Why Caltech Is in a Class by Itself
mindingthecampus.com
mindingthecampus.com
One of the most interesting things I heard in my first day at orientation at Carnegie Mellon was CMU's president talking about all the students they rejected- xx perfect SAT scores, xxx students with a 4.0, xx valedictorians, etc. In other words, CMU's perspective is that someone purely interested in academics (and nothing else) isn't as strong of an asset. I think it made for a more fulfilling academic atmosphere for the entire student body.
What this means is that at Caltech, there are no dumb jocks, dumb legacies, or dumb affirmative action students.
I kind of think that's weird too (besides the offensive nature of those words). Carnegie Mellon has a reputation for being an absurdly nerdy school, but along with Computer Science it also top business schools, drama schools, and art schools. That is a weird-ass cross section of human. There's plenty of areas that CMU may lack compared to other top schools, but I think having a broad, diverse student body is one of its strongest assets.
That said, I'm trying not to translate much to Caltech itself from this article since this cat sounds kind of crazy.
The point was that the stereotype is formed quite strongly because those groups do exist on campus. He was using those words to demonstrate why using different academic criteria for different groups of students was problematic. If there were no academic differences between the regular student body and minorities or athletes people wouldn't make those "offensive" generalizations.
You keep using that phrase, affirmative action. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Modern affirmative action in higher education isn't about meeting quotas and admitting inferior students; rather, it's more like the Rooney Rule in the NFL, a way to make sure that minority students are getting looked at.
By the way, MIT has an active affirmative action program and we still seem to be doing just fine.
But since you brought it up... At Caltech they didn't say they didn't use affirmative action at all. They said they didn't lower the "academic" criteria- i.e. test scores and GPA- for minority students. They do that at some schools. I wouldn't know about MIT.
Funny, you certainly had no problem rubbing your offensive, misguided views about minority students in my face.
They said they didn't lower the "academic" criteria- i.e. test scores and GPA- for minority students. They do that at some schools. I wouldn't know about MIT.
They don't do that at any schools in the United States, actually ... at least not at any in compliance with Federal law.
And then you say that I have offensive and misguided views about minority students when I have not professed any views about minority students.
I don't think I'm being overly inventive when I say you seem rather inventive.
Sure you have, scare quotes and all. From your comment:
The point was that the stereotype is formed quite strongly because those groups do exist on campus .... If there were no academic differences between the regular student body and minorities or athletes people wouldn't make those "offensive" generalizations.
Except that it's not the truth ... no schools do that for minority students. It's a strawman.
Having taught at UoM, I can say that unfortunately this translated to their performance on exams as well...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger
So yes, it's a strawman ... no schools do that anymore. Lots of schools never did it. And the schools that were doing so, were doing so with a fundamental misunderstanding of and in non-compliance with both the spirit and letter of the law.
Entering "minorities" and athletes enter with lower GPAs and SATs.
So? Surprise, surprise: when you start adding factors besides pre-college test scores to your admissions criteria you see ... variation in pre-college scores.
The methodology has changed. Now they use humans instead of a point system.
So you're unhappy that non SAT/GPA factors are taken into account. I'm curious if you've got the intellectual consistency to be in favor of simply ranking all students by their high school GPAs and SAT scores in descending order and taking the first N students. Maybe we don't actually need admissions committees or essays at all ...
Actually, they do. The Supreme Court decision involving the University of Michigan Law School explicitly allowed that practice.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger
* The Court's majority ruling, authored by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, held that the United States Constitution "does not prohibit the law school's narrowly tailored use of race in admissions decisions to further a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body."
Gratz didn't overturn Grutter. (They were issued the same day.) Grutter says that some things are permissible while Graz says that some other things aren't.
Yup ... I was outside the Supreme Court that day, actually. :)
Gratz makes clear that point systems are illegal, which was my claim. I never claimed that affirmative action or race considerations are illegal, writ large.
The original claim was "They said they didn't lower the "academic" criteria- i.e. test scores and GPA- for minority students."
Grutter said that they could use race to decide admit certain folks according to different criteria than they use for other folks.
The University of Michigan would give you +1.0 on GPA if you were black (e.g., 2.8 GPA -> 3.8 GPA):
http://www.cir-usa.org/Images/mich_index.gif
Medical schools have similar practices - the average black student accepted into medical school has GPA/MCAT a full standard deviation below the average white student. (I.e., 50% of black medical students are in the bottom 20% of medical students.)
http://web.archive.org/web/20080801022539/http://www.aamc.or...
Oh really? I suppose it's unlikely that peoples' prejudices could cause them to make inaccurate generalizations about the world around them. And do go on about the differences between the minorites and the "regular students".
He was using those words to demonstrate why using different academic criteria for different groups of students was problematic.
The assumption being that this is actually happening to a significant degree. The SCOTUS has set down fairly strict rules governing affirmative action in admissions processes, including forbidding quotas and rigid point-systems that benefit minorities.
"The academic achievement gap between the admitted white and Asian students and those designated as "underrepresented minorities" is often huge, in statistical terms often exceeding a full standard deviation (equivalent to a 600 vs. a 700 on each of the sections of the SAT exam)."
Sounds like a significant degree to me. Should the OP pretend not to notice this is happening?
I know it doesn't cite sources, but neither do you.
I agree with you that it's a strength of Carnegie Mellon (weakness of CalTech) that it has excellence in a broad (narrow) range of academic subjects. But that's not an argument against the author's thesis: the pursuit of non-academic diversity has a major negative impact on the academic quality of most major research universities in the US.
(Disclosure: I'm a white Princeton Alum who played one of the varsity sports which were not considered in admissions, so I took a bit of umbrage at those athletes who got a boost at the admissions office. Not that I'm a petty person or anything....)
