"Ivy Entitlement" Finally Understood

Parents Forum
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Very different in Cambridge. Collaborating on math problem sets was viewed as essentially cheating. If you couldn’t do one or more of the problems then your weekly supervisions were intended to help you along the way to figuring out the answer. Hence the interview format.

And relatively little choice in courses (almost none in the first year, limited in year two), hardly anyone would even think about doing a course from a subsequent year:

“Most students will find that there is enough mathematics in Part IA to keep them busy (or very busy!),
and the Faculty places no expectations on students beyond keeping up with the first-year lectures, examples sheets and supervisions. Indeed there are many other educational and recreational opportunities to enjoy at university, though mathematics itself can hopefully be recreational.
For those who do want something extra or something a bit different from the mathematics in Part IA,
the first choice should be the many excellent lectures provided by the student mathematics societies.”

https://www.maths.cam.ac.uk/undergrad/course/coursesIA.pdf

(I find it quite hard to imagine a US course guide saying “mathematics itself can hopefully be recreational”)

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“When we admit a class of students to MIT, it’s as if we’re choosing a 1,100-person team to climb a very interesting, fairly rugged mountain—together.”
This is interesting, as it has actually been shown that when people are in a group “brain-storm” setting, the ideas generated then are actually less creative than ideas generated in their own office/desk. This is not to say that there is no need for group work, but just to say that there is time for team work and then there is time for individual work. The so-called brainstorm session often is biased by group-think and/or diminished by team leader’s preference/influences.
I venture to guess the 1,100 strong MIT mountain climb team would be a lot more successful in conquering the rugged peak if they have leaders and followers and cheerleaders and background helpers. It will be a disaster-in-the-making if most of them are outgoing leaders.

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We can’t expect to use examples from decades past to explain the present. Today, the tippy tops want to see collaboration in general and even more so for STEM. The kid who applies without that is at some risk. The mindset they seek acknowledges the value of collaboratiion, to enhance the results. This isn’t just about problem sets or homework. It’s about the work of engineers and others.

Collaborating is not taking someone else’s work as your own.

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I thought that the “drinking from a fire hose” comments tended to come from Caltech students.

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The expression is used at Caltech too, I believe. But it appears to have originated at MIT:

https://www.■■■■■■■■■■/photos/wallyg/4847645087

"Former MIT President Jerome Wiesner (1971-1980) coined this colorful description of the MIT educational experience: “Getting an education at MIT is like taking a drink from a fire hose.”

“A group of (MIT) hackers … turned a fire hydrant into a working drinking fountain in front of the largest lecture hall on campus, 26-100.”

If you click on the link, you see an image of the hack. It’s in Stata Center.

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Another thought about something that may give rise to a sense of entitlement, or at least an unrealistic assessment of chances (aside from participation trophies): Indirect effects of yield management.

It is sometimes thought that high yields are desirable to raise a college’s US News rankings. They do that (to some extent), but I don’t think that is actually the main reason why high yields are desirable to colleges.

All of the CC single-digit schools do rather strikingly well in hitting their enrollment targets year after year, without going too deep into the waitlist pool. How can they do this, when students are applying to about 6 to 12 colleges, and the individual decisions are unpredictable?

I think the colleges most likely have fairly sophisticated algorithms to predict the likely yield within each category of applicant (I don’t mean demographics, mainly–more like high school profile, intended major, distance of home from the college, etc.). At any rate, that is what I would do if I had to arrange for (say) 1500 +/- 20 enrollees each year. Of course, they can correct for overenrollment or under-enrollement in the subsequent years, and they do have the overall patterns of yield to go by. The law of large numbers helps. Still . . .

Students who are likely to be admitted to multiple “top” schools create the greatest uncertainties for admissions offices. On the other hand, if admission can be plausibly offered to a student who is unlikely to be admitted to any other “top” school, that student is more likely to come, and the admission makes filling the class to the desired numbers simpler.

But then as a side effect, students learn about the profile of the single-top admit student, and more of them essentially match that profile than can be accommodated–so they develop unrealistic expectations of their admissions chances.

Of course, I can’t prove this, because I don’t have the inside scoop. But it at least makes some sense.

On the other hand, I suppose the simplest explanation for unrealistic expectations can be found by applying Occam’s razor: People tend to overestimate their own excellence. (This holds for most Americans, I think. It does not hold for most British people, in my experience, Twoin18.)

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MODERATOR’S NOTE:
Closing; thread has run its course.