[csa]

I can't speak for MIT, but I can speak for a couple of Ivies.

The content covered in the curriculum and the speed at which it is covered is one potentially challenging aspect of one school over another.

The more important aspect, imho, is your peers. Speaking for myself and what I have heard others experience, peers can push your thinking to more sophisticated levels -- this can be in terms of something like elegance in problem solving (which has valuable real-world applications), the ability to apply the knowledge in a wider range of contexts, etc.

This is also often reflected, rightly or wrongly, in the assessment stages. If you take a class with wicked smart peers, the test is usually going to be much harder just so that the test can evaluate differences in knowledge.

I remember showing my $IVY calculus final to a friend of mine who set the curve in what was supposed to be the same class at $STATEU, and his mind was blown. It took him a few minutes just to realize that the test covered the same topics, while I thought the test was merely "hard" pedestrian content. Once I talked him through the problem, he realized how cool it was, and then he realized one of the key differences between our schools -- the boundaries of my thinking on topics were challenged and stretched much, much more aggressively.

To be fair, some non-elite schools are equally or more rigorous than elite schools, but this is usually on a department level and is the exception rather than the rule.

[akhilcacharya]

> It took him a few minutes just to realize that the test covered the same topics, while I thought the test was merely "hard" pedestrian content. Once I talked him through the problem, he realized how cool it was, and then he realized one of the key differences between our schools -- the boundaries of my thinking on topics were challenged and stretched much, much more aggressively.

Well as long as you were able to demonstrate that you were better than him, it's all OK.

[csa]

Neither I, my friend, nor any of our peers doubted who was better at STEM subjects -- he was and is.

The whole thing was a pitch to get him to transfer (I think he would have easily gotten in), but he didn't want to leave our home state.

My point was merely that the school I went to pushed the boundaries of my thinking, while his (at least in that class) did not.

Did that make my school better? For my personal goals, it did. For his personal goals, it did not.

[bjourne]

Then one should prefer the universities in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. Students from those countries outclass everyone else on every level of the education system. Just look at PISA results and TIMSS -- it is almost scary how good they are. In fact, one should avoid all American colleges since American students are quite a bit below the international average on those rankings!

[csa]

Hmmm... Im not sure I should respond given your straw man response, but just so others can keep the record straight...

1. PISA is a widely administered test for 15 year olds.

2. TIMSS is a widely administered test for 4th and 8th graders (Advanced TIMMS does "last year of secondary").

3. We are talking about university -- specifically elite universities.

4. I am extremely familiar with education in East Asia (most familiar with Japan), and their teaching of the fundamentals of math in junior high school and high school are in fact excellent. Sadly, this does not translate well into creative thinking. The best math people in Japan are largely limited to a small number of schools (3 or 4 elite ones and maybe a handful of others that have some players).

5. While you are correct that the average quality of education in the US is lower than other places (there are lots of US-specific reasons for this), the education at US elite universities and the US high schools that feed into elite universities is quite a bit higher than the US average. It's tough to find hard statistics on this because it would reveal a class bias in the US (gasp, there is one!), but spending some time in these classrooms and talking to and working with the students from these schools is fairly convincing anecdata.

I'm not sure what you have against US schools and/or US elite universities, but I encourage you to open your mind -- there is a reason why we have a lot of world-class top-rated (by any measure other than cost) universities here.

[bjourne]

1-2. I know the tests are administered to school children. But academic success in school translates to academic success later in life.

3. What makes you think that MIT would be more elite than elite universities in other countries? Talent follows a normal distribution and if PISA and TIMMS show that the American mean is below the average, the American elite must also be below the average. So, if the most gifted American students are admitted to MIT and the most gifted Singaporean students are admitted to the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the latter university will contain the more gifted students. And if it is true, that you claim, that the quality of the education is dependent on the skill level of your peers, then NTU must be (much) better than MIT.

4. You can't measure creative thinking and the "Asians may be good at math, but they aren't creative" thing is a cliche.

I don't have anything against US schools or elite universities. Rather it would be you who have something against non-elite universities because you are claiming that you can't acquire the same education at other non-brand name universities. My claim is merely that one can excel at any university in any country as long as one puts in the time and effort. Especially when talking about math. You need a book, pen and paper and solitude and you're set.

I would be happy to put my money where my mouth is and run down to my local university with your hard calculus final. :)

[jcranmer]

You make a big deal about how secondary school rankings show that Americans are idiots and use that to guess that university rankings should similarly show that American universities are poor quality.

Which is obviously why only 12 of the top 25 schools, and 4 of the top 4, are American. I'd cite the logic failures in your argument as well, but I think letting actual statistics speak for themselves works better. And FWIW, I'm citing the university rankings that's published by a non-US publisher lest you think it's merely patriotic bias.

[bjourne]

Secondary school rankings show Americans are below the average. I never claimed that the quality of the alumni correlated with the quality of the school. The GP did. My point is that if you want to rank schools by how smart their students are, then no American institution would rank in the top 10. So you need to find a better metric if you want to claim that MIT is best of the best.

[rueynshard]

Students in elite American universities (ivy-plus) come from the top 1% of all American students in their cohort, not to mention other countries. However dismal American performances in PISA/TIMSS and other tests have been, the top 1% of roughly 3 million students every year are still bound to be generally smarter and more motivated than the average Singaporean or Japanese student.

[bjourne]

What makes you think other countries does not also have "elite" universities? China and India has five times the population of the US and several universities which are harder to get into than MIT. Fwiw, I don't believe in the theory of the GP. Math is a subject best done by yourself so what your peers know or not doesn't matter, imho.

[ep103]

Scroll through, and just take note of how many are American, vs other. Choose any international university ranking, I leave the following on just as an example.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankin...

[bjourne]

Such rankings are bullshit and easily gamed.

[walshemj]

And I have a suspicion that PISA is gamed to save face I suspect if it was taken by a representative sample of all school age kids the scores would be different

[Leaning_Tower]

https://www.unzcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/PISA-201...