My undergrad university in the UK (Bristol) was/is widely regarded as an "Oxbridge reject" school, full of those from the upper-classes that were expected to go to Oxbridge but failed. The private schools (called public schools in the UK) were outraged when Bristol announced that they would start offering placements not on academic achievement but on potential, so a straight-A student from Eton would be evaluated about the same as a straight-B student from inner-city comprehensive schools where the teaching was noticeably worse. It was a great idea.
It is wrong, if not dangerous, to evaluate universities by abstract metrics such as research or academic performance. Universities are much, much more. They are the student newspaper, the radio station, the sports teams, the activists, the hackers, the politicians. Students undoubtedly benefit from exposure to all.
(Disclosure: I'm a white middle-class Englishman who went to a Top 10 univerisity in the UK and now I'm a PhD student at the University of Californa, Santa Cruz)
Also: Gauchos >> Banana Slugs
I fail to guess in what sense research and academic performance are somehow "abstract metrics" while non-academic diversity isn't. You may dispute their effectiveness but SAT/GPA scores, number of peer-reviewed publications, million dollars in grants, etc. are certainly less abstract than the color of your skin or the word on the street about the school you attended.
Does the presence of a sports team make students feel more school pride, increasing student performance? How much does commute times factor in? What about whether there's political activist students that successfully negotiate better benefits for TAs?
If you look at metrics alone, you lose the woods for the trees. It looks like CalTech have their head on straight, at least according to some comments here, about potential and passion, not about numbers. This is what the blog post advocates, and that I think is a very short-sighted position to take.
Still, I agree. This seems like a fantastically inefficient way to meet people with different backgrounds.
Also, even tuitions at private colleges are massively subsidized - the subsidies just follow the students (e.g., subsidized student loans, need-based aid, etc).
You got any evidence about the trade-offs on that? In my experience, the very diverse student body of my alma mater formed closed cliques (racially, nationally) and the wide variance in backgrounds caused most, if not all, classes to slow down to the lowest common denominator.
Why should the taxpayer or the wealthy donor be fleeced to provide zero value to the unwitting student (who probably doesn't have enough maturity to make decisions independently anyway)?
Honestly, I felt like it cheapened my degree.
My impression was that non-diversity of interests actually extended to a complete lack of interest in theoretical math (my intended major). Everything was extremely rigorous but nothing was going to go beyond a certain theoretical level.
It indeed seemed unique in the sense of producing the most noticeably uniform group of students I saw in my different campus visits. It seemed like they did make a nod to English by having some breadth requirements and so it seemed it would actually have been even harder for a Caltech graduate to take theoretical perspective within an engineering field than it would have been for them to appreciate a sonnet on their off-hours.
Theoretical math is hugely important, popular, and a major department within the Physics, Math, and Astronomy division. Personally, I found Caltech to be far too theoretical for my own liking, as a former aerospace engineer.
Now, I'm a second semester senior with a 3.6 cumulative, I've TAed 5 classes, done 3-4 semesters of systems research, and accepted a job at Facebook (it was between them and Google).
If Caltech would have rejected me (I didn't apply) for being a "dumb jock," more power to them -- it might even be a worthwhile heuristic. I think CMU made the right choice though.
Caltech accepts people who discover their passion for a field very early in life and then excel at basic academics. Some, like myself, fail to take advantage of the academic opportunities and come out much worse than you seem to from CMU. Tech very well would have accepted you, if you had applied, but they would have done it for your demonstrated interest in CS--more likely ACM, since CS at Caltech is an entirely different fish than at other schools--while basically treating your athletics as a null factor. On the other hand, it would have perhaps been a slight negative against you, because athletics took time away from when you could have been volunteering in a local college science lab or hacking some code together. The students who read applications and we who screen them when they apply to sit on that committee are quite serious when it comes to seeking applicants who show a "passion for math and science."
http://my.cmu.edu/portal/site/admission/adm_statistics/
You can see that compared to the other departments that the College of Fine Arts lags "significantly" behind the other "academically rigorous" departments. Yet even that being the case, we have one of the strongest fine arts programs in the country with many of the programs being considered top 10.
My reason for bringing this up is that college admissions are (and should be) based on something more meaningful than paper qualifications. The point of a well rounded University is to foster a place of learning across a varied set of fields. Who is to say that athletics is any more or less worthwhile than Fine Arts, Drama, or Computer Science? Athletics contribute a lot to a school's experience. Who cares if their grades are slightly lower and didn't get perfect SAT scores. They are recruited because they have astounding talent in their respective fields just like a geek might have a talent for numbers or a music major has talent for playing the piano.
(I am not and never was an athlete)
Also, for all of the article's bashing of "dumb jocks" athletes at Carnegie Mellon slightly outperform non-athletes in GPA (something like 3.23 to 3.16 while I was there.) I ran cross-country and track there with people who were studying Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Architecture, Physics, Biomedical Engineering, etc. -- the one who was studying Biomedical Engineering ended up with a 3.97 as well as being one of the best distance runners in school history (3:51 1500m, 14:40 5000m, runner-up at the DIII national track and field championship for 5000m.) The team has consistently gone to the DIII national cross-country championship in recent years as well. I was never good enough to go with them, but some of my best memories are with that team. That's an important part of college too.
Caltech can have their famous losing streaks.
So if you're CMU admissions, how do you maximize yield in those scenarios when P(student matriculates) is relatively low? You reject the student in favor of the better (if lower scoring) fit. Not only does it enable them to better predict/manage the size of the incoming class, but it also increases yield, which is a number that's reported directly to US News and which (in principle if not in practice) describes the desirability of admission from the perspective of incoming freshmen.
