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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

It could be argued that if the news needs to introduce you as "an elite US school", you aren't really an elite school.

That's an odd conclusion to draw about MIT though. Who's the target audience here? MIT really is internationally known.

They A/B tested the headline with and without “elite” and the headline including “elite” got more clicks. Then they ran that headline and got you to click on it/comment on it/engage with it.

Everyone in the West knows MIT. That's a clue the Reuters headline target audience is in the East.

You overestimate the knowledge of MIT in Europe. I worked there and had to explain it to a small but not negligible fraction of my German friends.

They know MIT in China too. They don't read Reuters much though.

I used to live there and they don't really know MIT in China. I'd say only among the academics. Certainly not a household name.

I used to live in China too, and I'd certainly say it's known among the university educated.

Name dropping is a big thing in China. "Oh, my son went to Beijing University/Harvard/etc".

Are you sure? Because there’s a bus load of fascinated Chinese tourists clamoring to look at MIT every other hour.

I live in South Africa. One of my local malls has a busload of Chinese tourists arriving not hourly but possibly daily. Not a special mall.

China is so big that even if a tiny percentage have any interest in you, you'll think it's a heck of a lot. MIT can be a non-household name and still attract hundreds of thousands.

China has many people: a large number of tourists for Cambridge MA, but only a few percent of Chinese citizens knowing about MIT are compatible facts.

Yea they used to say for startups that any number of users for your free social app considered significant in Silicon Valley, you’d have to multiply that by 10x (paraphrasing) for the Chinese market.

It may surprise some of you but the idea of "elite school" is unknown to a good percent, possibly the majority, of people even in the US. I went to an "elite school" and my GF didn't think much of it. She just thought that it's a school where a lot of politicians and rich people send their kids but didn't infer any special status or qualifications from that observation. In some ways, she's absolutely right but culturally among some circles the idea of "elite school" exists and value is placed on that idea. It happens that the same circle of people who hold this idea are often themselves "elite" or at the very least privileged in some ways. So by labelling MIT "elite" the news article is signaling to people that this news is a "big deal".

Regardless of the semantics of elite and what she thought it meant, she knew that you went to a school associated with kids of politicians and rich people.

That’s consistent with the general definition of elite. Maybe what she and you were thinking of was “smart.”

This is simply not true. Everyone in the US knows about Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc. They are culturally significant institutions. So much so that people use "MIT" as a stand in for "excellence". "MIT of X".

"kind of like the M.I.T. [sic] for magic."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_in_popular_culture

If your gf didn't think much of your school, maybe it's not as "elite" as you wish it were. Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc are as elite as you can get in the US ( and the world ).

It's one of the three schools you just listed. Don't know what to tell you.

There are people who are different from us. I think your assumption that a large percentage of people think or believes the same things as us is a bit shaky. Sure maybe there are references to those schools in popular culture but can you really assume: 1. Popular culture is actually popular for the majority of Americans? 2. People consume all of popular culture? 3. People pay attention to the details in popular culture. Someone might say a line in a movie and not everyone is going to understand it nor is everyone going to look it up in Wikipedia or Google. 4. Even if people paid attention to the detail, are you sure that they understood it the same way?

It's not as if my GF haven't heard of those schools. It's just that she didn't think they are particularly elite. In her words, she thought my school is the New England version of Notre Dame. A good or even a great school but she didn't think it is "elite".

> Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc are as elite as you can get in the US ( and the world ).

I'm not too sure about that, especially when it's applied to the world. "elite school" is an idea that lives in the heads of people. It's not an actual club that grants special privileges. There's the Ivy League but that's an athletics association and you left out most of the schools in it from your list.

This may be true in the kind of upper-middle class bubble where people discreetly brag about going to Yale, but if you stop random people on the street and ask them to free-associate about MIT most of the time you won't get anything except some vague understanding that nerds go there, although now the Big Bang Theory may have shifted that kind of common cultural cachet to Caltech.

Reuters is writing for the world wide audience here who may not know the nuances of which Uni outranks another.

In the movie about 4 students winning the underwater vehicle contest, the MIT team was dinged for not defining the MIT acronym.

https://www.wired.com/2014/12/4-mexican-immigrant-kids-cheap...

It's more a way to draw attention to the headline than anything.

So... you don't think MIT is in the top tier?

It's bizarre that they felt the need to introduce MIT.

I've heard of the school but first thought wouldn't have been elite.

I'm Australian maybe elite has different nuances here I've always consider elite universities as the ones with centuries of pedigree Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard - the "sandstone" universities with their "old boys network" and all of that...

Compared to those schools I only have a passing familiarity with MIT, Richard Stallman was from MIT his really the only person I can think of off the top of my head compared to Cambridge which had people like Steven Hawking, Isaac Newton etc.

Surely that depends on how many schools you think the top tier should include. I don't think it's #1.

But as Armisael16 says, I think it's strange that Reuters had to qualify it as an "elite US school", implying that it isn't one. What would you think of a news article beginning "The Pope, a prominent religious leader, ..."?

What’s #1 then? :)

In terms of prestige? Harvard.

In terms of academic excellence? Cal Tech.

Found the Caltech student!

Jokes aside, why not include MIT or UChicago? The former is arguably a bigger Caltech, and the latter is extremely rigorous, even if not focused on engineering.

> Jokes aside, why not include MIT or UChicago?

...How many schools do you think can fit in the #1 spot?

Touché! I suppose I'm partially criticizing the idea of a #1, but that aside, there's a fair point to be made that MIT would beat a smaller version of it on any nominal measurement rather than per-capita.

Additionally, if you want to learn something academic that isn't technology, I'm not sure MIT or Caltech would win (or even be applicable), hence UChicago as a possibility for a general "best at academics" university.

If you want to learn something, top-tier universities aren't much better than many other options. They're top-tier by virtue of the glory they borrow from their students. We judge the "eliteness" of a school by what you can predict about an individual by the fact that they were admitted there.

And by that measure, Caltech is significantly outperforming in "academics".

> If you want to learn something, top-tier universities aren't much better than many other options.

Very true. In fact, at colleges like Harvard and Columbia, higher grades are often easier to achieve than at the mid-tiers like Boston University and NYU.

With that said, there are colleges that force you to absorb copious amounts of information and fail you otherwise. UChicago is known for this. Is that not symbolic of being top in "academic excellence?".

What you're implying seems more like the "prestige" category, in which Harvard was mentioned as the winner above.

All of this aside the point, this doesn't explain how Caltech would be #1 in academic excellence for a college, above UChicago, and Caltech's larger equivalent, MIT.

Elite != Culturally recognized

Every American knows Harvard, many wouldn't know Cal Tech or MIT.

I'm going to call bullshit on Americans not knowing MIT. It's TV/movie shorthand for someone being a tech genius, same way Harvard is shorthand for being a top lawyer/politician/writer. "Top of his class at MIT"

I grew up in America. I went to MIT. Three(!) of my high school teachers didn't know what it was.

Its where all nerd Minstrels in the USA go

I see your point, but IMO "elite" refers to its level of excellence, not how well known it is.

For example, my understanding is that IIT was elite well before many of U.S-born software developers had heard of it.

Nah, 'elite' refers to the level of prestige. Prestige != Excellence.

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