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Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

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Re: Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

#91

Post by onetimeusename »

disentanglement wrote: post #70
mchannon wrote: post #24

This is a third rail of conversation, regarding gender equality and equity, so please hold your downvotes if you differ from my positions. Some might value the perspective, and I feel we all could learn something here. I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive…

Coming from a country where the sort of super selective universities like Caltech don't exist, the fierce debates about equality of admissions to these sort of places never made sense to me. If Caltech, Harvard, MIT or wherever really were committed about advancing gender inequality, why not just raise the numbers of students and admit more people? The number of students is mainly limited artificially and there's no…

I think the prestige matters. I agree with you but in the US we deliberately create bottle necks and then award people who make it through with the most powerful jobs. The powerful want to perpetuate this.

I don't think this is a healthy situation, it is creating a zero sum game and a tiny class of people whose children have an edge getting accepted. There is such a gap between the average high school student and the people who can get into high ranked schools that it's very bad for the nation's health overall.

Re: Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

#92

Post by Aunche »

g15jv2dp wrote: post #63
mchannon wrote: post #24

This is a third rail of conversation, regarding gender equality and equity, so please hold your downvotes if you differ from my positions. Some might value the perspective, and I feel we all could learn something here. I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive…

> I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. You cannot guarantee that. Show some data or don't say anything. > That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in. This doesn't follow. If women se…

> Show some data or don't say anything.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/2/gender-parity-a...

> At Caltech, there has been an average gap of 10 percentage points between the acceptance rate for male and female applicants since 2003-04. Women were accepted at more than double the rate for men for the 2022-23 school year.

It's worth noting that men have it easier time getting into liberal arts universities like Brown or Yale.

> If women self-censor (not sure how to say it in English correctly) their applications in such a way that only top women dare applying, while men don't

In my personal experience, it was actually the opposite. I self censored my application to MIT because I noticed that they rejected all the men from my high school and accepted all the women who applied, despite the men being equally or more qualified.

Re: Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

#93

Post by abeppu »

jeffwask wrote: post #73
g15jv2dp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Women don't go to university to enter your personal dating pool.

While I get your point but it's short sighted to not view college as a place where both men and women learn and grow as humans outside of formal study. Learning to navigate relationships, discover your sexuality, and generally learn to work with and collaborate with people of different backgrounds. In an environment where the population is radically unbalanced there is less opportunity especially for the people who n…

Yes, a lot of growth and exploration of various kinds happens at college. Diversity in the university is probably good.

But, in the context of a society which historically denied women a place in higher education, and an institution which did not admit women, and then had disproportionately few women, to react to higher numbers of women with "this is good for men looking to date" is a really bad take. It frames more women in corners of higher ed where they were previously underrepresented in terms of how it's good for men, and specifically in framing women students as romantic opportunities for men.

You pretending that yeeetz's comment is part of some broader appreciation of a diverse college environment is kinda bs, b/c yeeetz did not say anything about learning from/working with people of a different background -- just that it makes dating easier for guys.

Re: Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

#94

Post by ghaff »

disentanglement wrote: post #70
mchannon wrote: post #24

This is a third rail of conversation, regarding gender equality and equity, so please hold your downvotes if you differ from my positions. Some might value the perspective, and I feel we all could learn something here. I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive…

Coming from a country where the sort of super selective universities like Caltech don't exist, the fierce debates about equality of admissions to these sort of places never made sense to me. If Caltech, Harvard, MIT or wherever really were committed about advancing gender inequality, why not just raise the numbers of students and admit more people? The number of students is mainly limited artificially and there's no…

For one thing, just admitting more people almost certainly decreases the access to quality education overall (as well as introducing pragmatic difficulties like housing). Schools do tweak who they admit outside of largely artificial measures like SATs. But, within reason, that's not a bad thing. You probably don't want to admit a class of students from top prep schools who had college test prep classes and helped starving children in Africa.

