Keep in mind even the English majors have to take two semesters of Calculus and Physics in addition to Chemistry and Biology. Basically if you can’t pass the first year engineering requirements, you’re not getting out of MIT with a degree. I believe CalTech’s core is very similar.
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Which means they really can’t afford to admit students who can’t deal with those requirements, whether they want to or not. One thing all theses schools have in common is their interest in maintaining a good grad rate %. People flunking or dropping out is bad for the stats.
See the post I quoted in the comment for the context of my post. I wasn’t replying directly to your earlier posts.
Exceptional in the context of what is expected. An example could be an employer hiring college grads. There are good reasons why typical tech employers give applicants tech interviews and evaluations before hiring, rather than assume he/she went to MIT, so I know he/she is going to be an expert. I expect some MIT grads don’t do well in such tech interview/evaluations – not just compared to Harvard/Caltech grads, compared to what the employer expects for the position.
There are countless reasons why this may occur. Just as some students don’t hit their stride until college, some students falter during college. For example, one of my relatives was a genius… the type of person who could read a physics textbook faster than you or I would read a novel, yet still master the material and remember for life. Nevertheless, he failed out of an Ivy+ college. With the more freedom college offered, he was more focused on partying and hanging out with his off-campus girlfriend than attending college classes.
Or more simply the student might not remember past classes well and/or blanking under pressure, not clicking in his/her field of major as much as math/science, have different focuses/passions, not being good at communication/interviewing and/or working in groups, … I could list countless more hypotheticals.
I attended Stanford and live in CA, so don’t run in to MIT grads often. However, among that small anecdotal sample, there are a wide variety of abilities in an engineering-work context, rather than a uniform distribution.
Math SAT score is not the same thing as being in expert at field of study or planned career path.
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MIT seems to have a STEM-related “core” of sorts. So everyone has to drink from the proverbial MIT firehose at least to that extent.
I have a lot of respect for how MIT and Caltech select students, and I agree that the majority of their students are extraordinarily smart (although, I wouldn’t go as far as saying there isn’t “anyone from that school who is not truly, truly brilliant”).
But, I don’t equate that to prestige. As I said in one of my first posts on this thread, prestige is simply the “wow” factor — the number of people who are impressed to hear where you went to school. Nothing more. Not median SAT scores, Nobel prizes won, competitions won, or any other metric that most regular people have no idea about.
So, what is the size of the group, both nationally and globally, that reacts that way to hearing “Harvard,” versus MIT or Caltech? The larger that group, the greater the prestige, IMO.
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Academically brilliant, perhaps. But, I’d argue that that brilliance doesn’t always translate outside of what might be their narrow scope of brilliance. I’ve met one MIT grad who is technically very astute (brilliant, even, perhaps) but is somewhere between socially inept to downright dangerous. Not exactly someone you’d want running your business for you.
I was listening to a podcast interview with a professor from Hamilton College. He noted that those liberal arts majors that graduate with degrees in the humanities often struggle initially while working various retail or other somewhat backwater-ish jobs until they find themselves in a relatively low rung corporate gig. It’s there, with their liberal arts education, that has them able to synthesize and analyze information where they come into true form and become adept managers.
Back to prestige, I think prestige is that benefit of the doubt that you could or can be “smart” and adept at doing things. The MIT grad gets the benefit of the doubt with their technical prowess. The Harvard grad gets the benefit of the doubt with their ability to succeed (like a mouse being able to find the cheese). I think grads of other prestigious colleges and universities also get the benefit of the doubt of being able to work and engage in relatively competitive circles.
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What I’m going to say is controversial: If one of my best friends is any example, there is some subset of MIT graduates who were admitted due to their ability to sacrifice just about every ounce of socialization in order to test well - some of which, I suspect, is in the form of paid coaching. We talk about this all the time, mainly because some of the more morbid aspects of his life choices (unremitting work week; virtually no outside interests; high blood pressure) are coming home to roost. He once admitted to me that he would have completely flunked out of Wesleyan because of its high reliance on reading and long form, graded “papers”.
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I agree that MIT and CalTech have the (well earned) reputation of every student and alum being very smart, and most having very high stats. I’m not sure I’ve ever met a CalTech grad, but the few MIT grads I’ve worked with or known for longer than a handshake were smart but not genius smart, had regular jobs, and just seemed ‘normal’ to me.
One MIT grad who I worked with also went to Harvard Law, so you’d think ‘double egghead’, right? Nope. He worked at the same finance company that I did (think loan shark level, not Wall Street), enjoyed deer hunting, and the Packers. I never heard him talk about science or math or what book he was reading in his spare time. The ‘legion’ about him was that when he got his mortgage, the bank documents violated the Truth in Lending Act and he signed the forms at closing but then wrote a letter to the bank and said “I’ll take $1000 for me and $1000 for my wife (the statutory penalty for a TILA violation) and for $1000 more I’ll tell you what the mistake is.” The bank paid.
