Odds of getting into MIT differ based on gender

MITChris
Thu, 21 Mar 2019 15:50:40 +0000

@FoundDad -

“The salient fact remains that the odds are much better for female applicants than it is for male applicants to be accepted to MIT.”

If by “the odds” you mean numerators and denominators, then sure, but w/ respect, that’s not salient to anything about how our process actually works, or the quality of our decisions or community. I am making this point because I would contest e.g. @TheGuy1 above saying that men are at a “competitive disadvantage.” This is only true if you reverse causality and confuse the reason for the result. As I wrote here: https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/the-difficulty-with-data/

The same goes for people who are highly ranked in their graduating class. Almost half of the class of 2015 were valedictorians of their high school. Aha! MIT must highly value class rank in our application! No, we don’t. Then why does this happen? Because we do highly value certain academic accomplishments, and if you are doing well enough academically to achieve these things, then you are probably doing pretty well in high school. Additionally, we highly value strong letters of recommendation, and often teachers strongly support students who really blow them away academically.

So we select for these other traits and end up, as a side effect, with a disproportionate number of valedictorians. But it’s not because they’re valedictorians that we select them, but rather that because of the things for which we select they are valedictorians. Or, to paraphrase a line from Llewellyn: being a valedictorian isn’t the reason for the decision; it’s the result of factors which were reason for the decision.

…

Think of it as the difference between a living thing and its fossil. A fossil isn’t the plant or animal itself: it’s the mineral imprint of the stuff that’s left behind. Or think of it like a shadow. A shadow is not the thing which casts a shadow. It’s the contours of where the light isn’t.

That’s how our admissions data work. It shows you where the decision wasn’t. It shows you the shape of our decisions, not the basis on which they were made. Admissions data are an accretion of the the sediment which dropped to the bottom of the decisions delta, and not the moving river where the actual action happened.

@Sleepy_willow made a lot of other great points that I just want to +1.