Originally Posted by Austin
Originally Posted by JonLaw
And my point is that this is a feature of the system as it is currently exists, not a bug.

They are not necessarily trying to get the academically superior students; they are trying to get the type of students they want to get.

I think its a function of the administrators running the academic side of things rather than the Deans and the professors. The latter should develop the admissions policies and then do the admissions selection oversight with the admissions department handling the clerical tasks. The football coach does not let admissions select his team. Neither should the Deans.

I think the Deans will act at most schools on this issue and others.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-...-000-feed-outcry-over-college-costs.html

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The 59-year-old professor of biomedical engineering is leading a faculty revolt against bureaucratic bloat at the public university in Indiana.


Correction about that perception-- admission to the institution is not the same thing as admission to the program/major.

Deans/faculty DO make admissions decisions. It's just not evident at this top-level analysis.

But that plays into the flaws in the reasoning illustrated in the (insightful) observations about Caltech versus Harvard in terms of applicant pools not being identical. I'm not sure that there is a good way to compare one elite institution to another in the first place for the simple reason that each "brand" draws a specific potential applicant pool.

Since those complex brand-affiliation reasons can't be normalized in any meaningful way, I'm not sure that we can expect that the student populations ought to be "representative" of anything but the qualified applicants within that specific applicant pool. So maybe MIT's admits won't look like those of Harvard, no matter how fair or meritocratic the process became.


Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.