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by academia_hack
1554 days ago
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Definitely go to MIT. You'll hear a lot of advice about not paying a fortune for private universities when affordable state schools are just as good. This advice makes really good sense for most people, but MIT and Ivies are clear exceptions. Where cost ends up being the right thing to consider is at schools that don't make US News top 20, or in fields where you'll never expect much career income. So long as you don't get distracted by the freedoms of university, MIT will pay for itself many times over. It's an unfortunate reality that there are prestige doors everywhere and merit only gets people so far. MIT will blast those doors wide open in fields like VC, consulting, and academia. My MIT friends seem to largely have been underwhelmed by the quality of instruction (as with students at any university), but the career opportunities the brand and connections have opened for them have been enormous. One caveat I'll give here is to be honest about your academic ability. The worst ROI by far is flunking out of MIT and other $$$ elite universities. MIT is actually pretty generous about how they treat freshmen, but you should 100% focus on ensuring that you can pass (or ideally excel at) your classes. Depending on your educational background, you may never have been properly challenged before and it can be a bit of an adjustment. In my experience the easiest techniques for doing well at top universities are sobriety, 8+ hours of sleep, strategic course selection, and tutoring at the first sign of trouble. |
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While it of course doesn't always get it right, MIT is very serious about undergraduate education. For example, with 1-2 exceptions that prove the rule like SF author Joe Haldeman, all classes are taught by tenured or tenure track professors, and you don't get tenure at MIT without being a adequate teacher.
Professors who break the rules about the work they assign can have their class taken away from them, and many if not departments also closely monitor student assessed quality of instruction.
I've witnessed first hand from the administration.staff viewpoint a well known professor who is very serious about teaching royally screw up a class on a subject he's not so good at, every student evaluation except for one special case was negative (I and another staff member read all of them). The department head sat him down and made him read every one of them, and then told him he'd never be allowed to teach that course again (which we could overhear because of how our offices were laid out).
You can also be reasonably assured courses won't be cargo culted as I've seen in lower rank schools, and that the Institute will move heaven and earth to make sure you can graduate in four years, unlike some state schools which aren't quite the bargain they appear because they ration spaces in required classes.
Pay close attention to academia_hack's last paragraph: work hard on academics until you get them under control then you can commit to doing other things like the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) which incentivizes professors to hire students during summer and the January "Independent Activities Period" by not "taxing" them with the overhead they have to pay on all other types of people they might hire. And there are of course many student groups, many quite hard core.
As far as succeeding in any given class, if you diligently do the "problem sets" (homework) and picked the right major, you can expect to make As and Bs and have a good outcome. Note grading is by mastery, would be unfair to the student body to grade on the curve, nor does it follow the model of some state schools and I've heard also some European ones of allowing people it doesn't think can succeed and weeding them out in early required courses.