<p>I could be wrong but I think that still works.</p>
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<p>Isn’t there something called an academic r</p>
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<p>I guess this throws into question the assumptions that Marilee didn’t need the college degrees she claimed in order to do her job.</p>
<p>Also, the admissions office shouldn’t calm down until they announce one way or another what they’re doing with the wait list.</p>
<p>MasterofBalances–Schmill said they would be accepting a limited number of people off the wait list. There are 500 on it. He wasn’t specific about the number that would be accepted. Good luck. BTW, what school is your second choice?</p>
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<p>Does it? Many colleges guess wrong on yield. In the Boston area, there are many students living in hotels because the schools underestimated yield.</p>
<p>Criticizing Marilee Jones for “miscalculating” the yield is utterly silly. MIT does not operate in a vacuum as its yield is influenced by other schools such as the Ivies or Caltech. It is remarkable that schools are able to predict their yield with such accuracy and in spite of a slew of factors over which they have little control in May.</p>
<p>“First and foremost, they are selecting QUALIFIED students.”</p>
<p>What is the qualification soozievt? What exactly is the cutoff? You are either not the sharpest blade in the drawer or deliberately obtuse and I am pretty sure it is not the former. They are not picking among qualified applicants unless you define qualified as anyong they pick. What are MIT’s minimal qualifications? If what you are saying is true then there must e a index of quantifiable characteristics such as gpa, test scores, class rank, and AP or other courses. You show me the minimal qualifications and then we will talk aout whether they are chosing among the qualified or filling quotas.</p>
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<p>He’s quoted as saying that in the Tech, but I’d prefer to see something more official posted on the blogs - the out-of-the-blue change in desired class size makes me a bit suspicious.</p>
<p>My second choice is RPI, and if I end up there I’ll still probably try to go to MIT for grad school. It would just be nice to know one way or another.</p>
<p>“There is an anomaly that I find mildly interesting: Many of the people who get so worked-up about affirmative action – and in this thread about holistic admissions in general – are politically conservative. In other contexts, they have a high regard for markets, and for the autonomous decisionmaking of market participants. In this context, however, they want to dictate what values are right and wrong in college admissions.”</p>
<p>JHS - and I suppose that I am supposed to seriously believe that liberals are disinclined to force country clubs to accept women and minorities? Lierals have no particular regard for property rights when it comes to forcing a social agenda. If a private religiously affiliated college or university announced it was not going to admit Gays or Lesians or transgendered people or any who has had a aortion or is pro-abortion you wouldn’t bring the full majesty of the law and all the force available to the federal government down on their head? Right!</p>
<p>The fact is noody believes a legal person, which is what a chartered corporation is, has the right to do the same things an individual does let alone greater discretion. Not conservatives and definitely not liberals.</p>
<p>No we do not grant limited liability to the boards of colleges and universities so they can exercise any and every prejudice they happen to harbor.</p>
<p>re post 1687
I don’t think a minimum qualification level is really an issue at a super-selective college. They could probably fill their class several times over with motivated students who can do the work successfully. Any adverse effect on the abilities of the student body is not experienced at this level when colleges practice AA or quota recruiting. Anyone who is motivated and has SATs above 1250 (or 1950) can succeed. It will require more effort for some, but they can do it. The effect will be felt by the admissions committees at less highly sought after colleges. They will have to chose between diversity and having a very wide range of abilities. Princeton Review quoted one college coed at a highly ranked but not Ivy league school as saying that when she arrived at colleged it looked as if she “had joined a white pride group.”</p>
<p>I am as conservative as you can get and what Marilee did only mildly disturbs me and I don’t think after 28 years she really deserves to get fired over it. She did the job MIT wanted and if she didn’t do it well whe would not have risen to her position. Who cares where she got her degrees or if she got them.</p>
<p>AA gets gets political but if anything I think Marilee horrified the liberals around here a lot more than the conservatives. Proably because it highlited the corruption in the whole admissions process.</p>
