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The cynic in me says that elite colleges understand that the largest value they add is the prestige you obtain from having one on your CV. That is what they ar
by batterseapower 16y ago
The cynic in me says that elite colleges understand that the largest value they add is the prestige you obtain from having one on your CV.
That is what they are selling, not education - so there's really no contradiction in giving the education away for free.
- damoncali 16y agoYup. When MIT released their courses, I eagerly checked them out, hoping to see what I missed at my big state school. Turns out I missed nothing. The courses were in many cases less rigorous than the ones I took. They were utterly unremarkable. Yet everyone I know who actually went to MIT loves the place. The magic just isn't in he courses you take. I'll give them more than prestige, but academic superiority? No way.
- ericd 16y agoA big part of it is that the people at MIT are rigorously prescreened, and many courses/tests are graded on a curve, with the cutoff for an A being .5-1 std. deviation above the mean score in many classes. By competing with basically only above-average people, it means that it's relatively harder to get good grades than at many schools, even if the material is the same. But yeah, another big benefit is just being able to interact with so many great people.
- damoncali 16y agoI don't know. I've never been asked what my grades were in any professional situation. Ever. Not in engineering, not in business (post MBA), and certainly not as an entrepreneur. And I didn't have the luxury of going to a school where there was an excuse for my lackluster GPA. I think they're selling two things: 1. prestige 2. community
- ericd 16y agoReally? Every job I applied to out of school (software) asked for my GPA, and many of the internships (quantitative finance) for my SATs. Of course it becomes less important a few years out, so I hope you're not talking about that.