“Who says elites can’t look for first gens who…show they’re able to self advocate? Or is it another CC assumption only higher SES kids can?”
If this is in response to what I wrote above, where failure to thrive is seen as a pattern within one of the demographics I mentioned, self-advocacy has been suggested to be lacking and a chief component of the student skill set that is missing.
Again, where I responded, there was no intimation of" only higher SES kids" doing anything.
“The ability to switch freely between majors is a FEATURE, not a bug.”
Wanted to say I thought this was a gem.
I think it could help kids to hear such a perspective when they are encountering problems and on the verge having to consider a change of major, as well as help them to gird themselves psychologically for dealing with family and friends after happily choosing to make a change.
“UChicago requires just as many science and math classes as MIT (6) and they’ve got no shortage of applicants looking to major in a social science.”
The University of Chicago and MIT science requirements look nothing alike. Not even close.
PG, what you were saying above may or may not be true, and I know you enjoy preaching, but how are those comments relevant to the original question?
Perhaps I should expand my response to @JHS a little. His position, if I am not mistaken, is that since all MIT admits probably ranked in the top 1% of population, there is no reason why they can not learn multivariable calculus. My position is that we are not talking about the admitees but potential applicants, who may or may not belong to the intellectual 1% of population. Even those who are may not necessarily care for that challenge.
The work done at the Duke University Talent Identification Program shows convincingly that even for those students in the top 1% can be differentiated. The SAT, given at age 13, can predict future achievement many years later, and those in the top quarter of 1% are significantly more accomplished than those in the bottom quarter. Even long before the existence of this program, we know the difference in ability among the top 1% is huge. At one time, for example, the final exam results in mathematics at Cambridge University were published, and the top scorer was considered to be the “smartest” person in Britain. It was not considered that unusual for the top scorer (senior wrangler) to get twice as many questions correct as the second wrangler.
In brief, if I am a humanities student, even if I can score in the top 1% overall, do I really want to test my math skills against future physicists or mathematicians, at an age where protecting your GPA is all the rage? After all, my name is not C P Snow, nor Bertrand Russell.
Lol. If I’m in the top 1% of something, that’s good enough for my purposes. Whether I’m in the top part of that or the bottom part isn’t really all that important to me. It seems vitally important to you.
@Waiting2exhale I wasn’t going to get into this, but as @alh noted, the topic is close to my heart.
My suspicion is that this is mainly a one-way street, otherwise the number switching into humanities and social sciences should equal the number switching out, give or take a few %tage points.
Here is a more typical “switcher”, made known to me by Friedman’s famous interviews with Laszlo Bock:
https://www.oakland.edu/upload/docs/Clips/2011/111111%20-%20students.pdf
Bock felt she was making a serious mistake. He felt she should stick it out even if it meant lower grades. “She was moving out of a major where she would have been differentiated in the labor force” and “out of classes that would have made her better qualified for other jobs because of the training.”
I disagree with him. She was struggling mightily to survive, not just getting a lower grade.
What’s the real point in quoting so many studies or anecdotes? To claim some definition of superiorty? Most of us here know there are many paths, impact comes in many forms. The ability of most MIT students to do higher/highest math is an illustration, not some absolute proof.
Most of us know their interests can be wide ranging and their programs both support and are supported by those.
Canuckguy: If graduates of MIT and peer schools aren’t gainfully employed, it is probably not due to educational deficiencies. One problem, imho, with all your posts is you start from the premise a high paying job at Google or the equivalent is the end goal of education. That just isn’t an idea with which I agree and I doubt I’m the only one on this thread feeling that way. Also, some of us on this thread have kids employed at Google or the equivalent. I don’t know if our anecdotes would be useful antidotes to the link you just listed, but I’m having a lot of difficulty believing Google doesn’t care about credentials.
I could maybe go with the argument TIP identified middle school age kids should maybe not become humanities lopsided too early on, thus not maximizing their intellectual potential, but any of those kids looking at elite schools is more likely to follow the excellent sheep path than anything else. They are going to take the highest math/science classes available to them. For the most part.
There are a couple of posters here I have been reading for years and my take-away from their posts is their kids would have probably done exciting computer/tech jobs for very low pay. Because that is all they wanted to do. The fact it pays so much is just icing on the cake.
This thread isn’t about average students. It is about MIT students. We don’t really need to worry about their employment prospects and we can not extrapolate from them to the rest of the student population. IT just doesn’t work. imho.