The author of the article spends an unfortunate amount of time talking about SAT and AP scores, as if that's all that Tech cares about. Having served on an institute committee to decide the direction of the Admissions office, I can assure you that this simply isn't true. Caltech's sky-high SAT and AP scores aren't an end in and of themselves, they're simply a side-effect. Caltech looks, more than anything else, for a demonstrated passion for math and science. Near-perfect SAT and AP scores are just a check box on the way to demonstrating a true passion and ability for math and science.
And that's really key, because a perfect GPA, SAT & AP scores, and great teacher recommendations isn't enough to get in. There has to be something more. Usually that 'something more' is independent work in a research lab, science competition, personal projects, or somesuch, and so the incoming class at Caltech is never just people who know how to get good grades and do nothing else, but a crowd of voracious achievers, many of whom have spent their lives figuring out how to push themselves harder and faster towards their passions than allotted for by whatever system they were raised in. To characterize them otherwise is a mistake.
I'd reject with a note, "This student may excel, but not in a university setting".
Most schools though, love to promote those who are a reflection of their definition of "greatness", so this sort of independent course is widely discoursed.
I think this is an admission that college, and defiantly CalTech is not about knowledge but academics, and the two are not the same. Imho, academics is also not the same as learning.
And I firmly believe that almost all studying is at its core autodidacty. You get out of college what you put into it.
That is to say, self-motivation is necessary to acquire knowledge in and out of a formal academic setting.
But clearly where you are and who your peers are, is a huge influence on the human social animal. And because you might love learning but hate the rather heavy hand of authority at the pre-college education level, you might still want to co to college.
Specifically, potential to change the world may be intimately related to an almost pathological love of reason and hatred of unreasonable rules, methods, approaches and behavior.
I believe Caltech wants students who will do great things. But I may be wrong? That may not be the goal, actually I am quite certain that is not the only goal.
The way Caltech evaluates students is by using a proxy of academics. There are other proxies but clearly formal schooling is a main component of the evaluation proxy.
I will not go into the proven dangers of optimizing the proxy instead of the thing that the proxy is proxy-ing for.
School prior to college is well known to not just impart knowledge but also things like arbitrary rules and enforced discipline over agreed upon cooperation, etc.
College has some of that as well, although much less so then pre-college education.
Assuming someone has proven both a disdain for formal schooling and also a love of learning, knowledge, and scientific discovery, we could speculate that is a person with an extreme love of logic and hatred of lack of logic, who might to well in an environment with more knowledge and less B.S.
We all know anecdotes about great geniuses and the trouble they got in at school. Beyond that there is a lot of formal work done on "gifted" children and learning environments.
So an argument could be made that exceptional academic success at the pre-college level is a bad predictor of truly exceptional success in changing the world.
But I don't think formal academic success is just a proxy for Caltech. I think Caltech is specifically looking for kids who will work well within the system.
Caltech's filter for students proven to do exceptionally well within the academic systems is I suspect a goal in itself.
Actually I find Caltech's laser like focus on proven academic success refreshing. Because it is honest, open and complete.
Other schools make use of the same proxy but don't do it as well as Caltech.
So in my opinion, Caltech is pursuing a low risk/high reward strategy of potential Nobel prize winners who don't make a lot of trouble in school and don't tax their advisor's schedule too much.
There is an alternative slightly higher risk which might have a better chance of picking up real-far outliers.
tl;dr: Does Caltech value academic potential over intellectual potential?
Anything less is beyond poor compared to Caltech's admissions standards.
For instance, when I was a student there, they had a professor, Edwin Munger, who was a professor of Geography. He was one of the world's leading authorities on Africa. He taught a popular class on Africa. The lectures were held in his office, which was big enough to comfortably hold a dozen or so students. Adjoining his office was his personal library of materials on Africa--one of the best collections of African research material in the world.
His classes were particularly interesting because he frequently would have guests speak and take questions. One week, the guest might be his good personal friend, the President or Emperor or Dictator of some African country. Then, a few weeks later, the guest might be his good personal friends, the leader of the revolutionary army trying to overthrow the aforementioned President. Munger knew nearly every important leader in Africa on both sides of most significant conflicts, and was close friends with many of them. When they would visit the US, they would often swing by Pasadena to visit him.
Er, what? I'm not following any of the author's points here. The introductory paragraphs read as a barely coherent rant against every major event that's occurred on university campuses since the 1950s. While I agree that not everything has been to the benefit of academics, I definitely disagree with the author's point that American universities reached their peak prior to World War 2. Pre-war, there were institutions in Europe and Britain that could match American universities; post-war, American universities were far ahead of the rest.
1. Exploring more than middle-class American political ideologies isn't an example of a decline in learning for the same reason learning only Java or C# makes doesn't make anyone a better programming student.
2. Derrida is my homeboy.
I haven't read the book these claims are based on, but a Harvard professor wrote what looks like a pretty thorough debunking here:
In my application I wrote about my experience in high school athletics and I obviously wasn't put in the reject pile. I also expressed my desire to be at a college where everyone was focused on learning, unlike at the underachieving public school I attended. That's the type of student Caltech is looking for: passionate about learning and STEM. While that usually translates to perfect SAT scores, an 800 in math is not a requirement.
The author stresses numbers because those are measurable and easily comparable, leading to the easy critique that numbers aren't everything. As in my case, Caltech admissions agrees, and the result is an incredibly diverse population considering how focused the school is academically and how small the classes are. A guy in my class designed and built a bridge in his home town. I knew kids who were home-schooled and who were champion ballroom dancers.
BTW My junior year we broke the women's basketball team's 10-year losing streak. One win of that magnitude trumps any winning season in my book.
