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I agree - and this is even more true at state schools than the slightly more selective schools (like RPI that I went to).

State schools have people that got into MIT, but didn't go for financial reasons or family reasons. Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true).

School admission is obviously not a perfect indicator of ability, but I suspect while the average and median may be higher (and more tightly distributed) at a school like RPI, a state school will have a lot more outliers.

Everyone is fighting for students from the super selective schools and state schools are largely ignored - students either need referrals to get interviews or jump through a ton of hacker rank like hoops.

This is even ignoring the 'diversity' angle - a lot of really great people are missed because it's hard to break in without knowing someone or having the right credentials.

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Nobody at RPI got into MIT because if they did they would have gone to MIT (maybe some rare exception exists, but this is generally true).

One exception at least. One of my fraternity brothers at RPI came to beautiful Troy, NY when he had the option of MIT.

There really are good reasons for such a choice. The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those elite professors doing research, and that comes at the expense of teaching. Going to a merely "most selective" school rather than "Ivy Plus" is an decent solution to that problem.

(of course, there are other reasons to not go to RPI, but that's a different conversation)

EDIT: I just noticed that you referenced RPI as "slightly more selective". At the time I was there (mid-80s) it was ranked as most selective. I'm aware that its reputation has slipped a bit. While it's not that big a deal to me, as my 30 years experience outweighs all that, I wonder what effect changing reputation has on past students.

I toured it in ‘99. I don’t remember the exact stats but the avg HS GPA at the time was around 3.3, it’s SAT’s not very high, and admission % decidedly higher than everywhere else I applied.

At the time I went, I chose RPI above Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins. Times change, I guess.

> The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those elite professors doing research, and that comes at the expense of teaching.

There's no guarantee that the less selective schools are any better at teaching. From what I've seen CMU and Stanford both had smaller class sizes and better teachers than RPI, but that was just from quick touring.

There are some schools with a strong focus on teaching (Harvey Mudd), but that seems to be unusual. I think in most cases if you get into a super selective school you should go if you can.

The Wall Street Journal had an article a while ago where they tried to find schools with great research as well as teaching.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/where-great-research-meets-grea...

Can't get behind the paywall now, but it was a lot in line with your arguments.

Most of the best professors I have had were researchers teaching they favorite subject. Most of the worst were "CS education" types who should have been good teachers.

How are you judging "best professor"?

I had professors at my school that taught their pet research topics. They all sucked at teaching, partly because their research areas were utterly irrelevant for undergrads who were still struggling to learn programming. RDF, anyone?

The best profs were the ones who had been working developers in industry. They found ways to make the classes engaging and fun, vs just lifelessly reading their notes out loud (often in impenetrable accents).

Best professor:

1. Actually know something about, and be interested in, what they are teaching.

2. Being able to explain the subject without making a complete hash of it.

3. Being able to explain the subject without leaving me comotose in my desk-thing.

Extra credit for including tips and tricks that don't get covered in textbooks and are only known to people involved in the field. Plus, background and amusing stories about how the goofy nomenclature and such got the way it is.

On the other hand, when and where I was an undergraduate, if you were "still struggling to learn programming" after the first couple of semesters of programming and data structures (taught by aforementioned "CS education" people), then you were pretty thoroughly hosed. (There were, however, 1-course hour classes in individual programming languages, if you couldn't pick up those yourself.)

I definitely agree on this.

Mathematical logic class taught by logician? Awesome

Automata class taught by expert in complexity theory? Fantastic

Rudin class taught by PDEs expert - amazing

The worst class I had was an introductory algorithms course taught by someone who specialized in teaching.

> There really are good reasons for such a choice. The schools that are so famous for their top-end research are achieving that research success by having those elite professors doing research, and that comes at the expense of teaching. Going to a merely "most selective" school rather than "Ivy Plus" is an decent solution to that problem.

One of the points of going to good research universities is to immerse yourself in exactly that environment: research. Good students probably don't need good teachers to learn. The reason to go to a top research university is to get involved in exactly that research. Especially in computer science and engineering, this is part of the pipeline to the really interesting jobs in industry.