@Canuckguy , even not all MIT students are in the top 0.25% of anything. Some of them, I daresay, are mere engineers, proficient at the same math that engineers from [gasp] Purdue or someplace can do, not math geniuses. (Purdue, by the way, has an excellent English department, too. I have a friend who got her PhD there.) I stand by the proposition inherent in the first post in this thread: there is a sizable population of humanities and social science oriented students who would be qualified applicants to MIT, and whom MIT might well admit, who do not apply to MIT because they don’t understand it to be a viable option. Look, @MITChris , who surely should know, suggests that the MIT admissions staff actually tries to admit such people, only to find them migrating into engineering – of course, their skills support that choice – once they arrive, due to peer pressure. And perhaps to the experience of MIT’s core, which makes them excited about engineering and confident that they can handle it at least as well as the next kid.
A word about the Arcidiacono study, which I think you are waaaaaay over-reading. If I understand it correctly, it doesn’t really tell you much about any particular group. Essentially, with two small exceptions, all group-level GPA and class-rank changes over the course of college are the result of course- and major-selection. People who start out doing badly improve their grades by taking courses (and majors) with more grade inflation. The first exception is a subgroup of students with relatively low test scores at the application stage whom the admissions department has identified as having exceptional potential to improve. On average, they do, a little. They struggle a bit at first and catch up more than you would expect given their major choices. Second, some significant portion of Asian students tend to go slack their senior years, presumably after they have already cashed in their GPAs.
Another thing Arcidiacono’s data seem to show – and this is truly a shocker – is that students in all groups who struggle with STEM and then switch majors on average have lower test scores that the students who don’t. Knock me over with a feather. In some groups, the average SAT differences are large; in others not so large.
The treatment of legacies in the study is not particularly interesting. As with minority groups, legacies’ apparent improvement in GPA and class rank relative to the average white nonlegacy student is accounted for by major switching. Whoop-de-doo, because pretty much all changes in GPA and class rank are the result of that. Legacies (who include some unspecified number of minority students) have slightly lower GPAs than the average white nonlegacy student as freshmen, largely because they are significantly more likely to be taking a STEM-heavy curriculum, but are better prepared to do so. The percentage of legacies who switch major areas is much lower than for minorities, but it’s enough to reverse the small initial difference vs. average white nonlegacy students. I don’t think you can really draw any conclusions from that, though, because based on the rest of the article it looks like if you made a random selection among students in the lower half of the class by GPA after freshman year, it would have similar dynamics by graduation.
Broken down by race and sex, there was no group that didn’t have significant switching out of STEM, although white males as a group switched a lot less than others. Part of African-Americans’ high switch rate was obviously due to the fact that many fewer of them identified themselves as undecided before enrollment compared to other groups. Undecideds in all groups broke between STEM and HASS in about the same percentages.
So here are some propositions that are NOT supported by the study:
– All students in STEM majors have higher test scores than all students in HASS majors. (The biggest average difference in any group, by the way, is about 40 points out of 1600. For white males, it’s less than 20. If there were a Venn diagram, the overlapping portion would be much larger than the non-overlapping portions.)
– Few or no students in HASS majors would be capable of doing the work in a STEM major.
– Most students in HASS majors originally wanted to be STEM majors. (Actually, overall, it’s very few.)
– Legacies switch from STEM to HASS at a higher rate than others.
– Legacies are less prepared than nonlegacies (that’s specifically contradicted).
"One problem, imho, with all your posts is you start from the premise a high paying job at Google or the equivalent is the end goal of education. That just isn’t an idea with which I agree and I doubt I’m the only one on this thread feeling that way. "
Thank you. There are many goals of education that have zero to do with employability, but within the employability side, the goal is to enable the student to do what he or she wants to do. For some bizarre reason, you have decreed that the jobs in STEM fields are better than the jobs in HASS fields. No. They may pay more initially, but the kid who majored in engineering who now has a job as an engineer does not have a “better” job than the kid who majored in art history and now works at the art museum, or the kid who majored in history and is now working for an NGO helping people overseas gain access to clean water. If they are all doing what they love, the that is success. The fact that one happens to pay more is icing on the cake, that’s all. If you want to define success as highest-starting-salary-out-of-the-gate be my guest, but don’t assume we all share that metric.
