Um, video lectures, lecture notes, problem sets, solutions, and references to textbooks is more than just "a dumping ground". When I look at what's available on OCW for the classes I took when I was at MIT, everything that I got any learning value from is there.
The biggest part of any "elite" university is being surrounded by similarly high achieving people, to learn from and be motivated by. Attending any random state college gives you theoretical access to all the non-human resources (except labs) that the typical MIT undergraduate will access.
> The biggest part of any "elite" university is being surrounded by similarly high achieving people, to learn from and be motivated by.
While this is a common belief (and many people, before I went to MIT, were very effusive in telling me how much it would benefit me), my experience is that it is a myth (or at least it was at MIT when I was there). Of course there were high achieving people at MIT when I was there, but there were also plenty who were not; overall I don't think the distribution of motivation was much different from high school. (Motivation is not the same thing as grades: most of my fellow students at MIT got straight A's in high school for the same reason I did, that for us, high school was simply not that challenging academically, so we could be lazy and still make the grades.) As for what I learned from my fellow students, I can't say I learned nothing (since, for example, learning what pot smells like counts as learning something), but I don't think I learned anything significant academically that I wouldn't have learned from my peers at a less selective school.
It's not theoretical, you simply need to search a bit more for same resources at a random state school.
There are plenty of top quality professors at such schools.
Not every professor can make things work for their family at Stanford or MIT. Maybe their partner has a modest income so to afford a house so they go work at Penn State or whatever.
Or you could just say explicitly what you think is missing from the course called "Analysis I" that I linked to, instead of making vague insinuations. Your call.
If you mean there is more to the credential than the coursework, of course that's true. But the only possible value in the credential is scarcity; if everyone gets it, it ceases to have any value as a credential.
Or if you mean there's more to the experience of going to college than just the coursework, of course that's true as well. But if everyone went to MIT (or any other selective school), that experience would change too; all those people would not be getting the same experience that people going to MIT now are getting.
In short, it is not really possible for everyone to "go to MIT" (or any other selective school) in either of the above senses. So I was focusing on what is possible, namely, for everyone to have access to the same actual learning materials that MIT students have access to.
There is one other thing you could be referring to that the online materials can't give you, namely in person instruction and feedback. Personally, if I think back to the classes I took at MIT, I didn't learn anything significant in those ways; everything significant I learned, as far as the actual academic material was concerned, I learned from reading the course notes and textbooks and working the problem sets and taking the exams (and seeing what I got right and what I got wrong). And all those things are available to anyone who goes to the OCW site. I can't say for sure what other people's experiences are, but I think this quote from Gibbon is relevant:
"The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."
> There is one other thing you could be referring to that the online materials can't give you, namely in person instruction and feedback
It's the labs and the projects. Especially for engineering degrees, a good part of learning comes from shipping projects. I think it's where "everyone doing MOOC" falls short.
True, this is one thing that online course materials can't give you. But I also don't think a school like MIT has any real advantage in this respect over other schools. At least, not if the labs I had there are any indication; the materials we were given to work with were just as half-baked as anywhere else.
And if I'm really honest, not to suggest the coursework (especially hands-on) didn't have value, but a huge part of what I learned was exposure to many things--including non-STEM--and various activities outside of classwork. I only use things I learned undergrad in the most general sense today.
Oh, I don't disagree. Certainly with respect to hiring, I'm usually interviewing fairly senior people in not-directly hands-on tech roles. I won't say I don't look at the schools but they don't really play a factor in my evaluation. And some of the best senior folks I know are from schools that no one's heard of.