Reply to Ivy League Affirmative Action from the inside

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]^^^ oops, wrong thread -- sort of.  The two seem to have run together in lots of ways.

But now that I realize context, I'll add what was probably already implicit in my last post.  I think it'd be a really undesirable out come (on so many levels and for so many reasons) if the result of the Students for Fair Admission suit was increased reliance on SATs and GPAs in both public and private college admissions.  [/quote]

Do you believe Cal, UCLA, and Caltech are in the wrong?[/quote]

No.  IMO, they aren't wrong but neither is Harvard.  Different universities have different constraints resources, and objectives.

The UCs have much larger class sizes, they’re public schools (a fact that has significant political and legal implications), and they haven’t chosen to devote the same kinds of resources to admissions that Harvard has.  At which point, of necessity, admissions is going to be a more mechanical process (and, as a result, how race affects admissions will be more obvious).

Caltech is focused primarily on STEM fields where, arguably, standardized tests are more relevant and reliable predictors of college success.  Even so, Caltech has made different choices wrt admission than MIT has.  I think both choices are legit.  But as a student, parent, or faculty member, I’d have a strong preference for MIT’s model over Caltech’s model.  These are the perspectives I’ve evaluated colleges from -- I'm not sure what I’d think if I were an employer (it might depend on the type of job and my experiences with grads of each school).  IME, the best learning environments are ones in which diverse groups of able students with different strengths, orientations, experiences, and points of view share an interest in a topic and are encouraged to respect, listen to, seek out, and learn from people who think differently than they do.  I don’t get the vibe from Caltech, whereas MIT clearly values creativity, collaboration, and even a certain (highly nerdy) sense of playfulness and transgression/risk-taking.  That’s certainly how I learn, that’s the kind of student I love to teach, and the kind of adult I hope to see my STEM kid become.  But clearly there's a market for Caltech (both among high-performing students and high-paying employers) and important research gets done there.  So I'm not saying Caltech is wrong to be Caltech.  Just that I'd choose MIT over Caltech if those were my only two options.

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