The lack of women in any CS program is a symptom and indicates a problem that is wider than mere gender (or race or whatever obvious demogoraphic category you h

The lack of women in any CS program is a symptom and indicates a problem that is wider than mere gender (or race or whatever obvious demogoraphic category you have). Harvey Mudd appear to have a desire to fix the actual problem, which is people who would do very well to go with CS being discouraged. As long as what anyone does to address demographic imbalance goes to the root cause and is not just a whole load of symptom masking I'm all for it. If $minority aren't present you can bet that there are also a bunch of white guys who would be really good at CS, better than the incumbents perhaps, who have also been discouraged because they're shy, are intimidated by those who loudly know 1% more at the start of the course or whatever it is. Just as there would be any other demographic group. In fixing that problem of discouraging the best talent the quality of their CS grads in terms of what they are able to get done, what novel insights they have should improve. The students should push the academics harder and make the CS program stronger. Will that happen? I hope so but we'll see. I don't know more than this blog post. The disaster would be if symptoms of the disease were masked and the manner in which they are masked means the grads have learned less. (Eg finding the subject matter is too intimidating so dumbing it down as a response.) Anytime you have a narrow demographic dominating a field it's symptom telling there's a problem but it tells you exactly nothing about what the true nature of the problem is. You have to do a bunch of additional work to find out if it's because of hostility to "outsiders", poor preparation earlier in education, societal cultural discouragement or if the field has no intellectual merit and is largely a con that has taken hold of a particular demographic or any one of a million other causes. Treating a demographic imbalance as the problem itself is crazy - the disease, whatever it is, will persist and be harder to track.