MIT Admissions Blog

As a 16-year-old who will be applying to these elite schools next year, I can vouch for the things you're saying. The competition is insane, and it puts the prospective applicants through a lot.

On the topic of race - It's no unusual occurrence to hear some HYPSM reject at my school (pretty average/ordinary California high school) say "I was rejected because I was Asian/White/Indian/whatever." It really bothers me because these kids never had a shot at those top schools anyway. They were above-average at an ordinary high school. They really had nothing to differentiate them from any other applicant. It was the same "Smart kid with good grades and an SAT score above 2000 who was loosely involved in a club or two."

The mentality is, if you get a 2000+ SAT score, then certainly you are some sort of genius who belongs at Harvard. You participated in two clubs?! Wow! You got A's in a few of your AP classes?! Look out Stanford!

They think there is some formula to admission, where it's just a stats competition. If you have the right stats, then you're in. But their goal numbers are weak, and they detract from what really matters, and that is being amazing and following your passion (see here - http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/esse-quam-videri).

And when they get rejected, their first reaction is to blame the black kid. It bothers me because there were other people of their race accepted, and they were accepted because they proved their worth to that college, just like the…

> in a party where the folks who think the SATs are racist

SATs are racist (to tptacek's point I'm on the progressive side, but I do think Biden agrees with me here [Biden education]). I don't know how you look at the data [SAT stats] and come to any other conclusion. We can discuss how much is solely the SAT vs. institutional racism, but the facts are pretty clear.

---

Since no one else is defending race-aware admissions policies, I'll do it here.

Fundamentally this is a clash of values. The left and academia (definitely not all Democrats) want racially representative cohorts. This is because they lead to better outcomes, and education is "the great leveler" and we want to level people from all walks of life as much as we can, given scarce resources. It's better for society.

The right characterizes these racially representative cohorts as unfair, because they believe they should be instead constructed from test scores. They'll say merit, but their only measure is test scores which aren't good indicators of merit because of systemic racism. If we went with this system, we would retrench and amplify existing biases and inequalities.

The current regime is doing pretty good at representation (2019) [Wiki US race] [Undergraduate race]:

AAPI in college/US: 6.89%/6.1%

Blacks in college/US: 12.65%/12.4%

Whites in college/US: 55.12%/60.1%

Hispanics in college/US: 21.08%/18.3%

While not perfect, college undergraduate racial makeup mostly tracks US racial makeup. The main…

Yeah, but that doesn't mean the Admissions Department isn't lying through their teeth, knowingly or unknowingly. E.g. they were strongly emphasizing the tradition of hacking (http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/hacks_traditions/) at the same time the Campus Police changed their posture on it and started arresting students in situations they hadn't previously. And while it's ugly to point out, they had to fire the Dean of Admissions in 2007 for falsifying her resume; she started in the Admissions Office in 1979 (if early in the year, she very possibly looked at my application...) and became the Dean in 1997.

They might also be trying to change MIT by attracting different students; as noted by sethg there was a strong push to change MIT from its traditional role of producing Sons of Martha who work for Sons of Mary, and it started a few years before he showed up (here is a fantastic rant by Hal Albeson on one of the early signs of that: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/hal/papers/coop.html).

The Admissions Office even drastically changed its real admissions policy for a couple of years until the hard subjects (e.g. physics) faculty forced a correction of that. The admitted classes were overall having too much trouble with the core curriculum, but even if they were less capable on average they were still dedicated to the traditional MIT mission.

Self-selection by applicants is so strong (MIT survived for a dozen year without a professional as the Director),…

There is a darker Truth.

Intelligence as tested by IQ by several govts and organizations is mostly genetic[1].

It means that the "nurture" part is not so much important as people think.

Heck you can even see with brothers / cousins the differences.

When we say "gifted" it means we are selecting and optimizing for IQ. Thus the "inequality".
You will always see more Asians.

To make more equal we need to remove/disqualify asians.

If a profession/skill is very related to a characteristic/feature as IQ then I want the best there.

Not everyone is equal and not everyone has the same skills. If you check [1] you will see they studied TWINS adopted in families. There is no better "social intervention" than adopting someone, provide the same food/structure that all on family have.

Then you can see here the confirmation in a soft way [2] and [3].

"and we consistently find that considering performance on the SAT/ACT, particularly the math section, substantially improves the predictive validity of our decisions with respect to subsequent student success at the Institute."

I am not gifted but I do benefit from gifted people work.

[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289621000635

[2] - https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-suspending-our-sat-act-requirement-for-the-2021-2022-application-cycle-as-well/

[3] - https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/we-are-reinstating-our-sat-act-requirement-for-future-admissions-cycles/

> I don't know many people who would claim that with a straight face. But it is your right to have that opinion.

I think you're taking the opinion out-of-context. The question was: "What are good places to get cheap college credit with a quality education?" The question was not: "Where should I send my kid to college?"

The context of the discussion was about finding ways to not pay $60k for freshman year, but to come in with credit.

The answer I'd give to that question is UMass. The tuition is $15k. The educational quality is very high. If MIT allowed it, the best-case option would be to _defer_ MIT admissions, do two years there, and then switch back to MIT. Sadly, MIT wants those dollars, and if you defer, you can't collect credits while deferred:

https://mitadmissions.org/help/faq/deferred-enrollment/

And no, MIT is not a meritocracy. Look at the new learning initiatives it launched, and look at the qualifications of anyone involved in senior positions. Or the heads of many labs, for that matter. It's 100% about connections at the top.

Admissions is _somewhat_ more meritocratic than Harvard, where >40% of the white students are admitted are ALDC admissions (athletics, donor, legacy, and children of faculty), but the days when MIT was a meritocracy faded in the days of yesteryear. I miss that MIT, but it's dead.

Please don't do this. There have been many take-downs of his full document (that include the so-called citations).

The one legit paper he linked to (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.173.2077&rep=rep1&type=pdf) didn't reach the conclusion he was claiming. That paper demonstrates that in egalitarian developed societies men are less oppressed by other men, not that there are innate differences. In all cases women's behavior is the result of being oppressed to a greater or lesser degree. In other words in less developed societies many men are just as oppressed by the powerful as women and use the same coping strategies.

He also failed to address the fact that interest doesn't necessarily correlate with ability. Research shows men and women don't differ in empathy unless men know they are being judged, which suggests it is a culturally-imposed trait and definitely not universal.

He makes a lot of assumptions without bothering to explain them, eg: assuming effective meritocracy and blindly ignoring his own caveats, never resolving the conflict with his own arguments. He never once presents ANY evidence that cognitive differences between men/women influence performance in software engineering.

Here are just a few…