The Roots of STEM Excellence - WSJ

It should be one of the nation’s highest educational priorities to get its most brilliant STEM students into those elite universities. Until a few years ago, the California Institute of Technology was the model. Caltech admitted from the top down based on evidence of exceptional talent and then put its students through a demanding curriculum that only those with zeal and a capacity for hard labor—the other requirements for great achievement—could survive. The record of achievement among Caltech graduates and faculty speaks for itself—46 Nobel Laureates, 66 awarded National Medals of Science and 75 elected to the National Academy of Sciences, all generated by a school that enrolls only about 1,000 undergraduates and 1,400 graduate students at a time.

Caltech might have gone wobbly. It suspended standardized-test requirements in undergraduate admission for four years starting in 2020, and its website boasts that “holistic review is the cornerstone of our admissions process” and this month Caltech announced that “in a historic milestone,” its freshman class will be majority female. But we still have the example of the old Caltech that every elite STEM department should emulate: require evidence of exceptional academic ability in the applications, admit those of top ability regardless of race, sex or social skills, holistic review be damned, and then push those students to their limits.

Doing so would play havoc with the DEI ideal student body. Based on the known distribution of math talent at the highest level and sex differences in occupational preferences, the students in these elite STEM departments will be more than 90% Asian or white and more than 80% male. But some things are more important than having the correct demographic mix. Finding and developing one of our rarest and most precious human resources is one of them.

via www.wsj.com

Charles Murray.