My SAT scores were lower than those cited in the article, but were average for my freshman class (750/640). I understand that there has been inflation in the SAT scoring system since.
One thing not mentioned was Caltech's attitude towards students who were accepted. Once they were in, they were in. You could flunk and fail repeatedly, and Caltech was always ready to let you have another go, even a decade later. I know students who dropped out and were welcomed back a decade later to finish.
I lucked out in going to Caltech. The way the college was run fit my attitudes completely. The administration always treated the students like sentient, responsible adults (even when we behaved badly) and by and large the students responded by acting like adults. For example, professors were not allowed to take attendance at lecture. The students could show up or not, their choice. Grades were determined by the midterm and final, which of course were given on the honor system.
The students liked the system, and if you broke the honor system you were ostracized. Nobody cheated that I knew of the entire 4 years I was there.
Of course, a Cal Tech star prof was Feynman. My understanding of his time in grad school at Princeton is that he mostly was on the floor of his dorm room talking and thinking about what became his approcah to QM. GOOD.
The frosh students at Cal Tech are ready for a LOT and should be encouraged to take the freedom to pursue it. Heck, they about deserved a Bachelor's on the day they were admitted, so after that, let them do their best relatively independent work and not sweat trivia.
Hear! Hear! to the 'once a Techer, always a Techer' mentality.
The other key thing about the honor code was the lack of proctored exams. I took most of my frosh ones at 3 am in the student SciFi library (SPECTRE, ftw)
I read with bemusement the various articles and laments about rampant cheating in colleges. And yet this cheating was completely absent at Caltech. Even the failing students did not cheat, it never occurred to them.
Perhaps that's also why I place no value on my piece of paper degree or GPA. I think it's moldering in the basement somewhere. What I value is the experience at Caltech and what I learned there. Reading the catalog of what classes I could take next semester was like picking which dessert you wanted at a banquet; the only regret was my stomach was only so large. Cheating would have gotten me nothing that I wanted.
I also read about students complaining that their college courses aren't "relevant", who wonder what the point is, that they'll never use that knowledge, etc., then graduate and wonder why they can't get a job. It seems pretty obvious to me why they can't.
However, I think most people would agree that academics are not the only thing that matters for success, either personally or professionally.
But isn't it a bit odd you had to go to college to do that?
Wouldn't it be better if you had grown up in a neighborhood that would let you do that?
OK, you didn't and you're glad college provided you that opportunity, but isn't it a bit sad how much $ they charge for what is at its core human interaction?
How many people make 6 figures for studying for and taking standardized tests every day?
>> However, I think most people would agree that academics are not the only thing that matters for success,
>> either personally or professionally.And strangely while many universities aim to do just that, I don't know of any who take it seriously enough to teach formal classes in self discovery or making friends and influencing people.
Which you absolutely could seriously do. But no one does. I think this shows that those "other" things are not something universities truly aim to teach, but want to make use of in creating an environment which justifies the very high cost of education.
Here ya go:
http://www.uq.edu.au/study/course.html?course_code=CRMD7001 http://www.eastern.edu/academic/cas/depts/missions_and_anthr... - MIS260
http://las.alfred.edu/psychology/ - "Life skills Students in Alfred University's psychology program learn about human behavior, develop self-discovery skills, and learn to think critically about themselves and others."
Self discovery is often an important part of a Psychology or Counseling major and "influencing people" aka Negotiation is taught at business and law schools across the country. I even took a corporate course in it 3 years ago.
Keep in mind that Caltech is a very small school, smaller than a lot of high schools. They chose to focus on doing one thing very well, and they succeeded at it. For some types of people, very much including myself, it was a perfect fit for my personality and what I wanted to get out of college. If you're not one of those people, there are plenty of other excellent choices.
First of all, SAT scores or grades are hardly any measure of the 'smartness' of academic credibility of the student. For example, as a commenter above pointed out, in computer science, a person who has average grades but more research work and open source experience is probably more motivated to learn than a student with just good grades.
Secondly, the data[1] proves even that though minority students who make it with affirmative action might graduate with average of below average scores but perform as well as their colleagues in their professional life. Come to think of it, isn't this what education is really about. Changing people's lives for good.
Thirdly, contrary to what the author might want us to believe, the politically charged atmosphere in the Universities during the 70s was good for the society. Remember the free speech movement? Universities have been the breeding ground of revolutionary thinking for centuries and it is actually unhealthy for the society if the Universities are too compliant with the dominant thinking.
Fourthly, though I am sometimes critical of exuberant spending on sports by American Universities, they are the primary reason of the USA's sporting excellence. Why should a student who is obsessed with and excels at track-and-field be penalized for his obsession? In addition, These 'dumb-jocks' work harder than most students. Contrary to popular beliefs; in most top ranked Universities these athletes have to finish as many credits as a non-athlete and have to work as hard on their courses.
I think very highly of CalTech and respect them, but the reasons for their excellence is not what the author would want us to believe. The article is nothing but horse manure.
[1] Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, 2008
Rather, they sought out qualified women and recruited them, much the way other schools recruit athletes. For instance, they might send someone to personally go visit the woman to try to sell her on the benefits of Caltech, and pay for the woman and her parents to visit and tour the campus.
that is exactly what affirmative action is.
Could you give an example of how this author could have criticized the practice of affirmative action without attacking racial, ethnic and sexual minorities themselves? I agree that the author clearly has an axe to grind, but I see nothing in the text which attacks a minority. Honestly, it seems like you're accusing him of racism based only off the fact that he opposes affirmative action.
ADDED:
>SAT scores or grades are hardly any measure of the 'smartness' of academic credibility of the student. For example, as a commenter above pointed out, in computer science, a person who has average grades but more research work and open source experience is probably more motivated to learn than a student with just good grades.
