Wow, this is extremely sexist and not at all evidence-based.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could prove any nonsense proposition p simply by insisting that p "isn't PC" and therefore any attempt to prove p "won't get taken seriously anyway" so it very-well oh-so-likely must actually be true!
And of course, asking males to take time away from their careers is out of the question...
I'm a current HS senior who took a Theory of Computation class the year prior, and I got a few chapters into QCSD before realizing that I needed to learn some more about complexity theory before I read that book. I'm planning on trying again once the summer begins.
Now I'm about half-way through Godel, Esher, Bach, and I have to say that GEB and QCSD feel similar, with an overlap not only in theme but also in genre and style.
I am a mildly dyslexic. I have excellent reading comprehension, but I read about a standard deviation slower than the average reader.
Thus, I don't think I've ever read a book "only once," since in order to understand much of anything, I always end up reading each page paragraph, sentence, or word until I understand it before I progress.
I am also an expert player, and agree with most of what was said, but I do think I should point out that this player's style is not the only strategy ("My strategy is usually to throw lots of pieces at their king and hope they die or I can win some material"). Personally, I prefer more closed/quite games, so most of my thinking (even in the middle game) is about how to achieve a favorable endgame, and win from there.
EDIT: I dislike studying openings too, (I started playing 1. g3 to avoid theory while still getting into some fun positions)
I play chess "seriously" (expert level) and am about a gold/platinum league Starcraft II player, and the games do show a surprising amount of similarity. Both show the most variance in the midgame, begin in identical formations (where memorizing openings is common), and converge to endgames that have somewhat less variance than midgames.
This type of training game is more often used to practice a certain structure that arises from a specific opening, and thus is a type of practice used more towards the higher levels of play (International Master+).
The thing is, if two amateurs are playing, neither of whom deeply know openings, then the starting position (or 4-5 moves in) is essentially new territory, like what might arise for a Grandmaster 15-30 moves into the game. Does this make sense?
My favorite thing about the MITx MOOCs are that they have really well-designed, carefully-devised problem sets, which I think might be the most important factor of a great class.
It is interesting that people are talking about the Ivies, not "elite colleges" in general. The article defines a high achiever as "anyone who gets a 29 or better on the ACT or a combined 1,300 on the SAT." At most elite schools (Ivies + MIT, Caltech, Stanford, etc.) a 30 ACT score would be rather below average.
Most colleges are moving towards need-blind admissions too, debunking the common complaint that they don't admit low-income students because they'd rather admit students who can pay.
It is also important to note that these types of policies are more common the more elite a university is.
Okay, but you could use that logic to claim (possibly validly, though I don't think so) that nobody should care about the Ivies because they only make up a fraction of schools (.08% times 5 = .4% of admissions, according to your data). This is not a sound argument, though, since very few of the 5 million students admitted to universities in the US would be competitive applicants at the Ivies. The pool of competitive applicants is much, much smaller.
"To address most of the responses below. I'm implying that even if all appropriate students applied for these programs, as the article suggests, it wouldn't make a difference because some tiny fraction of them would be admitted."
The article doesn't suggest that every student should apply, just that many academically qualified students are missing an opportunity to apply (even if that opportunity only results in a ~10% chance of acceptance, that's still a missed opportunity).
Wouldn't it be nice if you could prove any nonsense proposition p simply by insisting that p "isn't PC" and therefore any attempt to prove p "won't get taken seriously anyway" so it very-well oh-so-likely must actually be true!
And of course, asking males to take time away from their careers is out of the question...