Re: Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

#95

Post by HideousKojima »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #87
isotypic wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did Actually, my understanding was that women typically apply to higher education at higher rates than men. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2004.09.008 has some data supporting this, but it is an older paper - has this changed in recent years, or is it different for Caltech specifically? > This also means that on average, a man on campus is…

It seems like there is actually some affirmative action for men going on at Caltech, the exact opposite of what he claimed. Check out the acceptance rates, it’s double for men https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

"The overall acceptance rate for women was 4.5%, and the overall acceptance rate for men was 1.9%."

I think you misread this?

Edit: the transfer acceptance rate is even more imbalanced in favor of women

Re: Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

#96

Post by mchannon »

isotypic wrote: post #80
mchannon wrote: post #24

This is a third rail of conversation, regarding gender equality and equity, so please hold your downvotes if you differ from my positions. Some might value the perspective, and I feel we all could learn something here. I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive…

> I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did Actually, my understanding was that women typically apply to higher education at higher rates than men. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2004.09.008 has some data supporting this, but it is an older paper - has this changed in recent years, or is it different for Caltech specifically? > This also means that on average, a man on campus is…

I spent a few seconds googling Caltech admissions (we’ll table the topic of how many commenters can’t google the actual number before accusing me of assuming wrong).

Google’s AI assistant (which is often wrong) cited a 58 male:42 female applicant ratio for a recent Caltech class.

Re: Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

#97

Post by FredPret »

ghaff wrote: post #72
FredPret wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's nice for the guys to have it easy for a couple of years, but it's bad for all of us if an entire generation of women find it almost impossible to date because they want to date men with degrees and those don't exist in large enough numbers.

Maybe. I've gone out with women with advanced degrees and women without undergrad degrees. They've all been smart and I pretty much didn't care about their educational resume. Historically, that simply wasn't an issue in general.

Not for you - I'm saying it's an issue for them: many (most? all?) university-educated women want to date their peers - men with degrees. This is a huge problem for them when the ratio of graduates are two women for each man.

Re: Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

#98

Post by wannacboatmovie »

g15jv2dp wrote: post #47
yeeetz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at least it makes dating easier for guys at schools like caltech now which is a non-trivial plus

Women don't go to university to enter your personal dating pool.

They do exactly this if they intend to grow into a well-rounded, functioning human.

This attitude is how we end up with individuals at 40, alone, hoarding cats, and having no functional social skills.

Dating is necessary to develop skills to survive in the real world and for humanity to propagate.

Re: Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

#99

Post by kjkjadksj »

HideousKojima wrote: post #79
kjkjadksj wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then lets see your statistics

Suppose there are 100 female applicants and 200 male applicants, and there is an even distribution of GPAs and ACT scores (or whatever criteria is used) in both the male and female pools. If Caltech takes the top 10 females and the top 10 males, the bottom 5 females of the 10 selected will be less qualified than all 10 of the males that were selected. We would need more data from Caltech about total applicants and th…

You made my point. A lot of assumptions, no data. The female pool could very well skew higher in their stats. My assumption is that the pools aren’t any different as you are randomly selecting from a general population of people above a threshold level of qualification. Given that you can easily take in more females that have the same qualifications as the males. Given how stuff like the act is scored there will be a lot of people with the same score at every score level.

Re: Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

#100

Post by lief79 »

yergi wrote: post #60
caddemon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's purely an optics thing. College is a community not just school. Do you want all your social groups, living area, etc. to be 75+% male as a college student?

WHAT. You're far off base. You go to school to learn a skill or trade. Go to the bar, church or anywhere else to socialize if that's your goal.

In the case of a large university in smaller/to medium towns, there frequently won't be much of a change in ratio unless you're really willing to travel. It's the same community feeding all the places within walking distance or a short drive.

Relatedly, a selective school means that the peers are likely to be similar. Those connections can last a life time, and socialization can greatly broaden your knowledge base and lead to a potentially more interesting skill set and/or a more complex trade.

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