[isotypic]

> I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did

Actually, my understanding was that women typically apply to higher education at higher rates than men. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2004.09.008 has some data supporting this, but it is an older paper - has this changed in recent years, or is it different for Caltech specifically?

> This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus

Given the article has a difference of 4 students (109 men to 113 women) I have a hard time believing there is a significant difference in abilities of the students. The small class size only further emphasizes this - when the applicant pool is around 13000 students and you are selecting the top 200 or so, you are selecting the high tail of the applicants, where differences in relative ability are marginal (unless you believe the ability distributions of men to women are vastly different.) Why can't it be the case that the top 500 applicants are all roughly equal in ability, and so no matter what distribution of men to women is picked you have low variance in the ability of the class?

[ghaff]

It's a gross oversimplification of course but the next tier of admissions might be missing some proven athletes and some people with particularly noteworthy accomplishments (or donor ties) but most of them would do just fine at any of the elite schools.

[FormerBandmate]

It seems like there is actually some affirmative action for men going on at Caltech, the exact opposite of what he claimed. Check out the acceptance rates, it’s double for men

https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

[HideousKojima]

"The overall acceptance rate for women was 4.5%, and the overall acceptance rate for men was 1.9%."

I think you misread this?

Edit: the transfer acceptance rate is even more imbalanced in favor of women

[mchannon]

I spent a few seconds googling Caltech admissions (we’ll table the topic of how many commenters can’t google the actual number before accusing me of assuming wrong).

Google’s AI assistant (which is often wrong) cited a 58 male:42 female applicant ratio for a recent Caltech class.