t use that definition (solely), which has been explained multiple times on this forum by MITChris and others affiliated with the university. So your “judgment” as to who is qualified is irrelevant. If MIT wanted to admit based on SAT / GPA, they could do so at any time. Obviously they believe that doesn’t suit their institutional needs. Who is better poised to assess MIT’s institutional needs? MIT, or you?</p>
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<p>I was responding to a specific point made by the poster, who insisted that they needn’t find the candidates with the strongest academic profiles because science is collaborative. </p>
<p>I would never describe someone with your friend’s career as not bieing a good representative of MIT. If anything, since your friend went to MIT in the 80’s when admission was almost totally based on academics, she’s a good example of how people admitted on the basis of academics can go on to successful careers that aren’t strictly technical in nature.</p>
<p>It’s too bad that people are so myopic, in-the-box thinkers that they can’t imagine how much academic success can translate to success in a variety of endeavors. Today’s opinion of the value of academics in professional success is like the opinion of 50’s society on the value of lifgint weights in sports. At that time, football players and other athletes were leery of becoming too “musclebound” and it would hurt their ability in their sport. Obviously, they were wrong.</p>
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No one knows that, but many people make that assumption. I questioned it in post #1528
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/15593878-post1528.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/15593878-post1528.html</a> . It may be true in parts of STEM, say medicine or biology, and not others, such as physics or computer science.</p>
<p>MIT gets a lot more qualified applicants from International pool. Since they are restricted to matriculating only 100 students in each year, they are admitting a lot lower percentage. They admitted 148 out of 4517 in 2012, a measly 3.3% of applicants, most of the applicants more likely male based on a sampling of CC posts. </p>
<p>If MIT is to change anything, I propose they admit more International students to ensure STEM male supremacy is maintained. :D</p>
<p>Hmm… Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Paul Dirac, Peter Higgs, Carl Sagan… none of them went to MIT, and they managed to “become a leader in STEM”. If a kid has it in them, it won’t take MIT to bring it out in them. MIT would be great – but so would Cal Tech, Harvey Mudd, Cornell, University of Chicago, and host of other colleges here and abroad.</p>
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<p>Let’s say for the sake of argument that women are less capable in STEM.<br>
As a consequence of both this and the smaller number of women applying, MIT has to “dip down” further into the female pool in order to achieve a 50-50 gender balance. </p>
<p>Let’s also say for the sake of argument that the appeal of MIT among young men is directly linked to the gender balance - that is, a male-gender-skew is less appealing than a 50-50 balance, because even nerds like a date every now and then. </p>
<p>It may be that MIT considers it worthwhile to “dip down” into the female pool and pull in enough women, in order to serve as a means of keeping MIT attractive enough for the smart males they seek (who otherwise won’t consider MIT if it’s too male skewed). If such is the case? I don’t see what’s wrong with that either. Part of MIT’s mission is also to create an environment that attracts the very students they want to attract. </p>
<p>And yeah, yeah, I know Simmons, and Harvard, and Wellesley, and blah blah blah. Not my point. Do you think now, after having a 50-50 balance for so long, MIT could really “retreat” from that balance without suffering a loss among applicants they really want?</p>
<p>@1649</p>
<p>If students at men’s and women’s colleges can get Federal aid, it would be inconsistent to say that MIT cannot favor women, or that liberal arts colleges cannot favor men.</p>
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<p>Some hardcore engineering/CS I’ve known from HS and among supervisors/colleagues…including several MIT alums would view your friend’s career path as a “failure” in a sense by going into business rather than staying in the engineering/CS field. </p>
<p>Rightly or wrongly, they’d view that as an example of their alma mater/engineering college’s failure to select students who’d stay in the field for the duration. </p>
<p>Granted, the worst grousing I’ve heard on this theme were older alums* from Columbia SEAS who felt their alma mater’s doing something wrong when it seems most of the post-2000 SEAS graduates are going into i-banking, business consulting, etc rather than continue on to become engineers, computer programmers/software engineers, etc. </p>