I completely missed this when I was in school, and I regret it.

Meh, I got into CMU SCS, and chose Tufts, because I was equally interested in comp sci and music, and Tufts had a much superior music program.

Early on in my career I'd get questioned about my CS degree from Tufts, and I'd jokingly mention "I'd gotten into CMU SCS, but I preferred to be a well rounded individual. I can send you the acceptance letter if you'd like."

I think people choose schools for all manner of reasons.

I'd be worried about that coming off as "I'm better than you".

I would assume that schools like RPI also have a lot higher concentration of peers who are applying to places like Google, carrying around copies of Cracking the Coding Interview, returning from internships, and sharing knowledge of the industry and how to prepare for your career. Whether that actually makes someone better prepared to do the job is an open question, but it certainly seems like it would make people appear better prepared to do the job, since they'd know what interviewing companies value.

I didn't get in to MIT, but if I had, it's unlikely I would have attended, due to financial reasons. I went to a state school, and had a handful of scholarships to help me out.

In retrospect, I would have been better off applying to UIUC, Purdue, or CMU, but quite a lot of the decisions I made when young would have turned out differently if I knew then what I know now.

I don't know when you applied but my understanding is that MIT http://news.mit.edu/2008/tuition-0307 this is from 2008 presumably that number has gone up (stanford is now free for families earning under 125k for instance)

It would have been around 1994 and 1995. Historic data say that my 4-year (sticker price) total would have been just a bit over $90k (equivalent to $133k in 2017 dollars) for tuition alone. I don't have the receipts, but I think my parents only had to pay about a quarter of that, including non-tuition expenses, to a markedly less prestigious school.

Plenty of people decide against MIT or leave early.

It’s a pretty hostile environment for many people.

I'm not sure I'd call MIT 'hostile.'

I admit I'm heavily biased, but I'd say it is demanding. If universally demanding excellence is 'hostile,' then I guess I can agree with you.

> This is even ignoring the 'diversity' angle - a lot of really great people are missed because it's hard to break in without knowing someone or having the right credentials.

That is literally the diversity angle.

It is the diversity angle, considering many smart students of minority groups choose to go to public school because many come from families that cannot pay for tuition of the top 5.

Very much a diversity issue.

Top 5 universities (and elite private schools more generally) are usually much cheaper than public universities for students with limited means because they have deep pockets for need-based financial aid while public schools have little if any additional campus aid.

Now, awareness of this fact may be not widespread enough, skewing the applicant pool toward the outcome.you describe because of perceived cost, but it's much more likely that a student wouldn't be able to afford a public college than an elite private one.

No. They're cheaper for people with nearly no means.

The people with some means (aka the "middle class") can stretch their budget to afford state school.

Most states also have transfer programs that let you go from a 2yr at a CC into the equivalent 4yr at state school which takes a huge chunk out of the cost.

That’s a common myth.

They usually weasel word the scope of their generosity, treat loans as gifts, etc.

The sticker price is always negotiable, but state schools are usually ahead.

> That’s a common myth.

Since I personally experienced it, I'm pretty sure it's not.

I'm sure you and few others experienced it. But I'd say it's not that common. Just look at the make up of study body at the top 5 schools.

>> But I'd say it's not that common.

Then you should look at the actual university policies outlined on their website. At top of line elite schools (Stanford, Princeton level), if your family income <$65-75K, both tuition and housing are free, and <$125K tuition is free.

I know for a fact that state schools like UC Berkeley and UCLA aren't that generous with housing.

>> Just look at the make up of study body at the top 5 schools.

Students from wealthier backgrounds tend to have more access to academic and educational resources and are thus more qualified and more likely to be admitted.

Not a judgement suggesting that a less fortunate child would not succeed in a similar environment; many of them just don't have one.

That reflects more the effects of family educational background and socioeconomic class on pre-collegiate academic achievement and, even with good achievement, inclination to even bother to apply to elite schools (in part, again, because of lack of awareness that headline price isn't the whole affordability story.)