The author uses SAT scores because they are the best objective measure we have of academic quality. Most other measures (GPA, high school research experience) are going to be strongly effected by where the student is from. Nowhere does the author suggest that research experience shouldn't be considered. And, in fact, using this measure would benefit the rich, white, and privileged students, as they are much more likely to have such research opportunities than poor minorities.
>Secondly, the data[1] proves even that though minority students who make it with affirmative action might graduate with average of below average scores but perform as well as their colleagues in their professional life.
The data as you describe only confirms that well-known fact that top-tier schools add negligible value to the professional prospect of its students. That is, after controlling for SATs, familiy income, etc., future success doesn't depend on what school you attend. (I can pull the study if you want.) That data says nothing about the how lower admission standards for minorities impact the schools academics. And, as you say, their grades are weak both in high school and college.
>Thirdly, contrary to what the author might want us to believe, the politically charged atmosphere in the Universities during the 70s was good for the society.
This isn't the main thesis of the article; the author is just giving you his perspective on where the situation originated.
>Why should a student who is obsessed with and excels at track-and-field be penalized for his obsession?
No one is suggesting that athlete's be penalized. The author is arguing that they shouldn't receive the (massive) boost in admissions.
Racial balancing is somehow corrupting? If I am making a claim like that I would definitely like to back it up with some facts.
>" The typical African- American and Latino student who gets admitted to the most elite colleges and universities in the U.S...."
What is a typical African-American student? Can I meet him? Racial stereotypes are loaded, and the authors throws them around like bad puns.
>"a requirement often interpreted to mean that if there is a male lacrosse, soccer, water polo, volleyball, cross-country, or fencing team there must be a female equivalent"
And this is a problem, why? Why shouldn't there be a female equivalent of a fencing team?
I don't think the author is racist or sexist, I am sure he is a perfectly nice person to meet. However, his deep hatred for programs to achieve social equality leads him to have beliefs that are very very worrisome from a racial and gender equality point of view.
Incidentally, I decided to add to my original comment and address your other points. I'd love it if you had the time to respond. If you prefer, I can move those points to a separate reply.
Replied above in a separate reply.
What's the definition of "female equivalent"?
Doesn't the validity of your assumed "should" depend on the definition we're using?
> However, his deep hatred for programs to achieve social equality leads him to have beliefs that are very very worrisome from a racial and gender equality point of view.
Are you suggesting that all current programs to achieve social equality are worthwhile, that none of them are bad? Or is it just that any criticism is necessary wrong?
Author's words not mine. I should have put quotes around "female equivalent". I believe that female sports should be given as much attention as male sports.
>Are you suggesting that all current programs to achieve social equality are worthwhile, that none of them are bad? Or is it just that any criticism is necessary wrong?
No. Some of them might have failed spectacularly and deserve criticism. But to criticize the social equality programs in colleges because they get students with lower SAT scores into colleges is a very imprecise argument to make.
Why should they be "given attention" and by whom? What about folks who don't provide said equal attention? (While the majority favor male sports, there are folks who favor female sports. Surely both are in need of correction.)
For example, why shouldn't womens' preference be given some weight?
I note that women are less likely to attend women's sports than men are to attend men's sports. Heck - women are more likely to attend men's sports than they are to attend men's sports.
Be careful - the "provides valuable diversity" argument requires differences (in aggregate). If there are differences, then exact duplicate treatment is inappropriate.
Is it? The SAT folks claim that SATs correlate somewhat with college achievement, and the college folks seem to agree (otherwise they wouldn't use it).
What do you think that the goal of college admissions is?
Regardless the color of the skin, of the eyes, or of any other ridiculous parameters only one thing matters : excellence.
You talk about social equality. But is social equality a goal to reach ? If so, would you care to explain me why, and according to whom ?
There are bright people, there are dumb people. Fact of life. I don't care how you try to make them into groups through the aggregation of some parameters I find ridiculous - all I see is the end result.
Trying to impose social equality means working against this natural repartition. This takes cash and energy that could be used differently. Even worse - the added burden from those who can't pull they own weight is put on those who could excel.
To me, excellence seems like a better (and fairer) goal to reach.
See, here lies the problem. Define: excellence. As I have maintained, excellence is not tied well with SAT scores or GRE scores or papers or citation counts. I think excellence is very personal. If I am a economically disadvantaged student, but held my own in a violent high school in a bad neighborhood, worked a job but still scored good grades; much better than my peers. Did well in SATs without having any money for extra SAT training. If I resisted peer pressure to join a gang while focusing on my studies, I would think I did a pretty excellent job at my life. To compare me with a kid who comes from a privileged background had extra tuitions for SATs and had all the time in the world to spend on his studies and did much better in SATs is probably unfair.
>There are bright people, there are dumb people.
In your mind which likes to simplify things. Not in the world there aren't. If you think you are smart because you are really good at Math, I would like to introduce you to my friend who is an exceptional soprano.
>Trying to impose social equality means working against this natural repartition.
There are no natural repartitions. Only artificial ones imposed by the complex societies. I am not blaming the society, just saying that we could improve it to be much fairer and to aspire for anything less would be unfortunate.
>To me, excellence seems like a better (and fairer) goal to reach.
We agree, just not on the definition of excellence.
It sure is. But life itself is unfair. If you resisted all the pitfalls that society or the environment put in front of you, good for you, but I'm sorry it is not what matters.
What can you produce ? Can you outcompete others who do not have had such obstacles ? If you can, then yes I call that excellence, if you can't that personal growth/karma/name it the way you want.