<p>Personally, I feel it is a bit narrow-minded, but there seems to be an undercurrent of “must be loyal to the field of engineering/CS or bust” ethos among the hardcore engineering/CS majors/graduates I’ve met in school and in multiple workplaces. </p>
<p>Just wanted to throw that in to see everyone’s thoughts. </p>
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<li>SEAS Class of 2000 and before.</li>
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<p>Yes, we know, cobrat - you are exquisitely sensitive to what you perceive as other people’s perceptions and how they “regard” things - as if how other people “regard” things is someone that anyone other than the person affected should take seriously. I don’t know why you even bring up that random people who have no bearing on her life would “regard” what she does as a failure. People of substance don’t care.</p>
<p>@yolochka</p>
<p>Two points:</p>
<p>1). I was not, and am not, making any conclusions on MIT admission bias. I was trying to say that your personal observation on a small number of high school student should not lead to any significant general conclusion. FWIW, personally I give MIT the benefit of doubt.</p>
<p>2). The three former students started college between 1999 and 2001, and received their PhDs 2007-2010. None of them went to MIT, although they were all products of very elite schools. Affirmative action/admission bias (gender, URM, SE) or not, their records have shown that they are at good as anyone anywhere.</p>
<p>I put that in to shed light on how some engineering/CS folks/alums perceive such career paths because it bears directly on why some older alums may hold the narrow-minded positions they do when it comes to admission decisions for elite engineering/CS colleges. </p>
<p>It also meant to shed some light on the engineering/CS nerd culture as someone who was in a position to observe it in both school and the workplace.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, sounds like you dislike anyone who makes observations of the people/groups they’ve observed firsthand or otherwise and feel it’s all because they worry about what other people think. </p>
<p>Would you say the same about anyone who is an Anthropologist, sociologist, political scientist, or historian?</p>
<p>Intparent, she sounds resourceful, resilient, determined, team player and all sorts of good things. Love that she had the tool. Best wishes to her.</p>
<p>I don’t see anybody complaining about males being admitted at some top LAC’s at a higher rate then women. Is your gender bias only applicable to MIT?</p>
<p>Re #1652: One suspects that “people of substance” don’t spend Sunday nights *****ing at each other on message boards. Yet here we are.</p>
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<p>THAT’S FUNNY considering I’ve overheard much complaining from female HS classmates and later on, some neighbors with daughters who were waitlisted/denied at top LACs…especially Vassar* while male students with lower GPA/SAT stats were not only accepted, but given scholarships. </p>
<p>Considering how livid some of them were…it’s a good thing I was part of the HS group which went with the “I’m going to be a Californian Beachbum” answer when asked which college I was attending. If they had known…especially if they knew my HS GPA…they’d chomping at the bit to throttle me. :D</p>
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<li>The “male affirmative action” issue here really brought out much anger from women classmates waitlisted/rejected by Vassar.</li>
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<p>Also, keep in mind that perceptions of “people of substance” are in the eye of the beholder.</p>
<p>The Roman elite felt the Goths, Huns, Vandals, and other barbarian groups weren’t “people of substance”. </p>
<p>However, guess who ended up crashing the nightclub known as the Western Roman Empire, made off with its food and spirits, and ruled those elite Romans in the end? :D</p>
<p>This thread is both enlightening, and disturbing. lol It seems the thread has morphed from “How did HE Get In?” to “How did SHE get in?”</p>
<p>Yolochka, have you asked your son if he’d like to attend a university with only 30% women?</p>
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<p>No. I don’t see what the perceptions of your innumerable cousins / relatives / fellow classmates at Stuy / classmates at Oberlin have to do with anything, though. You tend to relay those observations as if they should be meaningful or if we should take it seriously that such people think X about topic Y. I am certainly far from alone in making this observation.</p>