When recruiting students into science/technology-centric paths (which is what MIT is looking for), it's important to accept that the required mix of interest in the subject and a strong work ethic is just not all that common. It's also difficult to predict which students are going to have those characteristics based solely on high school grades, SAT scores, etc.
Thus excluding anyone from the pool of applicants on the basis of things like gender, ethnicity, etc. means you end up with fewer students going into challenging math and science programs, which is really not a good outcome in terms of remaining competitive with China and other booming technological sectors. For example, Caltech used to be all-male until c.1970 and is now about 45% female at the undergraduate level - but the curriculum is still as rigorous as ever.
P.S. STEAM is better than STEM; the arts these days have many tie-ins with technology and STEM students with no experience of any of the arts are missing out on many economic and personal growth opportunities.
We already have a word for "STEAM": "Academia". Unless you don't consider, say, History an art or a science, in which case, why do you hate historians so much that you'd make up an acronym that basically means "not you specifically"?
Thus excluding anyone from the pool of applicants on the basis of things like gender, ethnicity, etc. means you end up with fewer students going into challenging math and science programs, which is really not a good outcome in terms of remaining competitive with China and other booming technological sectors. For example, Caltech used to be all-male until c.1970 and is now about 45% female at the undergraduate level - but the curriculum is still as rigorous as ever.
P.S. STEAM is better than STEM; the arts these days have many tie-ins with technology and STEM students with no experience of any of the arts are missing out on many economic and personal growth opportunities.