<p>"Brilliant science research, top surgical skills, rocket science, orchestral prowess, literary brilliance, painting, sculpture, dance, Olympic level athleticism, there are many more worthy and enriching contributions to the world than over-earning, rampant consumption, and the creation of new over-consuming tots and teens. "</p>
<p>I officially declare my hometown part of Mexico (or may be Louisiana). We could not have had Michael DeBakey, Space Center, Carl Lewis and still be part of Texas.</p>
<p>On a side note I think an American Indian with Suzy’s stats would have made it to many schools.</p>
<p>Yea, but only temporarily, until global warming fully kicks in: Those coming 140-degree summer days will sort out the real Texans from the wannabes. ;)</p>
<p>I’m gonna hang around Chicago for a bit, waiting for them to start planting palm trees along Lake Shore Drive.</p>
<p>Actually, among the hardcore engineering/CS hiring managers and colleagues I’ve encountered at work and tech-oriented conventions(i.e. Linuxworld), the stereotypical recruitment pattern is that the UIUC grads are hired for the technically demanding work alongside folks from MIT, Caltech, Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, etc whereas the Ivy grads from places other than Princeton, Cornell, or sometimes Columbia SEAS are more likely to be assigned to sales/customer relations or the business side of the company.</p>
<p>I prefer Peggy for customer relations at Google vs an Ivy league trained CS person. it would be very hard to justify all that data they are storing up from my wireless signals.</p>
<p>QuantMech,
like you I object to the remark about “clones” and “robots”. This is again so typical of MIT. I wonder why Caltech is not keeping admission blogs and doesn’t care about interviews. Yet they manage to select the brightest boys and girls without bragging. What I like is that they involve faculty in reviewing applications, or so they claim on their website. I believe they have the best process.</p>
<p>It may well be that students at Ivy League schools do not learn more over their four years than their counterparts (similar SAT scores and high school grades) at less prestigious schools, so the Ivies may be mediocre. American universities in general have shown no interest in assessing how much students learn in a way that can be compared across schools.</p>
<p>Belyavsky,
you are making a very good point. We can’t even compare well what kids learn in K-12 across US, but comparing college education is almost impossible. I wonder if GRE scores could be of any use.</p>
<p>I don’t know what to make, QM, of how foreign my thoughts seem, when summarized by you. It even got to the point where I directly asked you to stop.</p>
<p>You did say that you didn’t “want to be dragged back into the MIT brouhaha,” lookingforward.</p>
<p>I’m not writing about the auto-admit issue here, however, nor am I writing about things that are not up on the MIT site at this moment. I did re-engage with the “robots” and clones" issue, because ExieMITAlum made that comment on the thread linked by poetgrl on 3/31/13, after all of the comments on the “How did HE etc.” thread.</p>
<p>If you have commented negatively about the comments about “robots” and “clones” or MIT’s mocking the 2400 etc. crowd, and I missed it, I will apologize profusely–I haven’t read everything even on the threads I participate in.</p>
<p>If you have not commented negatively about it, there is of course no need for you to explain your position. But I do find it odd.</p>
<p>I can post a lot more if you want them. And here’s a quote from the first post in first thread linked above:</p>
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<p>So according to the opening salvo of this thread a Harvard education isn’t even mediocre. Without the brand name attached it’s completely worthless. </p>
<p>Look, for all those who say that there are many great schools out there beyond the Ivy League and other high-end schools where you can get a wonderful education and go on to have a great career and fulfilling life, I’m with you 100%. I couldn’t agree more. Heck, I never went to school anywhere near an elite college myself; I went to a middling UC and I think I got an excellent education, and I’ve had a very successful career.</p>
<p>BUT, I don’t feel a need to drag down the Ivys to prove the worth of my own education or that of any one else who went to any of many fine colleges this country has to offer. Why the need to trash the Ivys, and worse yet, trash the students who choose to attend them? </p>
<p>To begin with to say that the Ivys are not excellent schools (much less worthless) is simply incorrect. They are some of finest schools this nation has ever produced. But they by no means have the corner on excellence. And I think the much better and more accurate way to provide the proper balance is to promote and extoll the excellence of other schools as well as the Ivys.</p>
<p>I agree that the “Ivy, Ivy, Ivy and Nothing but Ivy” crowd is seriously misguided. We need to help them take a wider view. But trashing the Ivy schools ain’t the way to do it.</p>
<p>I owe you no apology. I have not distorted your words. You have backed down from your position while refusing to admit that you have. In round one, you claimed that there is this big group of “Elite school lovers” who think that nobody can live a happy and successful life unless (s)he attends a top 20 school. In this round, you said
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<pre><code> These two statements do not amount to the same thing. Yet, you refuse to admit that.I don’t think I’m the one engaging in obfuscation here. And, frankly, I have a hard time believing that there exists a kid who went to high school in Texas who thinks that if he wants to return to Texas, he’ll be better off in terms of job hunting in Texas if he has a degree from Cornell than one from UT-A. I doubt that all of the Texas kids who go to Cornell think that way–there may be one who goes to the School of Hotel Managment who thinks that he has a better chance of getting a hotel management job with that credential, but lots of kids heading off to Cornell A&S because it will help them get a better job in Texas? I doubt it.
