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Discipline snobbery (i.e. "My major is more hardcore than your major!"). The people who engage in it are a minority (and who they are varies, since for many people it's a defense mechanism when they're taking their major's most brutal classes), but they're a loud minority.
- Too much emphasis on being hardcore. To quote a friend who got his bachelor's, master's, and PhD from MIT, "I was really hardcore as a freshman. Where 'hardcore' means that you were dumb, but survived." It can turn into a masochism contest very quickly, with people depriving themselves of food and sleep, taking more classes than they can reasonably handle (I did this, with near-catastrophic results), or even going into majors that they don't really care about (see my first point) in order to prove to everyone how tough they are.
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I agree with jessiehl that there are many things to like about MIT. But I also agree with jessiehl that MIT's biggest drawback is what he stated above regarding the student culture and the social emphasis on being 'rigorous' and 'hard-core'. It reminds me of my high school (and I suspect most people's high schools) where there was excessive social emphasis on the guys to be star athletes and the girls to be cheerleaders, at MIT, there is probably excessive emphasis on people to be masochistic.
The emphasis on rigor might make some sense if it actually mattered from a real-world point of view. But the fact is, it probably doesn't. Just like being captain of your high school football team may matter a great deal in terms of social status while you're in high school but nobody is going to care afterwards, similarly, being excessively rigorous and masochistic may earn you social status at MIT, but probably not afterwards.
As a case in point, I think there is little dispute amongst MIT insiders that Sloan management is a relatively easy major (compared to many other majors at MIT). Yet the fact is, Sloanies earn one of the highest average starting salaries of any major at MIT: higher than many of the hard-core technical majors. In fact, I think that's the key reason why the Sloan School is such an crucial feature of MIT. Sloan offers students who can't or don't want to put up with the rigor of a hard-core technical major the chance to not only still earn a degree from MIT, but more importantly, to also get a top-paying job. In other words, you work less and get paid more. It's an absolutely fantastic deal. I often times wonder why more students don't become Sloanies. {Again, it's almost certainly due to the dysfunctional social pressures that jessiehl and I decry.}
I'll give you another example from outside the MIT community. Take the technical majors at Stanford. Stanford is quite famous, or perhaps infamous, for offering a relatively relaxed atmosphere (relative to most other top-ranked technical programs). It's practically impossible to actually flunk out of - or heck, to even get truly bad grades at - Stanford. Yet I think we can agree that Stanford graduates are hardly hurting for jobs or for grad school positions. The relative lack of masochism does not seem to hurt them.
The problem is not so much with pain or hard work, but rather with
unnecessary pain and hard work. There are some kinds of pain that are useful because they will foster long-term intellectual maturation and development. But then there is pain just for the sake of pain.