As you said - "much better than my peers" - that's good, but we are all in a big pond called mankind. The way I see it, some people think they deserve something just for the randomness of their birthplace, or for not screwing up.
Sorry they don't. There are a lot of people on this earth who may have surpassed even greater problems, yet did not make it.
Trying to improve or fix society means making the situation even more complex, with artificial restriction - thus even more unfair in the end.
Bright people come in all shapes and colors. A soprano, a sport pro, a math wiz - bright people in different areas. They all reach for excellence.
I don't believe I'm smart. I just believe I'm doing my best to become excellent in one specific domain, and I don't want to be judged on anything but my performance.
I wouldn't agree with this point. Though this claim has traditionally been accepted by academia but plenty of literature exists to make a claim otherwise too. I never took the SATs but did take the GREs and my anecdotal experience would say that standardized test are only a good measure of test-taking abilities.
>This isn't the main thesis of the article; the author is just giving you his perspective on where the situation originated.
The author tries to paint an idyllic picture of Universities of the 40s and 50s. He builds upon this premise and makes a claim that the quality of the Universities has gone down and ties it to the introduction to the Affirmative Action and rise of sports. I am attacking this very premise in my comment.
>No one is suggesting that athlete's be penalized. The author is arguing that they shouldn't receive the (massive) boost in admissions.
An obsession of being very good at something (be it sports or academics) brings with itself an inherent penalty of not being very good at other things. Though I am not saying that its impossible to excel at both sports and academics but to treat sporting excellence as a skill not as valuable as being good at academics is something I take exception at. In addition, considering that good sporting skills is how many racially and economically disadvantaged students make it to college is also not lost in the author's arguments.
>That data says nothing about the how lower admission standards for minorities impact the schools academics.
I haven't read the study, only Malcolm Gladwell's book on which I've based my argument. The books talks about the study done on Michigan alumni. I don't know if we are talking about the same study. Would like to read about both (or the singular) studies before making any further comment.
I want my kids to go to caltech but only if they qualify and are smart enough.
Like the author said, the Olympic team doesn't take players because of their race but because they can play and win. The same should apply to academic institutions.
Maybe someone should sue the NBA if they don't let him in for being vertically challenged.
This is why you'll often take disadvantaged students over advantaged students, even when the disadvantaged have poorer numbers. Showing you're passionate about learning and have the capacity to learn is not simply reflected in the output. You also have to look at the input.
The same also goes for football and chess players. If someone excel's at something deemed "valuable" (and people will argue over this), that goes into the equation of passion for learning and produced output.
I guess if CalTech's mission is just to breed academic warriors that's fine, but this article's statements on MIT (I can only speak for my own school, but it probably applies to others as well) are ignorant and elitist. They seem to be pushing their own stereotype that CalTech students are simply one-dimensional people. The real world isn't a 'pure meritocracy'.
The bigger problem I think is the belief that everyone has to go to college to 'get ahead' and the excesses of credentialism.
I do not really care anymore, but it would have been a cool experience to go to a good school.
In the case of Caltech, they may have looked at your major and decided that they wanted less Foo majors and more Bar majors. All about recruitment. Either way, I'm sure someone argued your case, as brandnewlow commented.[1]
For every candidate they accept in general, they must reject 8 others.
Not necessarily. Would you be okay with being the dumbest person in the room, not just for one class or one semester, but for four years? A lot of smart kids go to CalTech, MIT and Harvard, but end up dropping out and finishing their degree somewhere else because they're not accustomed to failing on a regular basis. Unless you're convinced that you'll be able to handle repeated failure (because it'll happen when you're trying to achieve at that level) that sort of school may not be for you.
Then there's the fact that these schools are expensive. So not only do you have to be able to deal with failure at an emotional level, but you have to be able to deal with failure financially as well. If you don't have the budget to repeat at least two or three classes - don't bother with a top-ten university.
this of course assumes I want to be good at whatever the subject of the room is.
Kid's take time off after repeated failure, but they often come back once they're off of academic probation. Others will leave to take jobs, start companies, or transfer to a similarly ranked school that they simply like better. I've heard/seen tens of these cases, but never one where students purposely transfer to a school where they're less prone to fail.
Moreover, financial aid seems generous here. And private school prices anywhere, regardless of the caliber, are very similar.
If anything, take solace from the awkward social life, the excessive workload that makes entrepreneurial endeavors seemingly impossible, and the fact that you really don't need a good school to succeed.
"Its indifference to athletic performance is well reflected by the fact that its men's basketball team in recent years had a 207-game losing streak, its women's basketball team had a 50-game losing streak, and men's soccer team lost 201 games in a row."
But it is not --- or at least shouldn't be.
It should be about evaluating people's achievements relative to the opportunities presented to them. MIT, for example, prefers someone who is resilient and will change the world over someone who retook the SAT three times to get a 2400. You could argue about whether places like MIT evaluate these things correctly, but having been at MIT for 3.5 years, I've seen a lot of academically less prepared, but super driven students do astoundingly well.
On a side note, I've seen some of the other side as well. I went to a high school that has a 2% acceptance rate by exam only. It was 60% asian, and about 4% total black and latino. While I was around a lot of smart, motivated people, there were also a lot of smart slackers who couldn't or wouldn't thrive in that environment.
How is being pro-sports being anti-meritocratic? It's anti-academic, but not anti-meritocratic. Getting a sports scholarship requires a tremendous amount of talent, teamwork, dedication, etc. Selecting students based on athletics is every bit as meritocratic as selecting students based on academics.
For example, Princeton has only 4,500 undergrad so, as the author points out, athletes favored in admission make up an suprising large fraction of the class.
Likewise, legacy admissions has a big impact on the quality of Princeton admits, but probably not as much at the University of Oregon.
