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Comment by hga | Hacker News Reader

I wish the author would "do the math": of the 42% female freshman class of 2004 entering in 2000 (which at CMU for this major requires a direct application for one of 135 (last time I checked) seats), 29% failed to graduate in the major within 4 years.

Now, that might be partly an artifact of the dot com crash convincing a subset to transfer to another major, but it otherwise looks very bad; if that happened at MIT for any reason other than transferring out (which I can check on if desired, the department did lose more than half its enrollment during this period as measured by freshman declaring a major), there would be serious hell to pay.

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Or a lot of men transferred/changed majors into CS, whereas very few women did—which wouldn't be too surprising since the outreach was aimed at freshmen.

Definitely an oversight in the article either way.

I get the strong impression from many sources that transferring into that department is very hard, just like it has its own admissions process (unique among the top 4 CS schools (Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU and MIT)).

High school girls don't usually have experience in software development. That's not something you can wish away by declaring "no experience required." Coding faster gives you time to finish your problem sets.

Women outperform and outnumber men in universities in other majors. There is no reason to think CMU SCS is drawing from a different gene pool. The solution is to push practical software development experience into high schools and get high school girls involved in hackerspaces and other extra-curricular exposure.

"There is no reason to think CMU SCS is drawing from a different gene pool."

Unless of course you wonder or suspect there are relevant genetic differences between the sexes. Not a field I study, but I've read e.g. that there are really significant differences in the populations in situational awareness and 3D visualization (which are focused on because they're life and death critical to fighter pilots, and e.g. the Navy where it's particularly critical all the time has killed people by playing PC games with unqualified female pilots).

I have a perhaps subjective metric I call "the spark". It's pretty rare in general, in (would be/claim to be) programmers, and extra rare in women, I think I've come across 4 in my lifetime.

One thing we should admit to ourselves is that we don't yet really know what we're doing, I liken it to the pre-phonetic alphabet era of reading and writing (which the Chinese never exited???). E.g. compare MIT and CMU's current curricula, they have diametrically opposed foundations and philosophies which of course play out in the courses (e.g. MIT's death to functional programming vs. CMU embracing it, working with libraries you don't understand vs. knowing the foundations, gadgets vs. I assume pure software, etc.).

If they're washing out, that's a terrible waste of the faculty's effort and limited seats. But if they're merely taking a fifth year to graduate, well, between unavailable prerequisite courses and part-time jobs, that was getting common at my state school long ago, and it wouldn't worry me much.

It had better not be unavailable prerequisite courses, especially since there's no excuse during that period for insufficient lab hardware resources (not true in the bad old days before most everyone can afford a laptop more powerful than a Cray 1). That's one of the reasons for paying the big bucks to go to a private school, and why many state schools are not so much the bargains that appear to be if you can't graduate within 4 or even 5 years.

I can't speak about CMU, but I know there are basically no limits to what MIT will do to make sure every major can graduate in 4 years, and almost always take the courses they need when they want to take them. That has sometimes meant non-majors couldn't take courses intended for majors, but otherwise....

CMU has always been harsher and more unforgiving than MIT.

For the cohort entering 2006, MIT's 6-year graduation rate was 92% for men, 93% for women. CMU's was 85% for men and 90% for women. CMU's entering class of 2011 first-year attrition rate was 5%. MIT's was 3%. MIT's 4-year graduation rate is 85% versus 71% for CMU.

We don't know that. For better or worse---and I personally would rate CMU's CS undergraute education as superior to MIT's now, but that's because EE and MIT's vision for EECS graduates does little for me---MIT can attract a significantly better pool. E.g. before applications got really crazy in the Great Recession, when 13,000 were applying, it thought 3,000 "could do the work" and chose from that subset.

And MIT doesn't do legacy admits; I get the impression CMU may.

Seems like a simplistic analysis. If the programs are of equal difficulty and MIT admits more a more qualified class, MIT will have a higher graduation rate.

You'd have to compare this to the graduating percentage of all the freshman entering in 2000 for this major, to see if the female portion was outperformed. The female percentage alone doesn't support your conclusion.

29% failed to graduate in the major within 4 years. ... it otherwise looks very bad

Sir, you must not have been paying attention in math, I mean statistics, class. I believe that your experiment needs a control.

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