&gt; If it&#x27;s admitting women it would not otherwise in order to meet its CS quotas, then it <i>is</i> lowering the standards.<p>I disagree. Say your standard is &quot;I will only date people that are over 6 feet tall&quot;. Statistically, there is a smaller percentage of women who meet that standard than men. However, there are more men over 6&#x27; tall than you could date in a single lifetime. There are <i>also</i> more women over 6&#x27; tall than you could date in a single lifetime. So if you choose to date 50% men and 50% women, you&#x27;re not &quot;lowering your standards&quot;. You&#x27;re just using <i>additional criteria</i> -- like the idea that you might want more variety than only dating people of one gender all the time -- to weight your decision making beyond drawing random lots.<p>You can say that the analogy doesn&#x27;t apply. &quot;I don&#x27;t want to date people over 6&#x27; tall -- I want to date <i>the tallest people</i>&quot;. I challenge you to apply &quot;the best&quot; to academic criteria that are available during the admissions process. There&#x27;s simply not enough resolution available to construct an absolute ordering over all applicants, so you have to bucket people somehow. And the top bucket contains more than enough people to select from without having to lower any standards.<p>You&#x27;re right that I can&#x27;t conclusively show that standards weren&#x27;t lowered using coarse statistics. I&#x27;m working with the numbers that I have, and with the knowledge that Maria Klawe and the professors of the HMC CS department <i>are acting in good faith</i>. Their end goal is not &quot;get more women into our CS program&quot;. Their end goal is &quot;make the CS profession a welcoming place for everyone&quot;, and bringing more women into HMC is a stepping stone towards that goal.<p>&gt; spending something on the order of $100k per additional woman in their CS program<p>I would love to see that piece. It goes against my expectations, but honestly you might be right. Can you try to dig it up again for me?<p>&gt; randomized experiments (who is better placed to try that than Harvey Mudd?)<p>Actually, Mudd isn&#x27;t well-placed to do randomized experiments. The population is too small. Also, you&#x27;re suggesting conducting sociological experiments on sentient populations without their express knowledge or consent. That&#x27;s something I -- and the school, I expect -- would like to steer clear of.