There have been threads about curves in STEM classes and teaching techniques which prompts me to ask the question the other way as a straw man - maybe the problem is that STEM profs are unable to teach material well compared to non-STEM profs, thus making their classrooms “unattractive” and causing people to leave their fields.
Let’s not forget that some possibility of boiled down AP psych notwithstanding, by far, most high school kids have no idea of the range of subjects available for study on the college level. They get to the buffet and can choose more than just what their hs exposed them to. Horrors?
Switching into many STEM subjects is much harder than switching into most humanities subjects, because of the structured series of courses most require. If you’re going to major in, say, neuroscience, you need certain math, bio, chem, maybe physics courses and you need them in a certain order. It’s difficult to just jump in and still finish on time.
But if you want to switch to, say, history, you may need a couple of writing/research intensive courses and after that you take what you want, with some concentration or distribution among eras, geographic areas, whatever. And you can do a lot of it concurrently.
The biggest lemming effect in the US is the number of smart kids who think pre-med is the only option/best option for smart kids.
When I was in a chemical physics PhD program and TAing, I had students in freshman chemistry ask me if I was doing it because I couldn’t get in to med school. I pointed out that most likely most PhD candidates in chemistry and physics could have scored quite well on the MCAT and had excellent grades, since most students in my program had 800 on the GRE in both reasoning and math as well as very high GRE subject scores. So then they wanted to know why we didn’t apply to medical school.
And at the other end of the intellect scale, the biggest lemming effect is the number of kids getting degrees in Event Planning or Leisure Studies or Sports Management, thinking that they are getting an actual university education.
Some who have the stats with viable GPAs and possible high scorers on the MCATs forgo med school because they are turned off by certain factors endemic to the profession such as long hours, being around sick/dying people, fears of malpractice suits*, and having to work in environments where they must deal with hazardous biological waste among other things.
Aw, c’mon!
Planning*, partaking in consuming copious amounts of food and spirits, and managing strenuous physical pastimes like beer pong and tangoing my dance partner into other dancers on the floor/wall are all legitimate academic forms of inquiry! 
@VickiSoCal : "The biggest lemming effect in the US is the number of smart kids who think pre-med is the only option/best option for smart kids.
The kids who are quick learners become attuned to the way this rote response and manner of stating their intention to study ‘serious’ subjects rankles the college reps and others with whom they interact during the college selection phase.
When you are ta’ing freshman chem at a large state university and 800 kids out of 1500 are “pre-med” and you know the numbers that will probably really go to medical school you start to get cynical. Especially when some of them assume you aren’t in medical school because you weren’t smart enough. 
Meanwhile in your free time when not TAing you are doing massive amounts of quantum homework.
That’s very interesting considering many of the doctors I’ve known/met tend to have the opposite reaction…they tend to hold PhDs in the sciences or in general in very high esteem.
Especially considering unless they’re also simultaneously doing a PhD such as a couple of mutual friends in the HMS/MIT MD/PhD program, they’re not beholden to proposing and working on an involved lengthy research project making an original contribution or reinterpretation which forms the basis of their PhD dissertation. It also requires far greater levels of independence as the research/dissertation part of the program is far less structured than undergrad or many professional grad programs(MD, Law, MBA, etc).
This include the cardiology fellow friend who attended H for undergrad and med school. One group of friends and people he holds in great awe…folks doing/completed PhDs.
If something is beyond the measurable, how do we know it is there? See how different we are @lookingforward ? Those studies or anecdotes are there to discipline my mind so that I would not trying to fool myself. We are not by nature rational beings. If empirical evidence goes against me, it would be time for me to reassess my hypothesis, because reality certainly will not change for me.
@alh I was actually looking at “best practice” on the part of elite employers-how do they recruit and what they are looking for. Personally I would be more incline to look for that sweet spot where “risk” to reward is more balanced. Working those banker hours maybe insane, but I am still interested in how they recruit.
@JHS I am not in the right mood, after Brexit, to take a closer look at the Duke study at this time. Your reading of the part about the legacies is significantly different from mine. I will definitely look into it.
@OHMomof2 I am certain a %tage of students falls behind and never catches up, in the same way that a %tage of elite students do not know MIT has excellent humanities and social science programs. I simply don’t believe they make up that big a portion of the pie. I am more in the camp with Charles Murray here. This is what he said:
“We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough”.
After all that is said here, I think @blossom is the sane one.