simfish

Die, post edit time limit, just die.

Many of these students don't have a lot of incentives to pursue Caltech/MIT equivalent educations, as opposed to incentives to be more relaxed (though one important question is - how much do students really remember from Caltech/MIT courses?). Most of the incentives come from the instructors they work in research with - and then there is the added question - are instructors likely to reward them with better recs if the students show the instructors the products of their self-study?

The other issue, in any case, is tht many of those students would probably major in physics/math in those state universities, while they would have been turned off by physics/math at Caltech. In conjunction with that, Caltech offers rigorous mathematical-based research in other fields - fields that would take courses and courses of non-mathematical busywork in a state university (though the student could try to contact instructors to do research independently of taking courses in such a field).

I apologize for intermixing the terms Caltech/MIT and Caltech. I'm a lot more familiar with Caltech, but I have to keep in mind that many Caltech students turn Caltech down for MIT and still get Caltech-equivalent educations.

Anyhow, how this is relevant to the topic - is this - if students can obtain MIT equivalent educations at state schools, then why complain about MIT admissions? But if students cannot obtain MIT equivalent educations at state schools, then that is one reason to complain about admission standards at MIT (were such students desirous of working in an environment other than Caltech's stress-filled one).