Do you believe that USC should "follow a similar path" and begin to emulate Caltech or are they allowed to be happy with the success that they've had in their own respective areas? My take from this article was that Caltech was the one and only true example of a successful college and all others are doing it wrong. Can we not have some schools that aren't focused solely on the hard sciences and welcomes students who may want something else out of their college experience such as a diversity of backgrounds and ideas, a path to professional sports, or a focus on the arts?
Uh, Job One at Cal Tech has to be 'research' and NOT "learning". For the article, sorry 'bout that.
Well, from the article, it sounds like most of the Cal Tech freshmen have already wasted a few years getting ready for the SATs, making straight A grades, and taking AP courses. Sorry, guys, but that's a LOT of work, a good recipe for early 'burn out', and indicative of a lack of seeing reality. What Cal Tech is insisting on looks very much like at least simplistic understanding and likely 'obsession', and a big, HUGE, problem with these two is that they overwhelm rationality and ability to see reality clearly and, net, are from harmful down to debilitating.
Uh, it sounds like the Cal Tech freshmen were ready for college 2-3 years before they went and, thus, wasted 2-3 years fooling around with make-work, junk-think nonsense. E.g., when I looked at the AP calculus materials, they were garbage. Instead, just get a good, standard freshman college calculus book. When that book is too easy, then just get a stack of the usual suspects in advanced calculus and then measure theory and functional analysis. Don't try to make a super big deal out of frosh calculus.
For AP calculus, f'get about it: The AP materials were overkill, packed solidly with tiny trees with no good view of the forest, written by people who didn't really understand calculus and were afraid to omit anything, no matter how tangential, and are a great way to kill off any interest in calculus.
Here's the truth: If a high school student wants to race ahead in math and physics, then FINE, but to do this they should just get (1) a good stack of the usual, best respected early college texts in these subjects and (2) some guidance from someone, maybe a college prof, who actually understands the fields. Basically nearly no US high school student should EVER take an AP course in high school because the fraction of US high school teachers competent to teach such material is tiny.
Broadly the AP courses are junk, a waste of time and worse; a student ready for the AP courses should just go to college or at least just study college materials.
The biggest problem with Cal Tech is that the freshmen don't really belong in college: Instead, they should touch up in a few subjects for a few months if necessary and then start on their STEM major at the junior or senior level, rush through that, and then get on with grad school, research, and their Ph.D. Instead, Cal Tech is insisting that in high school these students have gone through some pointless mental torture chamber, of material that is elementary and poorly conceived, and then wants to put them through four more such years. It's sadistic, a 'filter', destructive, and way too common in academics.
Look, guys, Cal Tech 'college' is JUST college, ugrad school, and NOT, and can never be, just one step from a Nobel prize. Instead, their college is to get the students ready for grad school, at Cal Tech or any of the usual suspects. The Cal Tech frosh already wasted 2-3 years on AP, etc. nonsense in high school, and Cal Tech wants them to waste 1/2 to 3/4 of their four years at Cal Tech. Bummer.
Net, what's important for that academic track is the research, just the research. All that nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, ear to the ground, and then try to work in that position, is from not very good down to a disaster for research.
Buyer beware: Save yourself from nonsense; often you are the only one who can.
The path to research is NOT through AP courses, the last 50 points on the SATs, or even frosh and sophomore college work. Indeed, the best path to research usually starts in, say, the junior year of college. The best part of the path is in grad school, and there the best part is the student being in a good 'environment' and doing a lot of relatively independent learning and, then, even more independent research. E.g., commonly a good Ph.D. program has no official coursework requirement.
With irony, Cal Tech, for all their emphasis on being 'brilliant', is being DUMB on college admissions, running a college, and getting students into research.
I've see FAR too much super narrow minded, simplistic, destructive, obsession in academics and know how destructive it can be. Cal Tech is embracing that nonsense.
No, it isn't a lot of work. I never studied before going to Caltech. I never studied for the SAT. This was typical for incoming freshmen. The ones who had to study hard for SATs, etc., could not make it at Caltech, and frankly the admissions committee tried to not admit them.
But making an 800 on an SAT has to be tricky stuff: The first-cut explanation is that it is more than 3 standard deviations above the mean in a Gaussian distribution. I can't believe that the test is very accurate much above 700 (in the sense of classic 'reliability'). So, getting above 700 is not so tough; actually getting an 800 has to be partly a craps shoot.
On both shots, I was over 750 on the Math SAT and never studied for it either. I finished early, checked my answers, and still had time. I didn't see any of the questions as very difficult and can't imagine I missed much. With such a short test, it about has to be that one question can mean dozens of points above 700 or so. So, the test 'reliability' can't be very accurate above 700.
In the end, what was valuable for me in college and grad school was interest, talent, 'environment', and some relatively independent work. That nose to the grindstone stuff played no role.
If you didn't burn yourself out in high school cutting through AP nonsense, SAT prep, etc. and still got into Cal Tech, then good for both you and Cal Tech.
But, ugrad school is not supposed to be so challenging that determined students "could not make it". Again, it's just ugrad school and not some one step before a Nobel prize. So, "could not make it" indicates something is wrong as I concluded.
If want to make a big splash in academics and get a Ph.D., etc., fine, but nearly all the big splash part is grad school, not ugrad. So, get a four year ugrad degree with a good background in your interest areas and then pick a good grad school. The ugrad school doesn't have to be Cal Tech. If in grad school the Cal Tech students are way ahead, then that just means that at Cal Tech they really deserved a Master's or Ph.D. but only got a Bachelor's.
