[jmj42]

>People are not going to stop going to MIT.

Well, actually... Let me provide a little insight. My daughter, a future engineer, has dropped MIT from her top choice to off the list. There are many schools that are nearly as good, and despite rankings, better than MIT.

Here's another cool little anecdote: I was in a meeting with director from NIST, along with another researcher and our director. He was in town to give a lecture as part of a regular lecture series we conduct through the school year, and I was meeting with him one-on-one to ask questions about the intersection of IT and power grid operations. He was relaying a story about some engineering project that they had asked MIT researchers for help on.

Suddenly our director burst out laughing. Said he couldn't contain it anymore. He says, "Yeah, we know about that project. We're the people MIT called when they couldn't figure it out."

The moral of the story: MIT is marketing machine. As a rule, they are over-ranked in nearly every category, and rely on a historical perspective rather than a current one.

[ericd]

I wouldn't say some researchers handing off a project warrants a broad panning of the school and the thousands of people that make it up...