You are, of course, absolutely right that there could be any number of causes.
But if a school like Caltech is failing to yield 250 students that absolutely rock their professors’ socks off from a graduating class of three and a half million, I think its faculty could be understood for being upset with the admissions department, whatever the underlying causes of the failure are.
I got considerable pushback a couple weeks ago in the other thread when I wrote:
Interestingly, no one actually objected my premise (which is pretty much self-evident at this point), insisting instead that it is academic institutions’ institutional right to pursue their other institutional priorities, whatever they might be.
One can simultaneously recognize that the institutions can, of course, choose their own priorities and craft their own policies, and that they shouldn’t then act all surprised that when the policies they craft prioritize other things over classroom rigor, the fall in admitted students’ ability to tolerate said rigor naturally follows.
Each individual faculty member might not actually have any evidence as such. They just see what they see in their classes.
But when half of Caltech faculty is shaking their heads in their collective cry for help, there’s gotta be some fire behind all that smoke.
Petey, I am asking this very respectfully, because I honestly think MIT admissions does it better than anyone (until recently I gave that distinction to Caltech;), but like you said, it’s your choice to post here;), so here it is:
Are you, really?
Is faculty really adcoms’ main stakeholder? Does their opinion outweigh that of the administration?
Because I honestly can’t imagine a math or physics professor saying “get me some more of those lacrosse players in my class” (to name just one of the purported institutional priorities).
I am sure every one of us here acknowledges that you and your colleagues at other institutions act under a very complex set of constraints.
But the very nature of the multifactor optimization is such that you are unlikely to optimize any one variable.
So the question then becomes: how much classroom rigor is a given institution willing to sacrifice in order to do better on some other metrics.
Evidently, half of Caltech’s faculty are now thinking: too much.