The Diversity Issue at MIT
It is mostly about the comparison population
It is not surprising that the Chronicle of Higher Education is dissatisfied with the MIT incoming class, as noted in their article After Ban on Race-Conscious Admissions, MIT’s Black and Latino Enrollment Plunges (8/21/2024), which includes a graphic at the top with a large -36% Diverse.
This is the first incoming class since the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard judgment, which barred race-based admissions. The left is unhappy because they don't like the decision and believe it will harm Black students. But should we consider MIT's income class fair to all groups or not? Let's get to the data to evaluate the Chronicle piece, leaving the key point for last.
-36% Diverse
Where does the -36% percentage come from? Last year, 25% of the income class was Black, Hispanic, and/or Native American and Pacific Islander, compared to 16% this year. There is a 36% decrease from 25% to 16%. I find the blending of percentages to be confusing and misleading. It is a 9-point decline, from 25% to 16%. Asians, while being non-white and a minority, are not counted in this statistic.
The Chronicle of Higher Education's metric of diversity has some flaws. Assume that this year's incoming class is entirely composed of Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Pacific Islander pupils. If this were the case, the Chronicle might claim that MIT's diversity increased by 300% despite the fact that there are no White or Asian students. That doesn't seem like an increase in diversity. A measure of diversity should be proportionate to whatever they regard to be optimal diversity, which they appear to commonly assume to be population proportions, and this is the issue.
The missing 7%
Figure 1 represents the MIT admissions data. The cohort year represents the expected graduation year; therefore, this year's incoming class is the 2028 cohort. The 2024–2027 cohort is the combined result of those four years.
The Asian cohort increased by only 6 points (or a mere 15%, /s). Every other group decreased, but astute readers might start adding percentages. The AIAN, Black, Hispanic, and White groups lost one point, eight points, four points, and one point, respectively. This adds up to 14 points. We can account for 6 of those points due to the Asian increase, but where did the remaining 8 points go? International students increased from 10% to 11%. I am presently missing only 7 points.
Students, with the exception of internationals, can check more than one box. If you add the 2024–2027 cohort, you get 110%. MIT reports that 1% chose not to identify. If you sum up the 2028 cohort, you get 102%, with no reporting on individuals who choose not to identify. This is unusual and shouldn't just be ignored. There have been reports of White students checking Black or Hispanic boxes to boost their chances of admittance, so could they have stopped doing so this year? This suggests that the prior year's Black and Hispanic counts may have been overstated. Another possibility is that there was a significant decline in multiracial students. In any case, this must be considered in order to adequately analyze the consequences of eliminating affirmative action altogether at MIT.
The Chronicle can’t subtract
The Chronicle says this:
The proportion of Latino freshmen slid about two percentage points.
As far as I can tell, it is a 4-point drop, 15%–11%?
The main point
The Chronicle article quotes Stuart Schmill (MIT’s dean of admissions), as he says:
“Many people have told me over the years that MIT ought to care only about academic excellence, not diversity. But every student we admit, from any background, is already located at the far-right end of the distribution of academic excellence,” Schmill told MIT News.
About a year ago, I wrote Affirmative Action, SAT Scores, Asian Excellence and Harvard (7/5/2023). Here is the key graph from that post.
I would call the far-right of this graph the group from 1400–1600, which is your academic excellence group for MIT. This is 2022 data, so the findings may have altered for this year, and while SAT scores do not tell the whole story of academic excellence, they are a reasonable approximation. Given that Blacks and Hispanics account for 2% and 7% of this top group, respectively, there is a case to be made that MIT still has an overrepresentation of these groups in its incoming cohort. It makes no sense to use the distribution of race and ethnicity in 12th grade or among the general public as a benchmark for what MIT's distribution of students should be. You must compare it to the pool of students who demonstrated that they have the necessary skills for MIT or have achieved academic distinction. Given this metric, the incoming class is closer to the mark than in the past.
Kevin Drum makes the same type of point in his post, Raw data: STEM degrees by race (8/24/2024)
When tech companies hire people, they're hiring from the pool of STEM college graduates. So, for example, if you read that some Silicon Valley company is 20% Asian, you shouldn't compare that to Asians' 6% share of the population. You should compare it to their 15% share of STEM degrees. When you do that, it turns out Asians are only modestly overrepresented, not hugely overrepresented.
In other words, tech companies can only hire qualified applicants, and they don’t recruit from the broader public. We would anticipate MIT to recruit from the 1400+ SAT group; thus, we should compare their incoming class to that group rather than the whole population. I believe this is fair; nevertheless, some may disagree. For the Chronicle, this should also be their baseline for optimal diversity, in which case diversity decreased due to a one-point fall in White students, bringing it farther away from the 44% of 1400+ SAT scores for White students.
Conclusions
Drum concludes with this:
Use these numbers as rough baselines to evaluate hiring in tech companies. Someday we can hope that all these figures match shares of population, but until then companies have no choice but to work with what universities produce. That's what this is.
We could say the same thing about MIT. I will go further and say it is a travesty that there isn’t a greater proportion of Black and Hispanics in the top SAT group. It appears that a lot of human potential is being wasted. But this gets fixed by cultural changes (if you don’t think culture plays a role, then how does one explain the impressive results of Asians?) and better K–12 results, not with college admissions. If folks at MIT are upset with their entering class, as the dean of admissions appears to be, someone should ask them what they are doing locally to improve K–12 outcomes in their own community.
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I am a tenured mathematics professor at Ithaca College (PhD Math: Stochastic Processes, MS Applied Statistics, MS Math, BS Math, BS Exercise Science), and I consider myself an accidental academic (opinions are my own). I'm a gardener, drummer, rower, runner, inline skater, 46er, and R user. I’ve written the textbooks R for College Mathematics and Statistics and Applied Calculus with R. I welcome any collaboration.