[pdonis]

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.

[scarmig]

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.

[pdonis]

> 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.

[erosenbe0]

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.

[RhysU]

(I don't understand the parent post other than it saying that top notch people can end up at state schools. )

We are...

[threatofrain]

Here's a tell of critical incompleteness — find Analysis 1, which is a must-have course for math and adjacent technical majors.

[pdonis]

> find Analysis 1

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-100b-analysis-i-f...

[threatofrain]

Now everyone can look and make their own judgment call.

[pdonis]

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.

[caskstrength]

Not the OP, but it seems that videos of lectures are missing, which is the case for most OCW courses - they are mostly incomplete and often outdated. Don't get me wrong, I'm very grateful for some of the marvelous OCW courses I took, but suggesting it can substitute actually studying at MIT is a bit too... optimistic.

[pdonis]

> videos of lectures are missing, which is the case for most OCW courses

Yes, fair point.

> suggesting it can substitute actually studying at MIT is a bit too... optimistic

My personal experience at MIT was that I didn't learn much from lectures; too long, too boring, and too much tailored to the professor's style instead of the student's. In this respect lectures at other schools where teaching is valued more relative to research might actually be better. (One of the professors I had at MIT who was the exception--an excellent lecturer, who actually responded usefully to questions from students in a freshman-level class of 200 or more--was criticized by the MIT administration for not publishing enough research papers.)