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What is the rationale behind the popular perception that its a good idea for international applicants from the same institution to apply to different universities for grad school?

  • Does diversity mean that if two similar applications were being considered from the same institution, admission committees would choose one and reject the other outright (i.e. not waitlist him/her, etc) in favour of another similar candidate from a different institution, or that both would be rejected? The latter doesn't make sense at all, but it seems to be the word on the street (or some streets, I should say). Do universities value diversity to the extent that it would overlook a slightly better applicant to accomodate diversity? Or is it usually the case that admission committees are left with half a dozen equally suitable candidates, between whom one might as well roll a dice, or better cite a diversity criteria?

  • Answer:

    I believe that Universities do indeed value diversity to an extent where a slightly better candidate might be rejected in favor of diversity. But more often than not, the definition of "better student" is very ill defined. There isn't a single attribute on which all the students of the world can be totally ordered, so selection is the art of picking various combinations of students with various combinations of skills. And most of the time, the selection committee will be dealing with student-A who's good at P but not so good at Q, where as student-B is good at Q, but not so good at P. Now things become more interesting, right? A better way of looking at this question might be this: Students from college-X are usually very good in domain-P so let us take 2 students from there, students from college-Y are very good in domain-Q, so let's take 2 students from there, and so on. Where domain-P and domain-Q could be various things that selection committee members are looking for, like technical knowledge, maths abilities, communication skills, innovativeness, attitude, people skills, etc.

Navin Kabra at Quora Visit the source

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I don't think its so much a matter of diversity as it is a matter of a comparative basis that is formed for the applications. Let me explain. Look at it this way. If you had candidates from the same school applying to different programs and departments in the same graduate school, then there's no problem, because the applications are not cross department. However, if candidates from the same school apply to the same grad school to the same program, what happens more often than not is that there is some overlap of recommendations. There is a high likelihood that the same professor will be giving a recommendation to more than one student, and an even higher likelihood that one of these will be more eulogizing than the other. This forms a direct comparative basis to pick one student over the other. This would probably hold for any common factor between applications. I've seen about 2-3 people from the same college get into the same grad program in the same application cycle, but not more than that (unless its an undergrad to grad transition within the same institute). It makes more sense to pick the top candidates from each institution, rather than the top 3 from one, since an objective basis for comparison between institutions is hard to establish.

Achintya Prakash

While I am not well-versed in the decision-taking procedure, I would tend to believe that universities consider diversity only when they're left with a pool of applicants, all of whom seem equally skilled/talented. Otherwise, I believe that they always go for the candidate they evaluate to be better. I can cite an example, when 3 students from IITK Physics were admitted to Caltech (2010). Given that Caltech is a small school, it is improbable that they'd admit 3 students from the same institute in the same department if they valued diversity over other things. I would say, though, that it is very difficult to judge the abilities of students from the very limited information the graduate admissions committee has. Given that, it may often happen that they would prefer to have a diverse group of students, hoping that this will lead to a better exchange of ideas. I do not have any data at all to back this claim up, so take it with a pinch of salt.

Shubhayu Chatterjee

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