I don't get why students need to be apply to be accepted. Why can't everyone go to MIT? Is there a scarcity on chalk boards, shitty chairs and cinder blocks?
Because you want to have a minimum level of ability so that you can maintain a certain pace of instruction. If you have students of various levels of ability and you teach high tier material, most of those kids will fail and drop out. Why set them up for failure?
That's a nice thought, but it's about status. If they let everyone in, they'd lose status, and having an MIT degree wouldn't have signaling value. If what you said was accurate, they'd just set minimum qualifications and accept way more people.
Um, video lectures, lecture notes, problem sets, solutions, and references to textbooks is more than just "a dumping ground". When I look at what's available on OCW for the classes I took when I was at MIT, everything that I got any learning value from is there.
The biggest part of any "elite" university is being surrounded by similarly high achieving people, to learn from and be motivated by. Attending any random state college gives you theoretical access to all the non-human resources (except labs) that the typical MIT undergraduate will access.
> The biggest part of any "elite" university is being surrounded by similarly high achieving people, to learn from and be motivated by.
While this is a common belief (and many people, before I went to MIT, were very effusive in telling me how much it would benefit me), my experience is that it is a myth (or at least it was at MIT when I was there). Of course there were high achieving people at MIT when I was there, but there were also plenty who were not; overall I don't think the distribution of motivation was much different from high school. (Motivation is not the same thing as grades: most of my fellow students at MIT got straight A's in high school for the same reason I did, that for us, high school was simply not that challenging academically, so we could be lazy and still make the grades.) As for what I learned from my fellow students, I can't say I learned nothing (since, for example, learning what pot smells like counts as learning something), but I don't think I learned anything significant academically that I wouldn't have learned from my peers at a less selective school.
It's not theoretical, you simply need to search a bit more for same resources at a random state school.
There are plenty of top quality professors at such schools.
Not every professor can make things work for their family at Stanford or MIT. Maybe their partner has a modest income so to afford a house so they go work at Penn State or whatever.
Or you could just say explicitly what you think is missing from the course called "Analysis I" that I linked to, instead of making vague insinuations. Your call.
Not the OP, but it seems that videos of lectures are missing, which is the case for most OCW courses - they are mostly incomplete and often outdated. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful for some of the marvelous OCW courses I took, but suggesting it can substitute actually studying at MIT is a bit too... optimistic.
> videos of lectures are missing, which is the case for most OCW courses
Yes, fair point.
> suggesting it can substitute actually studying at MIT is a bit too... optimistic
My personal experience at MIT was that I didn't learn much from lectures; too long, too boring, and too much tailored to the professor's style instead of the student's. In this respect lectures at other schools where teaching is valued more relative to research might actually be better. (One of the professors I had at MIT who was the exception--an excellent lecturer, who actually responded usefully to questions from students in a freshman-level class of 200 or more--was criticized by the MIT administration for not publishing enough research papers.)
If you mean there is more to the credential than the coursework, of course that's true. But the only possible value in the credential is scarcity; if everyone gets it, it ceases to have any value as a credential.
Or if you mean there's more to the experience of going to college than just the coursework, of course that's true as well. But if everyone went to MIT (or any other selective school), that experience would change too; all those people would not be getting the same experience that people going to MIT now are getting.
In short, it is not really possible for everyone to "go to MIT" (or any other selective school) in either of the above senses. So I was focusing on what is possible, namely, for everyone to have access to the same actual learning materials that MIT students have access to.
There is one other thing you could be referring to that the online materials can't give you, namely in person instruction and feedback. Personally, if I think back to the classes I took at MIT, I didn't learn anything significant in those ways; everything significant I learned, as far as the actual academic material was concerned, I learned from reading the course notes and textbooks and working the problem sets and taking the exams (and seeing what I got right and what I got wrong). And all those things are available to anyone who goes to the OCW site. I can't say for sure what other people's experiences are, but I think this quote from Gibbon is relevant:
"The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."
> There is one other thing you could be referring to that the online materials can't give you, namely in person instruction and feedback
It's the labs and the projects. Especially for engineering degrees, a good part of learning comes from shipping projects. I think it's where "everyone doing MOOC" falls short.
True, this is one thing that online course materials can't give you. But I also don't think a school like MIT has any real advantage in this respect over other schools. At least, not if the labs I had there are any indication; the materials we were given to work with were just as half-baked as anywhere else.
And if I'm really honest, not to suggest the coursework (especially hands-on) didn't have value, but a huge part of what I learned was exposure to many things--including non-STEM--and various activities outside of classwork. I only use things I learned undergrad in the most general sense today.
Oh, I don't disagree. Certainly with respect to hiring, I'm usually interviewing fairly senior people in not-directly hands-on tech roles. I won't say I don't look at the schools but they don't really play a factor in my evaluation. And some of the best senior folks I know are from schools that no one's heard of.
Yeah, without in any way to disclaim a rather privileged background, and without every really being outside of a engineering-adjacent space, I have had a very twisty turny path. And I don't think that's at all uncommon for a lot of people with a long career.
I think a lot of people here assume a fairly linear SWE progression beginning with a CS degree but that's not the norm for a lot of people who work in the computer industry in various roles even that didn't involve wholesale career shifts.
The admissions criteria is probably most of the value of MIT. If you have a degree from MIT you're probably smart, and we know that because you were able to get in to MIT (and graduate).
If we could find proper way to do testing and administer unlimited class sizes, one option could be just allow everyone in first year remote with some lower tuition rate. And then just drop all of the students who do not do good enough to get inside quota of spots for further years.
Lab based courses are crucial to the natural sciences. Even an institution as well off as MIT can't afford to buy enough NMR spectrometers for everyone to take their chemistry classes. Simulations and videos are not adequate substitutes for real lab work.
With online schooling this is true now more than ever. Why _cant_ i just follow along online, have a bot grade the assignments, and get a degree? Makes you start to question what going to prestigious schools is really about.
>Makes you start to question what going to prestigious schools is really about.
Parents should teach their kids about the importance of networking and signaling while growing up. Obviously, it's secondary to actually being proficient and productive, but still just as necessary.
How about kids test in? They can take classes online, if they perform well enough, they get to attend in person, everyone else can bang on the gates via a MOOC.
Why not take 1 or 2 university classes your junior and senior year of HS?
I think so, but in the method I am outlining, the student would be doing an audition with a university they would like to attend, it isn't just for college credit.
Their massive endowment comes from being selective. Seeing where someone graduated from is an excellent tool that companies use to filter out candidates and that filter is of genuine value to the economy. Hiring people is very very risky, especially new grads. Imagine having to sift through 1000s of potential candidates and not having indicators such as whether they graduated, where they graduated from, how well they did compared to their peers, etc...
It would result in massive inefficiencies and major risks.
With few exception (medical school, some very specialized research), you do not go to MIT if what you genuinely and strictly want is a good education. There is nothing that an undergrad is going to learn at MIT that can't be learned online. There's nothing secretive that MIT teaches that only MIT grads could possibly know about. There is no proprietary research or knowledge that MIT teaches to its students that isn't well established and that other colleges don't have access to. And finally, MIT and most other Ivy league schools and schools in general don't have any kind of specialty when it comes to lecturing or any kind of area of expertise on delivering educational material in any kind of special way; on the contrary most professors are pretty bad at teaching and teaching is not their area of expertise. The textbooks, the lectures, heck even the tests and assignments, are all available for anyone to learn from if they so choose.
You go to MIT because it puts you ahead of well over 95% of the population in virtually every future aspect of your career.
