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

latimes.com

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

#121

Post by ghaff »

disentanglement wrote: post #116
ghaff wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sta…

> For one thing, just admitting more people almost certainly decreases the access to quality education overall Why would that be the case? There are many much larger universities all around the globe and also in the US that manage to provide quality education to their students. To me, the statements that colleges make about their admission procedures always seem hypocritical to me. The colleges claim that the goal is…

Schools can be arbitrarily large I guess, e.g. some of the large state schools in the US. But private universities decide on their missions--which are often to have a smaller and more focused student body to your point. Making connections through my studies was mostly never a big deal but having a (somewhat) smaller school was. There are plenty of larger (and cheaper) universities if that's what you're looking for.

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #89
ghaff wrote: post #23

Some of it is probably a matter of deliberate policy choices. Other aspects include an organic shift away from engineering disciplines (like mechanical engineering) that were historically very heavily male dominated. I don't know the exact current ratio at MIT without looking up (pretty close to equal) but it was something like 1:7 50 years ago even though women were admitted since I think its founding.

Also there are way more women applying, to the point where you’re more than double as likely to get in as a man than as a woman. There’s a huge argument about this but no one actually looked up the data for some reason: https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by mchannon »

eigenket wrote: post #62
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…

> This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus This does not follow from what you wrote before. I think it would if equivalently talented men and women were equally likely to apply to Caltech. This does not seem to be the case, since as you say not as many women are applying. I'm going to make up some numbers for an analogous problem which might make the logic…

Unfortunately this is a textbook straw man fallacy, the epistemological Fourier transform from the actual argument to a domain where your position is solvable.

Let’s start with the assumption that the most qualified women applied to Caltech instead of pursuing educations in law, medicine, or other top-tier professions. I posit a number of top-tier women who tick all the boxes would simply have no interest in Caltech as a school. Men too, but less of them wouldn’t be interested. It’s not a matter of women having less merit, quite the contrary: they consider the legal or medical professions more worthy of their merit and thus for them applying to Caltech would be suboptimal for their career aspirations.

No, the fact is more men applied because men have fewer attractive alternatives, and unless you believe men are inferior writ large, more women are getting in than men in spite of fewer applying, not because the women are more talented, but because the admissions organization prefers having more women than men, application numbers be damned.

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

#124

Post by caddemon »

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.

Nah, sorry you had a shit college experience, but college is the place I made most of my close, lifelong friends. And had an awesome time. While also learning, they're not mutually exclusive. It's a shared experience you can't replicate just going to the bar.

It's not like they're taking women that can't hack the coursework. They could replace the entire incoming class with select people amongst the rejected and the class would still be successful. College admissions is partly a crap shoot. If they tilt the crap shoot part in a way that makes the community better, who cares?

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

#125

Post by klipt »

riffic wrote: post #51
klipt wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have humans fundamentally changed since 50 years ago? Was there something fundamentally wrong with women 50 years ago that we "fixed"?

societal roles and expectations have certainly changed.

If societal roles and expectations make one gender less successful, is that something wrong with "men"/"women" or rather something wrong with the roles and expectations?

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

#126

Post by caddemon »

mchannon wrote: post #64
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?

Given the option as an 18-yo male I’d probably opt for 5% male, but that’s strictly a matter of personal preference, and not a basis for admissions. I endured 75+% male and didn’t particularly enjoy it, but that’s not why I attended my similarly-sized engineering college. I went for the education and rigor. Caltech is and has always been about hardcore study. It’s not a cotillion. At least it didn’t used to be.

You don't need to sacrifice the rigor to have a more balanced community, at least not at the total size Caltech is. There's a large component of college admissions these days that is somewhat arbitrary. High school resumes (at least the type that applies to these schools) have become absolutely cracked. Like it used to mean something to have a research internship, now it's weird not to.

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

#127

Post by eigenket »

mchannon wrote: post #123
eigenket wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus This does not follow from what you wrote before. I think it would if equivalently talented men and women were equally likely to apply to Caltech. This does not seem to be the case, since as you say not as many women are applying. I'm going to make up some numbers for an analogous problem which might make the logic…

Unfortunately this is a textbook straw man fallacy, the epistemological Fourier transform from the actual argument to a domain where your position is solvable. Let’s start with the assumption that the most qualified women applied to Caltech instead of pursuing educations in law, medicine, or other top-tier professions. I posit a number of top-tier women who tick all the boxes would simply have no interest in Caltech…

Did you reply to the wrong comment? This doesn't appear to have anything to do with what I wrote.

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

#128

Post by tines »

snarf21 wrote: post #86
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 think you are missing the point that this is the way you get equal numbers of men and women applying. Mechanical engineering is currently 90/10 in the US. It takes extraordinary measures to create change and change is a pendulum. You can't ride the break to make it not go past equilibrium, you have to push it further past so that it will eventually move in the direction you want. If you want more women applying, gi…

> this is the way you get equal numbers of men and women applying

I don't think this is the only way, it's just the easy/lazy way. Being sexist during admissions is a proximal way of getting more women graduates, but it's also unfair. Focusing on distal methods can be more fair and also get the outcome we all want.

Things like helping girls out in elementary school and high school by, say, requiring STEM courses for everyone and giving plenty of help to the low-performing students, along with plenty of encouragement to enter the field, and plenty of good examples to show girls that they're individuals and might be good at STEM, are ways to avoid being sexist while also advancing toward the goal. The fact that it's a slower method isn't a good argument; we could just ban boys from doing STEM at all and that would make women 100% of the graduates. But that's not fair, so we don't do it.

IMO the university is not the place to try to achieve these balances, because they only have gross methods that can't be applied fairly, it's way too late in the process. Intervening earlier is the correct and fair way.

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

#129

Post by tines »

caddemon wrote: post #124
yergi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nah, sorry you had a shit college experience, but college is the place I made most of my close, lifelong friends. And had an awesome time. While also learning, they're not mutually exclusive. It's a shared experience you can't replicate just going to the bar. It's not like they're taking women that can't hack the coursework. They could replace the entire incoming class with select people amongst the rejected and the…

> If they tilt the crap shoot part in a way that makes the community better, who cares?

Everybody's all for tilting the crap shoot until they start tilting away from Asians.

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

#130

Post by tines »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #89
ghaff wrote: post #23

Some of it is probably a matter of deliberate policy choices. Other aspects include an organic shift away from engineering disciplines (like mechanical engineering) that were historically very heavily male dominated. I don't know the exact current ratio at MIT without looking up (pretty close to equal) but it was something like 1:7 50 years ago even though women were admitted since I think its founding.

Also there are way more women applying, to the point where you’re more than double as likely to get in as a man than as a woman. There’s a huge argument about this but no one actually looked up the data for some reason: https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

What? No. From your link:

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

You're less than half as likely to get in as a man.

Transfer acceptance rates are even more skewed towards women.

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