Engineering at MIT vs Princeton?

[sakky]

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I think you underestimate the power of the human ego. A person will stick to a place or situation they absolutely hate if it has the unbelievable reputation that the Ivies have.

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But unlike Butt State U., students at Ivies have more incentive to tough it out. They make invaluable contacts there that will help them for the rest of their lives. They know the value of their degree when getting that first job/grad school/etc.

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<p>Which is exactly my point: however dissatisfactory the Ivies may be, the vast majority of students will still choose to stay to finish their degrees. </p>

<p>I said it before and I’ll say it again: if the Ivies were truly terrible schools, students would transfer away. Lots of students would love to transfer from Butt State U (to use Tom Servo’s example) to an Ivy, but hardly any students want to transfer from an Ivy to Butt State. </p>

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Anyway, student dissatisfaction rates <em>are</em> high, and that’s because these schools, at the undergrad level, don’t live up to people’s sky-high expectations. You may never even see the Nobel Prize winners the brochures and websites mentioned, as an undergrad. You may realize that your physics class is studying from the same text, and covering the same material, as your friend at Butt State U., but for much more money.

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<p>The same is true at MIT: when was the last time that Samuel Ting taught an undergraduate course? MIT’s textbooks are the same textbooks used elsewhere; it’s not as if MIT provides secret textbooks. The laws of science and engineering, and therefore the formulas and pedagogical techniques, are the same at any school. MIT is also just as expensive as the Ivies. Given MIT’s brand name - which is more arguably more powerful than many of the Ivies - students would be justifiably expected to enter with high expectations. And, if anything, MIT students are under far more pressure than the Ivy students are; whereas Ivy students may feel pressure to do well, MIT students feel pressure to simply graduate at all. Subjected to a high grade curve, Ivy students know that the worst that will happen is that they’ll earn mediocre grades, but they’ll still pass. {As an example, both George W. Bush and John Kerry - both self-admittedly unmotivated students - still managed to graduate from Yale.} So, on this score, I don’t see how MIT would be any more satisfactory than the Ivies. </p>

<p>To be clear, I am hardly an MIT basher. Far from it, I consider myself to be largely pro-MIT. However, I am mystified as to what the sources of the supposedly high levels of satisfaction at MIT are, relative to the Ivies. If the Ivies have problems with student satisfaction, then so does MIT. Again I ask - what does the acronym IHTFP stand for and why does it exist?</p>