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Comment by estiaan | Hacker News Reader

I was reading the example of UC Berkely appearing to have gender bias in the admissions and read the following:

“it showed that women tended to apply to more competitive departments with lower rates of admission, even among qualified applicants (such as in the English department), whereas men tended to apply to less competitive departments with higher rates of admission (such as in the engineering department)”

That’s the opposite of what I would expect, I’d expect that English and the arts in general would be a lot easier to get into than stem, that’s how it is in Australia

Edit: When I say get into I mean get into university, not getting into the industry

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Since no one gave the obvious[1] answer:

The data is for application to graduate programs. There is a ton more funding for engineering, and many/most students going for a PhD in engineering don't pay for it. There's very little funding in the humanities, and most students are not willing to pay high costs for a PhD in the humanities, so the department tightly restricts admission.

As a result, it's easier to get into an engineering PhD program - as long as you are competent enough.

I had a friend who was a fellow engineering student. He became disillusioned and wanted to go into journalism. He applied to transfer to the Communications program at the university and told me how competitive it was - they admit less than 10 people per year. He did not get in.

[1] Obvious if you've spent a lot of time in grad school.

Ah yup, I definitely read that in the context of undergraduate degrees, I think you’re probably right.

I think it could be consistent.

In Australia we usually think about undergrad competitiveness in terms of the minimum ATAR rank of last years' admissions, right?

But you could also think about competitiveness in terms of admission fraction.

And I think those two metrics can be consistent if a very popular degree has a disproportionately low fraction of high-ATAR applications.

I was surprised to read that too. I think the answer is that here we're looking at admissions rate = number admitted / number applied, which is not the same as overall difficulty in a conceptual sense.

The only people applying to grad school in math are people who got a BS in math and did so with good grades (or perhaps some other STEM field + significant theoretical math coursework). On the arts side I suspect they draw from a larger pool (plus people tend to switch from STEM to something else a lot more than the other way around) of backgrounds. It's easier to convince oneself that a short story is great (when others may disagree) than convincing oneself a math proof is correct when it objectively is not. So there's less self-selection on the applicant side, and hence a lower admissions rate.

Competitiveness is one measure of difficulty, but there are others. Engineering departments tend to be qualitatively more difficult to get into than the humanities, which are quantitatively more difficult.

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