As someone who made a decent career for himself in tech without having been given a four year party immediately after high school, I am having a hard time seeing what I should be objecting to in this development. As far as I know, all of these students are welcome to roast a steer as often as they'd like after college, ideally on their own property.
MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
131–140 of 222 posts
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#132Senior House alum here... You are load balancing 5 servers. One has a latency issue that causes response time to be 2x the others. What do you do? You wait, it goes to 4x. Now what? You take it offline, spin up a new instance and investigate. MIT put them on notice (a year earlier), there was no attempt to improve and the bluff was called. I wish this wasn't happening, but sometimes you have to actually DO something.
Well, that's certainly a suitably nerdy analogy :-)
I never lived in Senior House, but I hung out with friends there quite a bit. From what I've read, I've tentatively, and sadly, come to the same conclusion: there were persistent problems with the culture of the dorm, and the administration probably had no choice.
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#133Senior House alum here... You are load balancing 5 servers. One has a latency issue that causes response time to be 2x the others. What do you do? You wait, it goes to 4x. Now what? You take it offline, spin up a new instance and investigate. MIT put them on notice (a year earlier), there was no attempt to improve and the bluff was called. I wish this wasn't happening, but sometimes you have to actually DO something.
If the articles' portrayal is accurate, I have doubts that there ever was a problem.
Yes, the rate of drop-outs was 3x the average (20% vs 7%). But it appears as if this dormitory draws its population from a subset of freshman that already starts out different than the average population.
College admission should make a few bets on misfits with potential here and there. And if the mark of MIT's drug-infested den is that only 80% of them graduate MIT, it seems like they're still doing ok in absolute terms.
The only real problem is that Wall Street has apparently infected MIT, and they're taking the love-yourself (and keel over with heart failure) drug.
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one thing that really struck me as weird in this article. I'm not living in America but just like I would expect my boss to only contact my parents in an emergency, I would expect my University to only contact my parents in an emergency (and graduation).
Speaking as someone paying what is effectively a second mortgage so my nephew can go to school, I expect the school to let me know how it's going. I'm not saying MIT is in the right here, but if you want parents or others completely disengaged, then you need to not engage them financially.
That's not how it works, assuming your nephew is an adult. You, as an adult, are making a decision to give another adult a lot of money. That gift creates zero obligations on any third party, and should not even create any obligations by your nephew unless you explicitly arranged for this in advance.
From what I hear, a lot of parents have your attitude. They call up the school asking about grades and performance with the attitude that they deserve to know because they're paying for it. They inevitably get shot down, because not only is giving out this information to paying parents not what's expected, but it's explicitly illegal to do so under federal law without the student's written permission.
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree with you. It's your choice to engage financially with the university, and you should do so knowing that if you want to know how it's going, you need to talk to the student, not the university -- we have laws like FERPA for a reason.
He told the university to disclose grades to me. No laws are being broken. This is his choice, just like it's my choice to send them a crapton of money.
Then you should expect the school to tell you these things because the student asked them to, not because you're paying for it. The first and second halves of your first sentence are unrelated to each other.
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
He told the university to disclose grades to me. No laws are being broken. This is his choice, just like it's my choice to send them a crapton of money.
I agree. If you finance something, you are allowed to exercise some degree of control over it.
You are. The control you're allowed is the right to decide to stop paying.
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#137Senior House alum here... You are load balancing 5 servers. One has a latency issue that causes response time to be 2x the others. What do you do? You wait, it goes to 4x. Now what? You take it offline, spin up a new instance and investigate. MIT put them on notice (a year earlier), there was no attempt to improve and the bluff was called. I wish this wasn't happening, but sometimes you have to actually DO something.
Considering that students are more akin to customers than worker bees, the obvious questions to that line of reasoning are: What is the MIT administration attempting to measure by using graduation rate as a metric? Why has the administration chosen to optimize for graduation rate? And the more general elephant in the room: What does/should a research university in general, and MIT in particular, seek to accomplish? A…
"Citizen" might be the best analogy for students: Neither the pay-and-be-served attitude of consumers, nor the shut-up-and-work of labor. Instead, a sense of both empowerment as well as responsibility.
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#138>> Registrar data showed that the hall’s graduation rate was lower than any dorm on campus—21.1 percent of Senior House students were failing to graduate, versus the campus average of 7.7 percent. In addition, the email cited data that suggested higher-than-average drug use in the house. So perhaps these kinds of people have a lower graduation rate. By spreading them around campus, they will probably be less happy. S…
It'll diffuse the negative effect throughout so it won't be visible to MIT detractors. The happiness is likely inconsequential. I speak strongly and pessimistically about this because of some very fresh in my mind experiences from my university, where I watched drug abuse (and some far more heinous acts) be covered up and untreated as long as they could be by staff, and then pushed under the rug after kicking out the…
And yet everyone preaches the value of diversity...
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about this particular dorm, it's about a broader social trend towards greater conformity and fewer second chances. Woz and Jobs started out in business selling blue boxes to illegal bookmakers. Imagine a world in which they had been subject to the modern surveillance panopticon and the sort of prosecutorial malice that was levelled against Aaron Swartz. RMS slept under his desk in the AI lab for many years a…
Facebook was started by somebody who followed bg's path of dropping out of Harvard. I don't know what Elon Musk's GPA was, I don't think anybody cares. I don't see a trend towards conformity...in the real world.
Those are significantly rare outliers and not the reality for the vast majority of people.
Re: MIT’s Senior House dormitory closes, and a crisis blooms at colleges
#140What's the actual story here? "Four students tried to buy cocaine" isn't the story. That happens all the time, at every college, in every other MIT dorm, and in most city high schools.
Looks like there are several different stories going on at once, but one major story is the fact that MIT abused a mental health survey to gather data about the inhabitants of this dorm.
Imagine if you responded to an "anonymous" mental health survey stating that you abused some drug, and then the city kicked you out of your house because they used that survey to determine that there were too many drug users on your block.