No, the 'diversity' angle is frequently tied to things like skin color, sex, ethnicity, heritage, etc. You can have two people that match in all of those categories but one chose to go to a state school because of a family issue and then they will be ignored by Google.

This is not something any diversity program I know of in the big companies is trying to address.

> but one chose to go to a state school because of a family issue and then they will be ignored by Google

A person with a family issue probably still has a family issue incompatible with working for a corporation across the country.

Ever think their process of selecting unencumbered elitists might be by design and super effective?

>probably still has a family issue

Probably? That seems to be an expansive assumption, to be charitable.

In the UK this would be called classism. It's the same thing but in the US setting.

I didn't even understand the whole world of prestige and specialization among colleges when I was 16 or 17 and trying to pick a school. I didn't know that some schools were where the "good" people go. I just knew I was supposed to go to college, so I visited the local Penn State campus and people said "don't come here". Then I visited another state school and people seemed to like it, so that's where I went.

I wonder if people realize how rare it is to even understand these things. If you don't have people in your family who went to college you are unlikely to be initiated into all this. If you do have a lot of people in your family who went to college, that's a serious leg up.

Now I work in a fancy startup where everyone went to Stanford, MIT, Harvard. It's a very weird feeling.

Things ended up working for me overall but I can relate to this post so much ...

The assumption that it's 'obvious' that knowledge of how the system works is widespread is just wrong. It's only recently that I clued in to how the industry works, if I had all this knowledge handy years ago, if somebody told me, I don't know what position I would be in right now.

This even goes for high school counselors. I grew up in a suburban family with all of that knowledge of the system. My wife went to a similar high school, but is a first generation college student. She found out that she was supposed to take the ACT from a fellow student mere days before the deadline. Her counselor told her to ask her mom about college visits.

Thanks for writing that. Sounds very similar to my experience in Europe.

I started high school at 15 and it didn't even cross my mind (and would not have been financially possible) to look for one outside of my town, while I had a reasonable one 5 min walk away from my place. There was one school known to be the top in the state, in a big city 50 km away, but it had a reputation of people going on meth to be able to keep studying 24/7 - not so great.

Then I started the local university at 18 - I happened to go to CS because I didn't see anything matching my skills better, but I didn't even write a line of C before that (did a bit of webdev and PHP though). No one in my family and none of my friends had anything to do with CS before me.

Since then I moved country twice for study/work, but I still don't see myself changing country or even state back then at 18. (At that time, I barely started having fixed internet connection at home, didn't even know something like MIT exists, and what's all the fuss about Silicon Valley).

"what's all the fuss about Silicon Valley"

No idea.

> If you don't have people in your family who went to college you are unlikely to be initiated into all this.

Absolutely. The number 1 reason I'm in tech is that my dad was a programmer. The reason he's in tech is that his dad was high enough up at an insurance company to swing my dad a job back when computers were new and nobody knew what to do with them. And that probably worked out because the generation before that was reasonably well off due to some lucky choices.

But I still grew up with little idea how to play the elite educational game. My family valued learning a great deal, but the jockeying for social advantage was never given much consideration. It's a very specific set of knowledge and skills.

Yep! I chose a local state school over my top choice.

State school was free with financial, extrapolating my financial aid package I would have graduated from the top choice with ~$60,000 debt.

I didn't understand the prestige differential because literally everyone I knew at best went to that state school. One of my high school teachers even told our class that we should not aim higher than the state school, because everyone who ended up going somewhere better flunked out and at best eventually graduating from the state school. At least he was telling us a state school was achievable?

This was my experience as well. I knew and admired schools like Berkeley as the home of Berkeley UNIX, but didn't recognize that the people who went there were considered the upper crust or that colleges were widely categorized into tiers until later on. As none of my family had gone to college, the goal simply seemed to be to get into a "4 year school".

I can appreciate now that these schools offer stellar educational opportunity in contrast with many others. It's just that this should still be seen in the context that a person attends for a brief time when they're young and that perhaps it's not the be-all and end-all of intellectual ability that cultural attitudes (especially seemingly here in New England) might suggest.

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