Less than one year after that article, Harvey Mudd's President says the last year was the school's worst ever resulting in a suicide, nearly 10% of the students on suicide watch, and having to simplify the curriculum from hard STEM with more electives.

As someone who nearly went there (accepted but opted for one of their rivals), it's disappointing to see.

Ref: http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/08/02/540603927/a-colleg...

Harvey Mudd internal report mentioned: [1]

(That's now inaccessable (403 Forbidden), and the page that linked to it, "http://tsl.news/news/6611/", is failing with a Ngnix error (502 Bad Gateway).)

I got to read it before it went down, and it sounded like they'd reached the student workload levels associated with the first two years of any serious engineering school. Their restructured student body wasn't ready for that.

[1] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/content_link/S4gumhMUSUdKB...

Ha. It's funny that it's gone now. I read it just after I posted my comment. That's just a coincidence.. right?

Also, the first two years at an engineering school is awful by definition. Generally by then you learn to a) prioritize, b) take the right combo of classes, or c) go somewhere else. I opted for a & b but many friends and smart people opted for c.

If you go here [1] sometimes you can get the report. They may have a caching server that's out of sync. If the document is too small to read, open its frame in a new window.

[1] http://tsl.news/news/6611/

Harvey Mudd is just performing selection bias. http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Only if you consider someone coming and telling people who are already accepted that they should consider CS as a form of selection bias:

I went to Harvey Mudd. What you are saying is flat out wrong. Harvey Mudd does not have "schools", it's a single 800 person college for godsake. Maybe you're confused about the claremont colleges as a whole? You apply to the claremont colleges individually, of which Harvey Mudd is one. That's it. You don't even know what you're majoring in until the end of your sophomore year, just like MIT.

The reason Mudd has so many female cs majors is actually quite simple: the president of the school is a computer scientist and personally talks to individual female students to try to push them towards computer science.

https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/6sia2q/gend...

I actually think the next comment is more meaningful as an explanation:

One other key factor that hasn't been mentioned yet: Harvey Mudd requires all first-year students to take their intro CS course

I've been arguing for a long time that simply forcing everyone to try CS (the way we force everyone to try math, English, history, etc) would go a long way towards closing these gaps. I think it's fantastic that they're doing that.

Yes, I think there's a lot to be said for that too.