Once upon a time, I had a good friend who went to Brown–your other example–from Texas. Both he and his parents thought Brown would give him a better education in his field of interest than UT would–and both he and his parents also thought that in terms of job hunting in Texas, he’d be better off going to UT-A. They chose Brown despite that. And certainly almost every Texan who chooses a school like Swarthmore is fully aware that it’s not going to “wow” a heck of a lot of folks in Texas. I don’t think they will be “stunned” --your word–when it doesn’t and you claim they will. That’s hogwash. Calling you on that statement is not twisting your words.
While telling me I can have the “last word,” you continue to make the same argument by grasping one of cobrat’s old posts. Now, personally, I disagree with quite a few of cobrat’s statements about Stuyvesant. But even if you think cobrat has it right, there are roughly 800 people in a Stuy class and I think cobrat claimed it was about a quarter of the class that had this hang up. Want to know who they are? Mostly kids who are immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants. They often come from countries in which competition to get into the top schools is more competitive than anything we can imagine–think India and IIT --and their parents don’t quite “get” the fact that the US doesn’t work the same way.
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<p>Well, cobrat, your anecdotal experience certainly does not match my anecdotal experience: My older son lives in Champaign-Urbana and has lots of friends who attend UIUC – they are not stupid but rarely are they the best of the best. Or maybe you are thinking about the graduate school? With an under-10% acceptance rate, UIUC’s grad school is every bit as hard to get into as an Ivy.</p>
<p>At the same time, my younger son attends Brown and has to for the first time work hard for mostly A’s, whereas before in all his high school and dual-enrollment college classes he consistently got near-100% averages on all his math and science tests without even cracking open the book. </p>
<p>One thing I really like about Brown’s CS classes is that the profs will periodically toss out an extra challenge worth a mere handful of bonus points and yet quite a few students will choose to participate for the fun of it, even when they know they have an A in the bag. It sort of reminds me those SRA reading competitions I had as a kid, competing with one or two classmates and leaving the rest of the kids in the dust – just for the fun of it.</p>
<p>As it turns out, my son’s faculty advisor is a legend in the field, having co-invented the concept of hypertext and mentored a lot of the folks at Pixar. We couldn’t be happier with his choice of schools. The school may not give him every opportunity possible, but it will certainly give him enough.</p>
<p>Certainly people are not trying to claim there is anything like parity between the pro-elite and anti-elite commentary on this website? This is a pro top college website, with special sections for those colleges, Which is great. Those schools are great, and difficult to get into.</p>
<p>Yes, there are a few posters that denigrate the top schools, but most often they are ornery kids, trolls, or crackpots, and they are typically immediately descended on by hordes of posters with the opposite opinion ready to show them the error of their ways. </p>
<p>Perhaps the most prolific anti-Ivy zealot, annasdad, is probably one of the most reviled posters on here. Every time he posts his Deresiewicz essay (and he does that a lot) he is posted down probably 99 to 1.</p>
<p>Really. I haven’t noticed this website regularly crashing the day Cal State Stanislaus releases its admissions decisions.</p>
<p>My friend went to Cal State Stanislaus and has been president/COO of 2 different companies, including an elite golf club manufacturer, that all golf players know well.</p>
<p>With a handful of exceptions, nope…the vast majority of UIUC folks they hire and are impressed enough to keep hiring are predominantly hired from the undergrad division.</p>