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Prestigious universities were never about quality of education: if you're smart enough to get in, you're smart enough to teach yourself anything. Rather, they

Prestigious universities were never about quality of education: if you're smart enough to get in, you're smart enough to teach yourself anything. Rather, they are about the peers you go to school with. You learn and grow from the type of people you surround yourself with, and at elite universities you surround yourself with extraordinarily smart people.

timthorn 17y ago
I think it's also about the quality of academic staff. At the best universities the teaching is usually a secondary activity; the lecturers are leaders in their field of research and can set a curriculum that a self learner would have difficulty in coming up with. But the actual learning is indeed often driven by the students.
- greenlblue 17y ago
  Disagree with you on that one as well. Every postdoc in the math department tells the same story. Go to the library, find something that interests you, spend every waking moment with the subject, find an advisor, write a thesis. Nowhere in any of their stories do they mention going to class designed by world class researchers and learning from lectures.
  - endtime 17y ago
    It may not be true for math...but math is probably the exception rather than the rule. I'd certainly say timthorn is correct about CS.
greenlblue 17y ago
I disagree with you there. There are extraordinarily smart people in every aspect of life and in every university so paying for the privilege of surrounding yourself with smart people is a really poor way to spend your money since you can find them for free.
- endtime 17y ago
  There's a difference between finding a few smart friends anywhere, which I agree isn't that hard, and living four years of your life in a place where everyone you meet is extremely intelligent and driven, which is qualitatively different and extremely valuable.
shawndrost 17y ago
You know, I used to be a big detractor of "Second Life", but the other day I found out that it's now a big part of distance education at some big universities. That seems like a great way to get some of the same benefits: you can literally run into people in the halls, and know what they're interested in. Edit: Did some research; it mostly seems to have failed. Some examples: http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/slum/ http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/slum/ http://udsled.ning.com/ http://udsled.ning.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA
hga 17y ago
This has never been true of MIT (although I'll double check that WRT to the very beginning, which I'm studying now), and to this day every course is taught by a professor (I know of one exception to this rule, an EECS grad student who walked on water and who everyone in the department thought was the very best person to teach one particular course). MIT is deadly serious about undergraduate education, to the point where if a professor violates certain rules (e.g. no homework of X sort N days before final exams), a committee charged with this sort of thing will take the course away from the professor. I was also once an employee who's office happened to be in the complex that included the EECS undergraduate HQ. One term a very good professor inexplicably did a horrible job of teaching 6.002 (or maybe 3, but I think it was 2). I read every one of the student course evaluations and with one special case exception they were uniformly negative with plenty of specificity. Then, due to the open office nature of that complex, I got to listen to the department head force the professor to read every single one of them, and then be told he'd never, ever be allowed to teach that course again (which he took very hard, since this is an area the professor really cares about). In all my personal experiences of taking courses, the professors were seriously dedicated to teaching, although obviously their ability to teach varied. But they tried, and some also would devote a little time to telling us about their research, how it excited them and they tried to give us a little facility in what it was all about. Generally the latter failed, but they seldom failed to get across how something as dry as say physical chemistry might be very interesting.
- metamemetics 17y ago
  They take education seriously sure, but a school that is 10x more competitive and 10x as expensive as a state school has at most 1.5x better teaching. It doesn't scale. The real asset is the student body. The department is good because it's competitive more so than it's competitive because it's good.
  - hga 17y ago
    Please define "competitive". E.g. MIT does not grade on the curve; that would be insane, instead they grade on mastery of material. I've e.g. never heard of someone sabotaging another work to improve their own grade, we're all in it together and tend to help each other out. As for costs, about 5 minutes with Google suggests a 5x difference compared to average state school tuition costs. Based on my experience, the difference in teaching quality is a LOT more than 1.5x, but I wouldn't be able to pin it down. I'd say the real asset is not the student body per se, but the whole community and the ingrained meritocratic attitudes. It's assumed by default that everyone at MIT is serious about what they're doing (which of course is not 100% academics, not that we've ever managed to top CalTech's Rose Bowl hack :-), and there's a tremendous amount of respect all around. It's said that undergraduates are treated like grad students (and that includes serious cutting edge research (e.g. through UROP; in both my experiences there, the problems had not been solved, period)) and grad students like junior facility, and on up for faculity (except, I will add, everyone in the Math Department is treated like shit, but it's not entirely horrible (my first job was maintaining a computer system in that department)). And in the end, if you're trying to get into a good grad school, which is the better foundation? If you care about how your resume impresses people and opens doors, which school would you rather have on it (note that in lower quality tech areas MIT envy doesn't make this entirely a good thing, but then again it acts as a filtering function).

