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Endowment: $13.182 billion (2016)
Academic staff: 1,021
Students: 11,319
Undergraduates: 4,512
Postgraduates: 6,807
Campus: 168 acres
For anyone who hasn't worked in academia there are three big funding sources for a university:
1. Endowments: Someone donates you money, you put it into a saving/investment portfolio, and you spend the interest of it. It's continual/perpetual funding for whatever you want.
2. Overhead on grants: I'd bet more then half of MIT's money is taxpayer-funded. MIT has a 54.70% overhead which means that of any grant that anyone on campus gets only 45.3% goes to real research. (I will say that a 54.7% overhead is pretty average. My school has a ~60% overhead.)
3. Last and least, Students: MIT's admission costs are $41,547. That's $187,460,064 total in from their current undergraduate class. They're still making money from grad students but it won't be the same amount so I didn't add them into them mix. You also need to remember for every dollar they take in from someone, they'll find at least 2 dollars to take in from someone else. When you go to a college and pay their admission free, you're paying the subsidized version and the college is getting rich.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Institute_of_Tec...
This does seem to just be one aspect of their annual fundraising. Donors like to see their money go to specific targets, and this happens to be a feel-good one.
1) Most universities get federal funding for facilities. That's what the student's tuition and taxes are meant to pay for. Now I agree that won't make up the difference (right now I've got ~300 machines running my code on my school's super computer) but that means more then half of the money for the research doesn't go directly to the research. Your grant for curing kittens of sadness also has to fund the super top secret nerve gas researchers work down the hall.
2) Many universities require you to pay for utilities, working space, and other things and still take overhead! I know a few who I don't want to point out an laugh at directly but we all know unfortunate colleagues who work at these universities (a few of which are publicly funded).
We, as researchers, shouldn't be so dismissive of the blatant pocket-lining that universities do just because maybe a quarter of it will go back to helping us.
Overhead basically makes it extremely difficult to start research in "convincing and novel" aspects of research when few people (maybe under 50 in the world) understand that what you're doing has value. In R&D that's most of the things that people are working on. If you're not fortunate enough to have someone already established take you under your wing your great idea will never see the light of day.
2. Most universities that do that don't require you to pay for space, but will base the amount of space you have on grant dollars you bring in. None that I know of make you pay for electricity, gas, cleaning, grant admin, compliance, bookkeeping, etc.
3. How does overhead make it difficult to do convincing and novel research? In fact overhead helps it in my opinion. This idea that getting rid of overhead will somehow make anything better or have better value for the money is seriously misguided.
Prof Gross is an awesome teacher. The lecture series include a lot of prerequisite material form high school math so would be great for someone to get started with math.
Lecture slides and notes which make up a lot of the content isn't very useful to me without the lectures.
Stanford has a few classes with all the lectures on YouTube. During my first algorithms course in undergrad they were super useful and the professors were really good at explaining things in plain languages. Better than my own instructors.
Same thing for Khan Academy. Their content is brilliant.
OCW is just a data dump.
Also, as I said in another comment, the main impetus of OCW was to provide materials for educators to use in order to create their own courses. In a way, I suppose it was part of a similar top-down, enable institutions to provide local learning opportunities thinking that One Laptop Per Child was part of as well.
I am following their Linear Algebra course ( https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-06sc-linear-algeb... ) and so far it's been really great. There are questions and answers after each lesson, you even get exams and their answers so you can test your progress.
Also the youtube comments for some of these classes seems to suggest that a lot of people are really thankful for the content.
When OCW was originally introduced, it wasn't really intended as a "MOOC," as the term is used today. It was more intended as source material for other teachers to put together classes following the curriculum developed by MIT than as something that students would use directly.
This original purpose didn't really pan out and the material for some classes has morphed accordingly but it means that you have a fair bit of variety in the posted materials.
ADDED: If you want turnkey classes, MIT also has a fair bit of material on edX which it co-founded.
There are about 10K students, but about 20K staff, a surprising number of which don't even interact with grad students much less undergrads (and undergrads are often found in research labs to a much greater degree than other schools).
So if you quote the stats, consider that tuition (and residence fees etc) is only about 14% of revenue. Does that mean the education is subsidized by the other 86%? No, education (which includes operating the dorms etc) is only about 16% of expenses (this has fluctuated but hasn't changed hugely over the 30 years since I graduated, not that I monitor the budget every year!).
So there's a reason why you feel like students aren't appreciated t MIT -- by many people they aren't. OCW is not just a great resource, but a way of making the educational mission more visible (and to the administration visibility is primarily how much money you bring in -- which I consider reasonable, as long as it's not the only metric).
I get several hardcopy pieces of MIT propaganda per month; less than half of it mentions students, almost none of whom are undergrads. And this is despite the fact that my donations and participation are almost all in support of undergraduate education.