<p>“What a contemptuous little statement that is! For me, and I bet for others who support affirmative action, we like it because we believe it is morally right, not the other way around. The issue is whether discrimination in favor of the less powerful, less privileged is that same as discrimination to maintain power and privilege.”</p>
<p>JHS - what piffle. There is NEVER discrimination against the powerful. By definition it is always the less powerful memers of society who bear the brunt because they are not powerful enough to protect themselves.</p>
<p>With affirmative action it is simply the very very powerful easing their consciences by throwing a bone to the least powerful at the expense of the less powerful.</p>
<p>Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your liberal bosses 
Look at these elite schools and see who is missing in the student demographic. You have rich minorities, rich white folk, a couple of poor minorities thrown a bone and no middle-class. ED and AA. One discriminates in favor of the rich and the other eases the conscience of the rich because they know they are screwing everyone else in society.</p>
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<p>but that’s just plain wrong. Especially at MIT- look up some numbers.</p>
<p>Actually, estimating can be a very exact science if the important variables are used in the predictor regression equation, a simple linear equation, mind you. I imagine that after several years of misses, someone got in there and fixed the formula … I’d be surprised if the yield was missed by more than one or two percentage points once the formula was fixed – and it should never vary by more than one or two points, in either direction, if those in the admissions department are doing their jobs properly.</p>
<p>Any graduate level statistics/decision making course would have covered linear regression. If no one in MIT’s admissions department had a graduate degree in science or business (or others) I can understand why Marilee was missing the yield – in fact, it makes <em>perfect</em> sense.</p>
<p>While Marilee may have done a few things well, we’ll never know all the rest of the things one with a graduate degree might have been able to do for the Institute.</p>
<p>Happypoet:</p>
<p>Where did you do learn statistics? Not MIT for sure! Maybe a “stats for dummies” book fell off the back of a truck. If yield could be predicted within a percentage point by linear regression then you get the Fields Medal. Anybody with the least amount of math background could tell you the predictive power of such a model would be very low, together with a huge estimated error.</p>
<p>But no, you have to take a cheap shot at MJ. As the song goes. “You don’t impress me much!”</p>
<p>Wow! This has been fun. Gotta go pick up my daughter. She returns tonight from college on the east coast.</p>
<p>Going along with Pebbles’ #1693 – I’m middle-class! I’m even a WASP to boot.</p>
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I don’t think MIT students were all exactly alike 10 years ago, but I don’t think admissions policies at MIT have changed that much in 10 years either.</p>
<p>I can’t find it now, but I read on an MIT webpage that this year the prediction was accurate… 67%, I think…</p>
<p>A yield prediction can be as easy as picking last year’s number and hoping it will be the same. </p>
<p>But we all know multiple variables go into the regression formula. </p>
<p>In a target class of 1,000, one percent is ten students… if they’re off more than twenty students, the regression equation should be re-evaluated, of course.</p>
<p>I believe last year, they offerred admission to 30 students on the waitlist, which itself has a yield, so there appears to be accuracy (with roughly 2% error) in the model used last year. Kudos to Marilee. Like I thought, someone got in there to fix the model. :)</p>
<p>And this thread is supposed to be about Marilee, so I will continue. :)</p>
<p>I happen to believe a ten percent variance is unacceptable, not only in terms of housing concerns, but also revenues (although I think tuition at MIT is a small portion of total revenues) and for financial aid… yes, unacceptable.</p>
<p>Actually yields are remarkaly consistent at most schools. Usually takes something really big to change them by more 1-2% year to year.</p>
<p>I wonder hoe Duke’s yield is doing this year?</p>
<p>We’re a full-pay tuition family, and for a quarter million dollars, I guess I was expecting certain standards – and perhaps I am allowing the money to bias my thinking… I will need to reflect upon this… to be honest, I’ve waffled a bit back and forth on the topic of this thread. </p>
<p>There were times I was really, really upset with Marilee’s behavior, but there were other times, as time went by and the surprise wore off, that I wished the admissions department well as I tried to find forgiveness and compassion. And if I can’t forgive, I can’t move on, and I oh so much want to move on (and far away from this thread, sorry).</p>
<p>Okay… here it is… Marilee, I forgive you. </p>
<p>:)</p>