This article doesn't mention anything about scale. I think we may be criticizing an elephant for failing to lift as many times its bodyweight as an ant. For a

This article doesn't mention anything about scale. I think we may be criticizing an elephant for failing to lift as many times its bodyweight as an ant. For a back-of-envelope calculation[1][2], it looks like there were 27 CS majors out of Harvey Mudd in 2017. We can probably add in another 20 from the joint CS-Math degree. So, about 50. Berkeley, on the other hand, graduates almost a thousand students in EE or CS every year. Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, University of Michigan, UCSD... these schools all graduate large numbers of CS majors and compete with each other for the top students. The accounting is tough here because the degrees at Harvey Mudd and Berkeley are different, so I may be over or under counting, but we're talking about a massive difference in scale here. Let's take one metric - the AP Computer science test. About 27% or the people who took the AP Computer science test are women. Harvey Mudd is small enough that it could probably fill 100% of the starting class with women who got 5's on the AP Computer science test and have near perfect math grades and SAT scores. But if scores are roughly evenly distributed between men and women, eventually, you're going to have a school that has more men with 5's than women - and the only way to reach 50-50 parity will be to select women who got 4s or 3s with men who got 5s. It won't be Harvey Mudd, but that's because HM is tiny and elite. Instead, it'll be Berkeley, or Georgia Tech, or UC San Diego, or U Texas. Would Harvey Mudd be able to maintain this at 1000 CS majors, using the same methods they do now, while competing fiercely for the top students in this environment and at this scale? [1] https://www.hmc.edu/institutional-research/institutional-statistics/institutional-statistics-graduates-and-alumni/majors-by-class-year/ https://www.hmc.edu/institutional-research/institutional-sta... [2] https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/by-the-numbers https://eecs.berkeley.edu/about/by-the-numbers