Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 183 posts

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

#151

Post by nataliste »

abeppu wrote: post #93
jeffwask wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

in a nutshell, this is why men dropped out and stopped talking to women at all

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

#153

Post by foxyv »

mchannon wrote: post #134
foxyv wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 is almost a statistical certainty no matter how many women are admitted. Not because of any preferential treatment of women or men, but because the admissions process…

Disagree. In my argument I used “talented and impressive” to mean as the admissions group saw them. It’s subjective, it’s likely inaccurate, but it’s consistent with itself. Essentially the admissions group stack-ranked a male pile and a separate female pile and pulled the top 100 off each. Having to stack rank #100 from the thin pile and #101 from the thick pile would reverse their order using the organization’s sta…

> This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus

You make a lot of assertions, however I think you would be better off finding evidence. For instance, 93% of women graduate, while only 91% of men do. This would seem to indicate that women are more qualified to be there by at least one metric.

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/incoming-class-50-percent....

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

#154

Post by ghaff »

riffic wrote: post #152
EasyMark wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a half century plus ago though? 50 years is a long long time.

no, it really wasn't that long ago.

I'd like to think that 55 years ago isn't really that far in the past but, at the scale of undergraduate academic institutions it sort of is. Although I think it was always coed going back to the 1800s, I think MIT still had just a handful of women in a class into the 1960s.

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

#155

Post by ghaff »

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…

It's a gross oversimplification of course but the next tier of admissions might be missing some proven athletes and some people with particularly noteworthy accomplishments (or donor ties) but most of them would do just fine at any of the elite schools.

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

#156

Post by ghaff »

mchannon wrote: post #144
onlypassingthru wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That is a hasty generalization fallacy. That presumes the applicant pools were comprised of the same quality of applicants. It could also be that there are simply more youn…

To the contrary, it presumes that the right edge of the curves for both applicant pools do _not_ connect at n - ~100. Given the size difference between cohorts, I argue the curves would never meet at all. If the sizes were identical or close, then you could argue I'm using the fallacy. Your second guess is correct.

I had zero interest in Caltech for reasons I probably couldn't tell you years later from when I was a young man. Ended up at a different engineering school somewhat by default and it was good for me. (Never even went on campus before I started.) No regrets.

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

#157

Post by ghaff »

mchannon wrote: post #145
caddemon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you do need to sacrifice some rigor to reach a level of perfect balance, or at least sacrifice the appearance of rigor. So let's agree to differ on that one. I think we would agree about most aspects of college admissions being flawed.

Flawed is probably technically correct. But you're basically optimizing for a good blend of student body and I think admission committees don't get things "right" but who knows what that even means? They probably mostly do well enough given there are lots of opinions on what the targets should be.

It's pretty clear to me that you don't want to just admit the highest SAT scores, the best athletes, or the best musicians (unless maybe you're Juilliard).

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

#158

Post by foxyv »

tines wrote: post #130
FormerBandmate wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

This is a bit of a misunderstanding of how statistics works. This does not reflect your personal chances of being accepted, only the chances of the subset of men who applied. You are assuming that all the men were equally qualified as the women and there were no other distinguishing characteristics between the two groups.

For instance, if there is a pre-selection process for one group that there was not for another it could skew the numbers significantly and make one group much smaller with a higher acceptance rate.

While the percentage differences could indicate bias against men, it could also indicate something else.

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

#159

Post by rexpop »

scottyah wrote: post #78
rexpop wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman I am not sure that "talented and impressive" is the metric by which we should be admitting students into higher education. On the contrary, I submit that we should be admitting the least impressive candidates who can matriculate in order to "train our weaknesses." Women's disenfranchisement has long been a hand tied behind our back, and it's high time that…

That's what State Schools are for. CalTech is where we send all the giant-brains so they're not held back and can produce things for society that us small-brains could never comprehend.

I don't subscribe to your eugenicist ontology.

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

#160

Post by tzs »

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 believe you've overlooked some important factors. First, Caltech puts a lot more effort into recruiting top women than into recruiting top men.

So if you are a top man but are not considering applying to Caltech Caltech probably won't reach out to try to change your mind. If you are a top women they are much more likely to reach out to you, maybe even sending someone to visit and personally pitch applying to Caltech. This is going to tend to raise the average quality of the set of women who end up applying to Caltech, so we should expect to see a higher acceptance rate for women.

Second, Caltech has been doing this for a long time. It was an all male school until around 1970 then went coed. I don't know when they started actively trying to recruit women, but they were doing it by the late '70s when I was a student there. At that time incoming classes were around 15% women and the percentage was slowly rising. It has been a long slow rise to where they are today.

That gives us at least 45 years of data on the results of these policies and as far as I know no one has ever found any indication that the women of Caltech are any less meritorious than the men. If they had went from 15% women to 50% in a few years then it would probably require lowering standards, but doing it over 45+ years can plausibly be explained just by the recruiting efforts.

Third, wanting to have more women isn't a mere matter of optics. Most undergraduates live on campus. For the first couple of years students are generally required to do so. But Caltech is a very hard school. Most undergraduates have little to no time to have any kind of social life that is not on campus. And they are around the age of peak horniness. When the gender ratio is out of whack in such an environment it causes a lot of stress (at least for the heterosexual students), for both men and women, which can greatly affect academic performance.

Also, as far as imposter syndrome goes, a sizable majority of the men at Caltech probably have it too. Most of them were at the top of the class for their whole life, and without having to put a lot of effort into it. School was always easy. Then they get to Caltech where they have to work their assess off just to reach average. It's hard to avoid getting some imposter syndrome.

Post reply on HN