21–30 of 87 posts
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> MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways. This is true, but there's a lot of value in being surrounded by peers who are at your level or a little better who push you to become better than you would otherwise.
Value for who, the people paying or the people attending?
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To be fair, it's probably true that the admit rate for MIT legacy applicants is also higher than the overall admit rate. It's just that the MIT admissions committee doesn't consider legacy status in admissions. It's hard to separate correlation from causation in the admit rates.
Really? Seems pretty easy to analyze. Just take legacy applicants and their non-legacy equivalents and see the admittance rates.
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The survivorship bias is kind of the point. An employer can't administer an IQ test, but they can hire from MIT or Stanford. They can't pull employees from the good old boy's network, but they can recruit from Harvard.
This is only because schools are so crappy to begin with, by design. If a degree actually meant something it wouldn't matter what school you attained it from.
Given that university is becoming the new high-school, is there merit to the idea of just having all universities follow the same curriculum and standardised assessments and exams? Like the University of California system, but nationwide - if not international.
School admissions should be reviewed like (some) conference papers, i.e. single-blind review. The name of the student is never known when considering him/her.
This is the reality: 1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area). Combine these two and you see the perpetual unfairness of education. Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' b…
True, but there's nothing MIT can do about it except stop being MIT.
At MIT, freshman calculus (if you didn't AP out of it - which you need a 5 on the BC to do) is not one year, but one semester. Multivariate calculus is also one semester, and if you're not done with it by the end of freshman year, you're not likely to graduate.
Yes, it's unfair. But it's not MIT's fault.
> Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways
I strongly suspect you are not in a position to provide empirical backup to that assertion.
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This is only because schools are so crappy to begin with, by design. If a degree actually meant something it wouldn't matter what school you attained it from.
Thats how university accreditation is meant to work: industry and state/gov agencies are supposed to certify an institution's graduates meet certain minimum standards. Given that university is becoming the new high-school, is there merit to the idea of just having all universities follow the same curriculum and standardised assessments and exams? Like the University of California system, but nationwide - if not inter…
Similarly, a nation wide curriculum would be shot down because it would make school way more difficult for a lot of parents' kids.
This is the reality: 1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area). Combine these two and you see the perpetual unfairness of education. Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' b…
> Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways. Ignore this person, they don't know what they are talking about. For better or worse, the 'elite' schools have money. That means they can hire teaching-track professors. These are professors whose sole job is to teach and advise (i.e., they don't spend all their time doing research). And they do a really good job at it. Much better than ov…
> Ignore this person, they don't know what they are talking about.
I'm not sure that that's fair. Granted I didn't go to a great school; I went to community college because it was what I could afford. But I know many who have attended other, "elite" schools and most of them, barring a few exceptions, told me they basically learned out of the book and the only "hard part" about the school was a high frequency of difficult testing.
A few have told me about great professors but even they said most of their other classes was almost just reading out of a text box and doing typical work around it.
So, no first person information here but what I've been told by several friends and former colleagues is they're like most schools they just push students a little harder with more testing. Hell one of my friends dropped out of Stanford and went right into quite an important job at Microsoft stating he wasn't learning anything by just reading books.
This is the reality: 1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area). Combine these two and you see the perpetual unfairness of education. Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' b…
my oldest is in 2nd grade Success Academy in brooklyn, they actually do lottery ( there is even a documentary about them on Netflix called the lottery)
in my view there is only one thing that allow kids to do well in school and that is parents who care.
once my son reaches 4th or 5th we are going to send him to a private school, cause thats when it starts to matter if they want to go the educational route.
to be honest though short of getting the most fundamental skills like reading and math and music i am kind of hoping he will just educate himself with things he care about his whole life.
there is something not very futureproof of sending your kid into an educational system that teaches everyone the same while expecing them to stand out.
i managed to do quite well for myself and i am mostly autodidact, but its hard to know if i was just lucky.
bottom line is you cant make the right decisions for your kids.
This is the reality: 1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area). Combine these two and you see the perpetual unfairness of education. Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' b…
>1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] > 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area). True, but there's nothing MIT can do about it except stop being MIT. At MIT, freshman calculus (if you didn't AP out of it - which you nee…
Not that I agree with parent, but given selection bias they can't empirically prove the opposite either (that elite schools teach well given that they select the best students). The lack of proof for the positive of course doesn't prove the negation, but I wish someone would do this experiment (admit a bunch of students randomly into a bunch of universities, compare academic performance over 4 or so years).
This is the reality: 1. High schools that tend to send high numbers of people to schools with acceptance rates less than 20% tend to be dis-proportionally represented. [1] 2. High schools that send kids to good college are more expensive (either inherently, or because they're in an expensive area). Combine these two and you see the perpetual unfairness of education. Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' b…
> Not to mention that MIT and other 'elite schools' barely teach well anyways. Ignore this person, they don't know what they are talking about. For better or worse, the 'elite' schools have money. That means they can hire teaching-track professors. These are professors whose sole job is to teach and advise (i.e., they don't spend all their time doing research). And they do a really good job at it. Much better than ov…