Comment by Whitespace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Whitespace | Hacker News Reader

If they accept only women, I have no problem with that. The can make up whatever rules they want, and the people here who are huffing and puffing about that should go and make their own club with their own rules and write about them in their own blog posts.

What I'm curious about is their stance of only accepting the top 5% of applicants.

She says that there aren't a lot of women in tech because they don't have a lot of friends, and that most women don't know about what programs are available to women in tech. To combat that, they go ahead and reject 95% of women who _did_ find out about their program.

Sucks for you, lower 95%.

And then she talks about how that's promoting the idea that women are as good at CS as men, but wouldn't the top 5% of GENDER_A in _anything_ wipe the floor with the average GENDER_B in that same thing? How is that promoting the idea that men and women are equal?

This all seems really strange to me and damaging to the brand (I've never heard of it before). What's the goal of this post, to help or to harm Hackbright?

MIT actively recruits the top 1% of SAT scorers. For a few years, they decided that to bump up their "diversity" numbers, they would pursue the top 10% of African-American students. Sure enough, they got a lot more African-American students! But there was a new problem: they flunked out at a much higher rate. MIT had unintentionally set them up to fail by putting 90th-percentile students in classes with 99th-percentile students.

Source?

Looking at the HEA numbers from 2003-2006, the difference in graduation rates between whites and black students at MIT ranged from 22pts in 2003 to 10 pts in 2006.

http://web.mit.edu/ir/pop/students/graduation_rates.html

On the other hand, here in the UK our elite universities Oxford and Cambridge have an unofficial policy of holding applicants from elite schools to a higher standard than ones in impoverished areas.

Why? Because there are a bunch of expensive (and almost entirely white) private and state schools that are very good at teaching their students to do well in exams and interviews and the other factors Oxbridge use to assess candidates. What they're not so good at is teaching them the underlying skills and aptitudes required to succeed there, and those are rather hard to measure directly. So by biasing their application process based on the background of the applicants, they'll hopefully get a less biased selection of the actual top students.

Isn't a large part of the problem with oxford/cambridge that there just are not enough applicants from state schools.

I think that implies that most of the problem is not in the application process but rather the alienating effect the elitism of such institutions has. I really think that in their case a selection bias is not the solution.

Hey - it's me, @lizTheDeveloper.

We only take the top 5% because we only have space for the top 5%. We're not a huge organization that can just spin up 20 new dynos and laterally scale. We scale horizontally, which is frustrating for everyone, including us. The rest of them we try to direct to resources that DO scale, like http://teamtreehouse.com/ and learnpythonthehardway.com/book

But yeah, we'd love to help the other 95%. Got any thoughts?

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