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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

#171

Post by ghaff »

lukas099 wrote: post #165
mchannon wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I googled it. 58:42 ratio of applicants. While I could accept that the bottom 16 of males and bottom 0 of females are joke applications, these each included a substantial application fee ($75).

They wouldn’t have to be joke applications, just worse than the ones that were accepted.

It wouldn't be the slightest bit shocking if, on average, men were somewhat more overconfident than women on their ability to get admitted and to the work at an elite technical school.

Of course, that doesn't mean the school doesn't also have their thumb on the scales to adjust demographics in various ways.

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

#172

Post by knowaveragejoe »

gruez wrote: post #32
knowaveragejoe wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She wants to win, and winning in this scenario does not involve pandering to the more extreme elements of the party. You need to win to actually achieve anything. The reality is that the more extreme elements of her party are not actually that popular.

In other words she's not really powerful, because she's ultimately beholden to the electorate/political machine and has little leeway to affect change in anything she believes in.

...yes? You have to win to do anything at all. Would you prefer she were ideologically pure and irrelevant?

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

#173

Post by foxyv »

mchannon wrote: post #168
foxyv wrote: post #153

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 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... .

If you're going to claim numbers make your position superior, I'd suggest using more meaningful numbers. 93% vs. 91% is a rounding error. What's the p-value for that? Makes me wonder. Was Steve Jobs qualified to attend Reed College? How about Bill Gates or Zuck for Harvard? Larry and Sergei? Would society (or their alma maters) be better off if someone took their place who ended up graduating? Or maybe the world is a…

Graduation rates have an error of zero. Unless you think the registrar didn't count properly.

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

#174

Post by bfrink »

HideousKojima wrote: post #169
foxyv wrote: post #153

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 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... .

That's majorly confounded by a significantly higher percentage of female students at Caltech being transfers, as opposed to beginning there their freshman year: https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

Caltech accepts a tiny, tiny amount of transfers in total; less than ten per year. The imbalance in transfer admissions is not significant.

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

#175

Post by [deleted] »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #76
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.

They can just date down? A lot of the times those degrees don’t pay better anyway

[deleted]

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

#176

Post by ghaff »

ghaff wrote: post #138
tines wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course, you don't know what the distribution of applicants looks like. Though I do strongly suspect that some groups (by gender, geography, even athletic credentials, etc.) almost certainly have a better shot than others all other things being equal.

MIT these days is about half men and half women undergrad. Pretty consistently, about twice as many men as women apply. So you can do the math. There are some other factors like I believe a slightly lower percentage of women accept than men and, of course, you don't know the relative quality academically of the applicant pool (which MIT doesn't publish any data on).

However, it would be really hard to believe the curves for the two populations are that different even if I can certainly believe men are a bit more likely to roll the dice by applying just in case they luck out.

I suspect an admissions officer, if they were candid, would probably say something like: Look, all the students with absolutely impeccable credentials applying are probably getting admitted. Those that are unqualified are not. So we're now figuring out what's most important to us as an institution from the middle tier of applicants especially given that we're dealing with a lot of noisy signal. And, yes, one of these things is that MIT decided years ago it wanted a reasonably balanced gender ratio which we didn't used to remotely have.

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

#177

Post by bfrink »

photochemsyn wrote: post #44

Caltech's gender makeup was 45% female a decade ago, although the school did only started admitting women in 1970. A more interesting question would be the ratio of debt-burdened to free-and-clear graduates from Caltech, which reflects on parental wealth. Not that the LA Times would want to take the focus off identity politics and onto class politics.

32% of 2023 graduates had any debt at all; the average total indebtedness (over all four (or more) years) of that 32% was $15,896[0]. Not bad for a school that costs $86,886 _per year_[1].

One should also note that "[s]tudents from families making $90K or below, will receive a no loan financial aid package (package will consist of grants and work-study)" and "[a]t least 20% of first-year students in the past three incoming class were Pell eligible students." [2]

[0] https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/typesofaid/loans/disclosure

[1] https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/documents/25301/2324_tuitionf...

[2] https://www.admissions.caltech.edu/afford

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

#178

Post by dang »

riffic wrote: post #7
klipt wrote: post #5

The overall gender imbalance in American higher education is now just as bad as when Title IX was first implemented, only in the opposite direction. What's interesting is this is deliberately excluded from many metrics of gender inequality, eg the UN defines inequality as "fewer women in college than men" so even 100% women and 0% men would be graded as "more equal" than 51% men and 49% women. Pretty Orwellian.

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads into gender flamewar hell (or any flamewar hell). It's just what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#180

Post by dang »

zer8k wrote: post #14
riffic wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads further into gender flamewar hell (or any flamewar hell). It's just what we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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