He was cleaver, but not in the brilliant category. I don’t think he ever wrote articles for law reviews or trade publications or did any work other than our 8-5 job,. I didn’t find him to be an 'academic but still a nice guy.
Yes, although MIT general education requirements have substantial math and science requirements (fulfilled by courses suitable for majors, not “physics for poets” type courses).
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Not convinced by any of that, guys. Not a lick.
People are impressed with schools because of how hard they think it is to get into them. Not about whether some of you have met people who didn’t blow your socks off in some real-life pursuit. My God, we’ll be here forever if we invoke those things as part of the criteria.
Yes, yes, anecdotally, I too attended law school (a very hard one to get into btw) with an MIT grad who did not finish at or near the top of the class. Not sure what to do with that, but I know this: she had high SAT scores, a rigorous high school curriculum and very good grades. I know that w/o actually knowing that because of where she attended and graduated. I can’t say that about any other two schools of which I’m aware.
Yes, there are names that are more synonymous with “wow!” due to pop culture, but I’m interested in what this crowd thinks. The people whose opinions are of no relevance (or interest) to me are legion.
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I personally think the academic experience for undergrads is a lot flatter than a lot of people want to believe. Basically, there is such a glut of PhDs looking for faculty positions that a wide range of colleges can still be very choosey. A few individuals are then such research output stars that they can move around, and eventually they concentrate at top research departments. But I am skeptical that really translates to undergrad experiences.
I do think things like class sizes and who is actually teaching classes can matter for lower level classes, but I think this also starts to flatten out at upper level, major only classes. Still, colleges that focus more resources on undergrad classes, per undergrad student, may be better bets to provide a higher average experience across all four years, including introductory and non-major classes.
So how would we actually measure all this in a meaningful way? I think it is inherently tricky, and I would be skeptical of measures that purported to find huge differences between undergrad programs of broadly similar format and resources.
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The academic experience for undergrads is not flat because of differences in peer quality (the network effects are very significant), and differences in faculty availability — not quality, and other resources.
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I think peer quality is another thing that tends to flatten more as you move into advanced major classes. Academic peers can also find each other in study groups, and so on.
Of course these are relative terms. Flatter than some believe is not the same as totally flat.
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Peer quality can be vastly different at the top 5 schools vs the next 5 etc especially in majors that are concrete — eg stem , in particular in non Engg majors etc. Also probably in humanities, languages etc
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Because of the Ph.D. glut (and the random luck of the higher ed job market even in the before times) you’re right that colleges can be very choosy, and as a result, the caliber of faculty even at less selective institutions has risen across the board – so the gap is not as significant in the education and general qualifications of faculty at different kinds of schools as it once was. However, undergrads’ academic experiences will still be very different at different kinds schools – with differences in class size, resources and opportunities for faculty and students, the spectrum of preparation and interests among students, the proportion of adjuncts to tenure-track professors, and so on (this in no way suggests that adjuncts are less qualified or talented, but it’s hard to have the same presence in a school and in students’ lives when one’s employment situation is so precarious and unstable). All of those variables determine what classes professors can offer, how much they can expect of their students, what research or lab experiences they can provide, how committed students are to learning outside their majors, etc. So the experience is not flat, but there are many more factors at play than the differences between individual faculty members in Ivy/Ivy+/T20 institutions versus less prestigious schools.
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Not sure what you’re saying. The quality of students at Princeton is vastly different than that of Penn or Cal Tech?
Also, not sure what you mean by “concrete” but that’s probably a discussion for another thread. Or not.
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So you are saying that, for example in CS, a higher ranked school like UIUC has better quality (however you define) peers than a somewhat lower ranked school like Harvard?
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Per MIT, this URL provides a distribution of undergrad student majors.
Note “primary” vs secondary major. It appears not that many attend MIT for the purpose of a non STEM primary major (“non STEM” encompasses both humanities and social sciences).
I think if you want to be a humanities or social sciences PRIMARY major at the undergrad level, there are better colleges to attend, where you can learn outside the classroom from like-minded classmates.
https://registrar.mit.edu/stats-reports/majors-count
I imagine this rarity in the non-STEM major is similar at Caltech and other “…. institutes of technology”.
These are very useful definitions of prestige, even as we know prestige is something that cannot be precisely measured. Prestige of your college manifests in people you encounter giving you the benefit of the doubt, and it shifts the burden of proof: they will assume you are smart and can add value (unless and until you demonstrate otherwise).
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Prestige of your college usually* means that you were a high achiever in high school with supportive-enough parents (willing to pay the amount calculated by the college’s financial aid office).
*Or that you had a large hook (often inherited like legacy and/or donor relation) to get admitted.