timthorn 17y ago

I think it's also about the quality of academic staff. At the best universities the teaching is usually a secondary activity; the lecturers are leaders in their field of research and can set a curriculum that a self learner would have difficulty in coming up with. But the actual learning is indeed often driven by the students.

greenlblue 17y ago
Disagree with you on that one as well. Every postdoc in the math department tells the same story. Go to the library, find something that interests you, spend every waking moment with the subject, find an advisor, write a thesis. Nowhere in any of their stories do they mention going to class designed by world class researchers and learning from lectures.
- endtime 17y ago
  It may not be true for math...but math is probably the exception rather than the rule. I'd certainly say timthorn is correct about CS.

greenlblue 17y ago

I disagree with you there. There are extraordinarily smart people in every aspect of life and in every university so paying for the privilege of surrounding yourself with smart people is a really poor way to spend your money since you can find them for free.

endtime 17y ago
There's a difference between finding a few smart friends anywhere, which I agree isn't that hard, and living four years of your life in a place where everyone you meet is extremely intelligent and driven, which is qualitatively different and extremely valuable.

shawndrost 17y ago

You know, I used to be a big detractor of "Second Life", but the other day I found out that it's now a big part of distance education at some big universities. That seems like a great way to get some of the same benefits: you can literally run into people in the halls, and know what they're interested in. Edit: Did some research; it mostly seems to have failed. Some examples: http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/slum/ http://mblog.lib.umich.edu/slum/ http://udsled.ning.com/ http://udsled.ning.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFuNFRie8wA

hga 17y ago

This has never been true of MIT (although I'll double check that WRT to the very beginning, which I'm studying now), and to this day every course is taught by a professor (I know of one exception to this rule, an EECS grad student who walked on water and who everyone in the department thought was the very best person to teach one particular course). MIT is deadly serious about undergraduate education, to the point where if a professor violates certain rules (e.g. no homework of X sort N days before final exams), a committee charged with this sort of thing will take the course away from the professor. I was also once an employee who's office happened to be in the complex that included the EECS undergraduate HQ. One term a very good professor inexplicably did a horrible job of teaching 6.002 (or maybe 3, but I think it was 2). I read every one of the student course evaluations and with one special case exception they were uniformly negative with plenty of specificity. Then, due to the open office nature of that complex, I got to listen to the department head force the professor to read every single one of them, and then be told he'd never, ever be allowed to teach that course again (which he took very hard, since this is an area the professor really cares about). In all my personal experiences of taking courses, the professors were seriously dedicated to teaching, although obviously their ability to teach varied. But they tried, and some also would devote a little time to telling us about their research, how it excited them and they tried to give us a little facility in what it was all about. Generally the latter failed, but they seldom failed to get across how something as dry as say physical chemistry might be very interesting.

metamemetics 17y ago
They take education seriously sure, but a school that is 10x more competitive and 10x as expensive as a state school has at most 1.5x better teaching. It doesn't scale. The real asset is the student body. The department is good because it's competitive more so than it's competitive because it's good.
- hga 17y ago
  Please define "competitive". E.g. MIT does not grade on the curve; that would be insane, instead they grade on mastery of material. I've e.g. never heard of someone sabotaging another work to improve their own grade, we're all in it together and tend to help each other out. As for costs, about 5 minutes with Google suggests a 5x difference compared to average state school tuition costs. Based on my experience, the difference in teaching quality is a LOT more than 1.5x, but I wouldn't be able to pin it down. I'd say the real asset is not the student body per se, but the whole community and the ingrained meritocratic attitudes. It's assumed by default that everyone at MIT is serious about what they're doing (which of course is not 100% academics, not that we've ever managed to top CalTech's Rose Bowl hack :-), and there's a tremendous amount of respect all around. It's said that undergraduates are treated like grad students (and that includes serious cutting edge research (e.g. through UROP; in both my experiences there, the problems had not been solved, period)) and grad students like junior facility, and on up for faculity (except, I will add, everyone in the Math Department is treated like shit, but it's not entirely horrible (my first job was maintaining a computer system in that department)). And in the end, if you're trying to get into a good grad school, which is the better foundation? If you care about how your resume impresses people and opens doors, which school would you rather have on it (note that in lower quality tech areas MIT envy doesn't make this entirely a good thing, but then again it acts as a filtering function).