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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

CMU's overall 4-year graduation rate is only 71% so that sounds like women in the CS program graduated at the same rate as men: http://collegeapps.about.com/od/collegeprofiles/p/Carnegie_M.... CMU, like most engineering schools, has high levels of major attrition: http://hlt.media.mit.edu/dfe_readings/fisher_2002_clubhouse.... (see Figure 2).

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That doesn't explain the gap, though: the same class went from 42% women starting in 2000 to 30% women graduating in 2004. If 71% of both men and women graduated, there should still have been 42% women at the end.

Your explanation is possible, but there are other explanations, like people switching majors.

We can't say that which such limited data. E.g. it could be the whole school lowered its admissions requirements without sufficiently lowering the real graduation requirements, due to pesky faculty, departments determined to maintain their reputation and/or not lose accreditation, etc.

My point is that simply posting the 4-year graduation rate of women in the department in isolation is misleading. At my undergraduate school (Georgia Tech), only 31% of people graduated within four years (70% by five, 80% by eight). Big attrition rates are normal for focused engineering schools.

I do not believe they're normal for the top schools. Absolutely not for MIT, and as one of the top 4 (with no real second places) CS schools I'd hope CMU's CS department is the same.

But we do need more information. E.g. if you think you want to major in EECS at MIT you'll likely take your first course before you declare your major at the end of your freshman year, and if it's really not for you you have a good chance to realize it. Prior to the new post-dot com crash panic curriculum this has been complicated by the department's opinion that you can't separate EE and CS and what that entails, but still, no one will think twice of your transferring in your sophomore year.

But at CMU you apply to the department for that major, for one of 135 seats, so we'd be astounded if there wasn't this sort of attrition, and to judge this experiment we'd need to know if it changed significantly. Still, my general point remains, the author is totally failing to realize, let alone think about the attrition rate.

Yes there was a lot of attrition from the initial experiment when they started with 42% because they let too many women in who didn't know what they were getting into and then decided that CS wasn't for them. The easiest intro to computer science class was essentially all women, and I think many of them dropped out.

But the fact that 30% of the graduating class in 2004 was women vs <7% in 2000 is still pretty impressive.

Unless of course they lowered the graduating requirements, or the women graduates did significantly poorer, e.g. more Bs and Cs compared to the men (CMU does not, I assume, grade on the curve; MIT doesn't, if you're in an appropriate major you'll gets As and Bs, Ds and Fs only if you're having personal problems).

This, however, is not my impression at all, nor I gather your's.

And let's not forget the cost in depriving 16 men places in the Class of 2004 (12% of 135); unless you were one of them, acceptable in an experiment which may be ultimately successful, but....

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