Some students will never make it there no matter how hard they work. If one had to take a "test prep" course to do well on the SATs, then realistically Caltech is not the right school for him. And I'd never be an olympic athlete, no matter how hard I tried.
I didn't for three simple reasons: (1) I was so uninformed I didn't have a clue about just what the SAT was! (2) Teachers in grade school had been so critical of me, essentially because I wasn't a student like the girls in the classes!, that I'd largely given up on academics and wasn't trying very hard. (3) I'd never heard about any SAT test prep!
I did try hard in high school math, because I very much liked the subject, but I still thought that pleasing the teachers was hopeless and, thus, didn't try. Maybe that math I studied was responsible for my SAT scores, but I doubt it. Besides the CEEB or whatever wanted to claim that the test measured just 'aptitude'.
Uh, just because someone took some SAT prep material doesn't mean that the prep material was really responsible for their good scores! I'd side with the students who got good scores, however they did it: If they did so well on the SATs, however they did it, then they should be able to "make it" in ugrad school.
Uh, unless they were competing with my wife! She wanted to take a course in history but didn't need the credit so just audited. The lecture hall had 300 students. The prof insisted that even auditing students also take the tests. At the end, the prof told her that she should have taken the course for credit since she had the highest grade in the class! Before I met her socially, I taught her frosh trig. On my tests, some of the questions were difficult for a lot of points. At the end, she had twice as many points as the next best student; she could have walked out after the midterm and still made an A! I tried to compete with her in Scrabble. She was ahead, but as we played I got better. Alas she got better even faster so that her margin grew so much she refused to play with me again!
Having just had a look at the Official SAT Practice Test 2010-11, I agree. There's no calculus or anything else at all difficult in the maths SAT so getting a perfect score is merely a matter of avoiding slipping up.
Actually I'm surprised Caltech or any other supposedly elite US university uses it as an entrance exam; it's simply far too easy a test to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Caltech is in some class by itself, sure, but not for the reasons he cites, which are plain bullshit, and definitely not a completely 'positive' class---there are definite, subtle tradeoffs of a Caltech education that are not highlighted by the rather crude level of discourse this article has encouraged.
Already mentioned and debunked here is the asinine assumption that AP/SAT scores are used as proxy for actual academic excellence by the admissions committee.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2089717
However this next comment, while probably made on the wrong premises (that the admissions committee uses test scores as the sole criteria), is probably the only assessment of Caltech I've seen that has a hope of getting the real issues that show going to Caltech can be a bad decision if there are other respective alternatives available:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2090087
"Well, from the article, it sounds like most of the Cal Tech freshmen have already wasted a few years getting ready for the SATs, making straight A grades, and taking AP courses. Sorry, guys, but that's a LOT of work, a good recipe for early 'burn out', and indicative of a lack of seeing reality. What Cal Tech is insisting on looks very much like at least simplistic understanding and likely 'obsession', and a big, HUGE, problem with these two is that they overwhelm rationality and ability to see reality clearly and, net, are from harmful down to debilitating."
Indeed, even though the admissions committee emphasizes the fact that test scores do not completely determine admission, preparing for tests and 'burning out early' is exactly what the majority of applicants end up doing anyway to get into this place. Then Caltech has (and misses) a great opportunity to end up educating people the right way, as you say.
What many people who go to Caltech do is end up learning all the right subjects but the wrong lessons. There is hardly room for introspection, broadening one's perspective, and really learning the why and how of research---there is only the assumption that you are enthusiastic as hell at math/science and you are going to signal this by overloading, taking the hardest classes for no good reason, and trying to impress Head Nerd in <subject of your (their) choice>. This is your life---this is a social group where your self-worth is measured by your GPA and how many papers you publish. Too many people I knew have been sucked in this way and ended up burning out in one way or another.
The end result is that there are no 'jocks' at Caltech in the usual sense---what you have is a similarly wretched, caveman-like hierarchy, but with 'sports' replaced by 'academic achievement.' Surely a different and perhaps more productive contest than what goes on at other colleges, but no less of a harmful environment. Unless you are at or near the top of the hierarchy, the environment has the structural effect (as in, may not be intentionally designed) to beat any previous interest you had in math or science out of you. Could this be an explanation for the high suicide rate at Caltech (and other elite institutions like it)?
Basically: Where was the education? For being a fairly good student who clearly could learn subjects straight from books: how to learn what to learn? To educate yourself in the right way? To see the world for what it is and make independent, informed choices? To be rational?
Hell, this shouldn't be exclusive to Caltech---with the availability of information these days it seems to be a much better payoff to educate people in this alternative way instead.
So, go to Caltech only if you really understand it as just one small step in a longer research career, you know how to be rational and not get taken in by the social hierarchy there, and you are in contact with helpful faculty with whom you know you will have a productive relationship. Or, if you estimate P(Head Nerd) as being really high, so you can start your own little fiefdom.
Full disclosure: I went to Caltech (class of 08) and thankfully am in a good Ph. D program right now where I can 'pick up the pieces,' as it were, and reignite my interests.
I am constantly in conflict about this---would I have done 'better' (for some definition of better) overall if I hadn't gone there, and instead gone to an easier school?
Or do I just remain grateful about my current situation and just stop thinking when I think about this? I am forever indebted to my parents for their sacrifice in paying my Caltech tuition, and I really think there could not be a better place for learning engaging subjects with the brightest people around. All my career opportunities were made possible because I networked in the Caltech community.
But I just think there could have been a much more principled, less psychically costly way of doing it.
We were actually offered Los Alamos, too, after several security breaches under their UCLA managers, but our faculty board turned it down, resulting in UCLA getting the contract again. Amusingly, the result of UCLA management's security failings was that they got paid a higher rate for the same duties. Gotta love the government sometimes, heh.