Some last year admission stats from admissions411

not to be sexiest, just find it weird that we have compromised too much on merit for gender equality...maybe it has to do with that most of the adcom are women???

When I posted this info I thought only about giving some insights about the specifics of admissions in certain schools – and even then, very careful insights because the data is not representative. However, the discussion has obviously gone too far from its initial goal when we started to argue about ‘unfairness’ of the admission decision.

I'm afraid this way is leading nowhere. The problem is the very mechanics of the admission process makes it an easy target for blame: unfairness will always seem to be there.

Let’s say we have A, B, and C groups of people; the basis for classification does not matter for this example. They have a certain distribution among population, say, A - 40%, B - 30%, C - 30%. However, among applicants, the situation is not the same: A has 40%, B – 10%, C – 50%. In addition to it, there is a market demand, which wants to see, say, A - 60%, B - 15%, C - 25%. And also, there could be some promoted cultural values, according to which there should be A - 33%, B - 33%, C - 33%.

So, which distribution business school has to follow in its admission decisions? Most probably, it sticks to the mixture of all these distributions when creating its quotas. Some schools give more weight to market factor, some to cultural values factor, etc. – that’s why we see differences in the admission policies among schools. But the matter is that the final quota upon which bschool bases its decisions is different both from natural popular distribution and from the distribution among applicants. In reality, the situation is even more complicated because there are more groups and they could intercept – but the principle of decision, I believe, is the same.

Naturally, such an approach would seem unfair – both to those who believes that ‘equal chances’ means equal for each applicant AND to those who believes that ‘equal chances’ means equal chances for any person if he/she chooses to apply. You can imagine that from the market point of view, bschool quota may be not up to the employers desires too. But that’s how it works. Whether it is right or wrong we could discuss endlessly – as well as the nature of the reasons why market wants 60% of group A and only 25% of C.

With respect to all participants of the discussion, I suggest that we keep this thread to the discussion of the factual aspects of admissions: stating that a certain trend exists but not trying to blame/defend the reasons for its existence or the fairness of the trend itself. Perhaps it will be more constructive in that way.

Good luck with your applications! May we all win in the R1 waiting game!
And thanks for reading this long post