Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a confusion with diversity in academic persuits (math/science vs. humanities/arts) and non-academic diversity (racial, socioeconomic, athletic). It so happens that CalTech values neither type of diversity in admissions (focusing on math/science academic merit, and nothing else). But the author is really only arguing that the non-academic diversity is rightfully ignored.

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....)

Non-academic diversity should never be "rightfully ignored". Universities are a wonderful tapestry of people, and students benefit by being exposed to students from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds.

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)

OK. In my comment, I was just trying to keep the discussion focused on non-academic diversity. I agree with what you say to a certain extent; I'm willing to consider other factors in admissions besides academic excellence. But I find it hard to believe that the quality of academics isn't negatively impacted to an unacceptable degree when a sizable fraction of the class (the OP claims > 10%) has much poorer scores (the OP claims roughly one standard deviation).

Also: Gauchos >> Banana Slugs

It is wrong, if not dangerous, to evaluate universities by abstract metrics such as research or academic performance.

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.

They are abstract in the sense that it is not immediately clear what makes them go up or down.

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.

If universities are the student newspaper, the radio station and the sports teams, a 1 in 9 chance of sharing a dorm room with an underachieving black guy and the opportunity to go to student protests, then as a taxpayer, I want to stop funding them. It sounds like a huge waste of money.

Then you can pull the money from Berkeley, I guess. Other than that, the large majority of the very-top-tier schools are private. Yes, they receive public money for research, but the undergraduate "experience" is funded by tuition, endowment, and donations.

Still, I agree. This seems like a fantastically inefficient way to meet people with different backgrounds.

Roughly half the public money for "research" is actually pocketed by the university and spent on education/administration/etc (the university calls it "overhead"). This is a dirty little secret of science funding - a big chunk of it isn't funding science at all, but is merely a subsidy for big research colleges.

Also, even tuitions at private colleges are massively subsidized - the subsidies just follow the students (e.g., subsidized student loans, need-based aid, etc).

"students benefit by being exposed to students from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds"

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.

If one wants to be exposed to people from different backgrounds, one should go live in a big, metropolitan city / travel the world while earning his way. Sucking down enormous amounts of public / donor / endowment money to run social experiments, whether in university or otherwise and then using weasel-words like 'diversity' etc. is of questionable value, at best, unacceptable at worst...

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)?

I agree with you, Jess. Georgetown (where I did my undergrad) isn't on the same level as CalTech or Princeton, but it's still supposed to be pretty good, and I honestly wasn't that impressed with the student body on the whole. There were, as expected, a lot of precocious wannabe-Senators...but there were also a lot of, for want of a better term, dumb jocks, and also a lot of people who were selected entirely for skin color and who didn't really have the academic qualifications to be there. There was even a program to teach these students remedial English during the summer before their freshman year - an explicit admission that they weren't qualified.

Honestly, I felt like it cheapened my degree.

besides the offensive nature of those words

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.

If there were no academic differences between the regular student body and minorities ...

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.

I'm pretty sure I didn't use the phrase affirmative action so I'm rather taken aback that you think I don't know what it means. I'm sure you don't know what καλημέρα means, but I have better chance at being right because it's in Greek. And I wouldn't rub your face in it anyway.

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.

And I wouldn't rub your face in it anyway.

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.

First you say I used the phrase affirmative action when anyone could see that I didn't.

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.

And then you say that I have offensive and misguided views about minority students when I have not professed any views about minority students.

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.

How is that misguided or offensive? It's simply a fact that if you lower academic standards for athletes, then the stereotype will be that the athletes are of lower academic caliber. Because they are. It was a statement of fact. I suppose the truth can be offensive...

I suppose the truth can be offensive...

Except that it's not the truth ... no schools do that for minority students. It's a strawman.

It's not a strawman. At UoM, the point system was designed so that being a racial or ethnic minority was worth the same number of points as a full grade point (i.e. a white student with a high school 4.0 was equivalent point-wise to a black student with a high school 3.0.) For athletes, I remember it was about 1/5 of that amount of points, but I could be wrong on that score.

Having taught at UoM, I can say that unfortunately this translated to their performance on exams as well...

If you taught at U of M, I'd imagine you're at least passingly familiar with Gratz v. Bollinger, in which the Supreme Court explicitly made what you're talking about illegal.

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.

The methodology has changed. Now they use humans instead of a point system. The result is identical. Entering "minorities" and athletes enter with lower GPAs and SATs. It's a fact, not a strawman.

Well at the very least maybe you can finally admit that you're expressing a view about minority students. Quitting your denial of that would be a great first step.

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 ...

> They don't do that at any schools in the United States, actually ... at least not at any in compliance with Federal law.

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."

You're reading the wrong ruling:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratz_v._Bollinger

Huh?
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.

Gratz didn't overturn Grutter. (They were issued the same day.)
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.

> Gratz makes clear that point systems are illegal, which was my claim.
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.

As a follow-up, in the late '70s, Caltech changed the admissions policies to go from application review by one professor to review by a committee of three. The % of women in the next class jumped by about 3x from one year to the next, from about 5% or so. Admissions is done completely differently today, but I still find that to be an interesting anecdote.

I think affirmative action does mean what he thinks it means. Data is hard to come by, but here are a two data points:
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...

If there were no academic differences between the regular student body and minorities or athletes people wouldn't make those "offensive" generalizations.
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 article says:
"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 applied to CMU with a 3.8 cumulative (at a school where AP classes were worth 5.0), 740 math SAT, and 670 English SAT. I was accepted into the school of computer science, after submitting my application in a big red envelope that said "Athletics Department" on it (I was a football player).
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.

Sweet, congrats on the job accept, Alex!
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."

"A weird-ass cross section of human" is a great description of Carnegie Mellon.
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.

I also attended CMU (SCS). I'm not sure how many other schools do this, but when applying to CMU you apply to specific departments and the acceptance decision is handled at the department level. This causes there to be a great variance in the paper qualifications of attending students across the school.
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)

There's another principle at play. Colleges aim to maximize their yield, or the percentage of students who are offered admission that ultimately matriculate. Nothing against CMU - it's a fantastic school in nearly every regard - but these perfect scoring students... are they most likely to attend CMU? In a lot of cases the school is competing with HYP and others of that ilk.
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.

They said the same thing at my CMU orientation in 2005. To be fair, they don't mention how many students with perfect SAT scores and GPAs they accept (I met many as an undergrad, and I'm sure many of those accepted chose other schools). The percentage rejected is more interesting.

ditto 2006, they clearly like that introduction ;)

I heard the same intro speech during 2007 and 2009. It's their stamp to show their diversity statement

I remember visiting Caltech years ago when I was in high school (I never applied).
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.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, you picked up a completely inaccurate impression. Caltech is theoretical to the point of disregarding many practical applications in many fields.
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.

It's true that, at least in the engineering department, Caltech isn't that hands-on. But I learned the hands on at work at Boeing, and it was backed up by solid theoretical knowledge, which was lacking in a lot of the other engineers. So I think it's the better approach.

Good point. I just didn't make it that far :) For further expansion of the point, Caltech teaches you how to learn in a rigorous, rather than piecemeal, fashion, which if you are still filled with passion for your chosen path, gives you the chance to be extremely technically successful. Rather than learning 'tricks' that build into experience-based knowledge, you have a full framework that new knowledge gets slotted into as you acquire it.

That CMU President was Jerry Cohon?

Correctamungo.

He was one of my dissertation advisors.