Yeah, MIT in theory has a lot of majors available, but the truth is over 95% of the graduating primary majors were in STEM in the latest NCES cohort, and over 98% when you add in Business and Architecture.
For some kids that focus would be desirable. Not so much others, including kids who like STEM but also are interested in exploring other things.
Your son did what was best for him which is really all that is important! And now he is in a career that he enjoys which is great.
As has been noted, MIT wins cross admits from Harvard more often than not, in publicly listed information. MIT also has the higher yield between the 2 schools, in spite of being non-restrictive EA instead of restrictive EA. There are several contributing factors. One is MIT is a more specialized school. While the general population may not prefer MIT, the kids who apply to MIT are not the general population. They are kids who want the unique MIT experience, which is not equivalent to Harvard or other Ivy+ colleges.
This also fits with why kids may prefer MIT over Harvard or vice versa. It’s not only about the name/connections. I’d expect that’s not the primary deciding factor between the school for typical students. There are many other possible contributing factors. For example, in the other thread I mentioned on the key reasons why I chose Stanford over MIT was feeling that I’d have more options, in the unlikely event that I changed my mind about majoring in engineering. The schools have quite different vibes and reputations, including for things like mandatory intensity of classwork. They have different available majors, specific classes, ECs, etc. As an example EC, according to Harvard’s website, 80% of Harvard students participate in athletics (including varsity, club, and intermural levels). The 2 schools have different athletic options and levels, including Div I vs Div III. More to the point of this thread, I think which college is most likely to support achieving a student’s future goals varies depending on what those goals are, rather than all Ivy+ colleges being grouped as comparable, and all non-Ivy+ colleges being grouped as different.
I work at a major software company in Silicon Valley. For engineering and technology jobs, there is really no question that Caltech and MIT are equivalent. Both are at the absolute pinnacle of the college food chain for STEM (Stanford is up there too, but it’s not like many Stanford graduates want to be practicing engineers for long).
And both certainly rank over Harvard for engineering and technology jobs. I see this in the excitement manifested when we successfully recruit college seniors from either Caltech or MIT. Neither school yields a lot of graduates!
However, unless your child is VERY certain about a career in STEM or in a STEM adjacency, Harvard will give you far more flexibility or optionality.
Both Caltech and MIT are known as “technology” schools for a reason. A student wanting to possibly major in non-STEM shouldn’t really go to either. Many better options out there for non-STEM.
Finally, our recruiting actually takes into consideration that “grade inflation” doesn’t really exist at either of these two schools. For example, I think the average GPA at MIT when normalized to a 4.0 scale is like 3.3 (MIT runs on a 5.0 scale). Both of these places are super rigorous and difficult so a kid needs to committed to science and technology and be around others who feel the same way.
Is your point here that Stanford is also at the top of STEM, but in a different way because its people become tech leaders rather than actually practicing engineers? I’m not trying to challenge your assertion, just to understand it.
Yes, exactly. Stanford engineers (most of which seem to be CS) are highly skilled too, but in my experience relatively few seem to want to become working engineers, as opposed to leveraging their degree to pursue engineering-adjacent professions, like entrepreneur, venture capitalist, or product manager.
Between these career preferences + grad school + some going into Wall Street, we surprisingly don’t get a lot of engineering applicants from Stanford even though they’re down the street so to speak. We get a lot more from Berkeley, San Jose State, UIUC, CMU, UCLA, etc. but they are in the next level down, which means absolutely nothing since they’re all excellent other than I’ve observed more creative ‘breakthrough thinking’ from our MIT and Caltech engineers.
Which I suppose is why they are so valued.
Sort of random, but I have heard some people in East Coast settings express similar sentiments about MIT as you are expressing about Stanford.
Of course all that is just anecdotal, but I do wonder if this might in part be a school + geography thing. Like, MIT students thinking New York might end up selecting for a different distribution than MIT students thinking California.
And then I would wonder if the opposite could be true for Stanford, although I really don’t recall East Coast people expressing to me anything one way or the other on this issue as to Stanford (in my admittedly extremely limited experience talking to engineers and such about these things).
I think at the most elite colleges which are not “institutes of technology”, there is a lot of peer (or parental?) pressure to not “just” be a school teacher or nurse or another similarly normie job coming out of Stanford or Harvard or Princeton. There is some non-trivial pressure to “be somebody” or have high ambition in terms of money or influence or power. Whether it is due to an increased focus on “return on investment” given how expensive these places are, or some other societal pressure, I truly don’t know.
I remember that was the essence of that Mother Jones article last September: How America’s Elite Colleges Breed High-Status Careers—and Misery – Mother Jones
Timely article in the NYT. Article gifted. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/us/yale-report-colleges-unversities-trust.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bFA.Zadr.UFPAomW9kKkL&smid=url-share
I’ll see if I can get the actual underlying report and share it.
Just saw this article under its own thread.
Here’s that thread: Yale Report Finds Colleges Deserve Blame for Higher Education’s Problems