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Comment by robrenaud | Hacker News Reader

I'd guess it would look a lot like Caltech.

http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/12/why_caltec...

> A combined SAT score of 1470 (the 99th percentile by national standards) placed an entering Caltech freshman at only the 25th percentile among his fellow students. (At Harvard and Princeton, by contrast, the 25th percentile is reached by a score of only 1380)

> Only 4 percent of the U.S. population, Asians made up a whopping 40 percent of the incoming freshmen class in 2008, a slightly larger proportion than the 39 percent figure for whites.

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Caltech explicitly looks for the top science/math/engineering students. These tend to be students with heavy focus on academics, and in particular these students universally score very very well on the math section of tests like the SAT. Harvard and Princeton, by contrast, look for students who excel in a much wider range of skills. Many of my most brilliant classmates at Harvard came in with abysmal SAT math scores. A brilliant actor, painter, entrepreneur, historian, debater, or even naturalist who can’t hack it in a calculus or physics course is never going to get into or survive Caltech, but might be entirely successful at Harvard or Princeton.

There’s nothing wrong with Caltech’s admission criteria (engineers and scientists are lovely people! I am one!), but it’s pretty stupid to boil down human ambition and accomplishment to the results of the SAT test.

Harvard and Princeton, by contrast, look for students who...

Cut it to the chase. The ruling class of tomorrow is the current class of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. (And maybe Wharton). The end. The current class wants a ruling class that looks like their idea of utopia. This means a very Kosher group of whites, a hefty dose of divide-and-conquer "diversity", and a minimum of technocrats. Obviously, Asians are left out of that utopia.

They aren't going to spell that out in words, but their actions are clear as damnation.

This is really the gist of these suits. If it were the case that by law colleges could only consider SAT score, then there is strong evidence for anti-Asian and anti-white discrimination. But since not all schools are Caltech, nor want to be, these suits are without merit. It is entirely possible that a legitimately race-blind admissions process would produce lots of 2600SAT asian kids not getting into the elite unis.

That said, race-blind admissions policies are not current law nor necessarily even the optimal policy. For example, we can't have a nation with a persistent racial underclass. In as much as college effects class mobility (which is probably small), race-aware policies allow for this.

For example, we can't have a nation with a persistent racial underclass.

Why not? As long as the racial underclass remains an underclass due solely to non-discriminatory processes, what's the problem?

A related question: suppose we don't divide humans into subgroups by race, but instead divide them by some other factor. (E.g., height, good looks, intellect, whatever.) Would it be wrong if one of those subdivisions were a "persistent underclass" due solely to a meritocratic process?

> For example, we can't have a nation with a persistent racial underclass

Are you asserting that we don't?

If an average Caltech graduate has a higher SAT score than an average Harvard/MIT grad, does that translate to success later on in life?

For example, are there proportionally more Google employees from Caltech or more startups in YCombinator with Caltech graduates?

How do you measure success in life?

I'd bet P[At Google | Caltech degree] is greater than P[At Google | Princeton degree], but it's mostly explained by P[interested in CS | Caltech degree] >> P[interested in CS | Princeton Degree].

While this is definitely changing, Caltech graduates have tended to be heavily focused on academia in the past, and in that particular regard, the data definitely show success later on in life. The percentage of Caltech undergrads who earn PhD's is well above everyone else: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf08311/?govDel=USNS...

In terms of other measures of success, Caltech might lag behind some other schools. As a current CS undergrad, I only know of a handful of startups run by Caltech grads. As I said, this is changing, but it goes to show the impact of choice of metrics.

from the article: "The fact that 17 of its student alumni and 14 of its faculty have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, and six of its alumni have won the prestigious Turing Award in computer science, surely says something about the institution and what it stands for. Despite its small size, Caltech was chosen by NASA to be the center for its Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and in the past was a major venue for visiting scholars of the rank of Heisenberg, Einstein, Lorentz, and Bohr. In more recent times its undergraduate alumni have gone on to be founders or co-founders of such leading-edge American companies as Intel, TRW, Compaq, and Exploratorium."

http://www.harvard.edu/heads-state

http://www.harvard.edu/nobel-laureates

http://www.harvard.edu/pulitzer-prize-winners

For example, are there proportionally more Google employees from Caltech or more startups in YCombinator with Caltech graduates?

Since they are all based in California now, I would think yes. But since Larry and Sergey Bin are both from Stanford, I'd expect a disproportionate number of Stanford grads at Google.

In any case, one way universities market themselves is by looking at the average income of their alumni. Since Harvard grads often end up on Wall Street, I would not be surprised if Harvard comes up on top.

But you could argue that's just the financial industry connection. What if you restrict your search on science and engineering majors? Well then we already know MIT and Caltech are better.

Regardless of restriction to science and engineering, Caltech comes out on top for median starting salaries and second for mid-career: http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/top-us-colleges-gradua...

Maybe financial industry salaries would change these rankings if they considered averages rather than medians, but a reasonable number of Caltech grads end up on Wall Street as well.

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