[disentanglement]

Coming from a country where the sort of super selective universities like Caltech don't exist, the fierce debates about equality of admissions to these sort of places never made sense to me.

If Caltech, Harvard, MIT or wherever really were committed about advancing gender inequality, why not just raise the numbers of students and admit more people? The number of students is mainly limited artificially and there's no reason they can't educate both men and women who apply.

[thedman9052]

The prestige of these schools is a significant, if not the main part of their appeal. Admitting too many students would cheapen their name. It's an open secret that the admissions processes for the elite US schools is far from meritocratic. They do admit many top performers, since it's part of their image, but also prioritize children of the wealthy and powerful, children of alumni, and other prospects with traits good for their image. For example there was a recent scandal where these schools were found guilty of handicapping Asian applicants because there were so many who were high performing. If they admitted all of those who qualified academically they would become "the school for Asians" and that's not the image they want.

[navvyeanand]

I don't know where you're getting your data from, you're probably referring to the Harvard lawsuit.

Caltech in particular is race-blind, and the majority of people attending Caltech are Asian.

[ghaff]

For one thing, just admitting more people almost certainly decreases the access to quality education overall (as well as introducing pragmatic difficulties like housing). Schools do tweak who they admit outside of largely artificial measures like SATs. But, within reason, that's not a bad thing. You probably don't want to admit a class of students from top prep schools who had college test prep classes and helped starving children in Africa.

[disentanglement]

> For one thing, just admitting more people almost certainly decreases the access to quality education overall

Why would that be the case? There are many much larger universities all around the globe and also in the US that manage to provide quality education to their students.

To me, the statements that colleges make about their admission procedures always seem hypocritical to me. The colleges claim that the goal is to advance gender equality and provide education to underrepresented groups (which would not require a small student body) when their main goal seems to be in fact to create a small in-group of people who have made the right connections during their studies (which absolutely does require a small student body).

[ghaff]

Schools can be arbitrarily large I guess, e.g. some of the large state schools in the US. But private universities decide on their missions--which are often to have a smaller and more focused student body to your point. Making connections through my studies was mostly never a big deal but having a (somewhat) smaller school was. There are plenty of larger (and cheaper) universities if that's what you're looking for.

[onetimeusename]

I think the prestige matters. I agree with you but in the US we deliberately create bottle necks and then award people who make it through with the most powerful jobs. The powerful want to perpetuate this.

I don't think this is a healthy situation, it is creating a zero sum game and a tiny class of people whose children have an edge getting accepted. There is such a gap between the average high school student and the people who can get into high ranked schools that it's very bad for the nation's health overall.