I went to MIT for grad school. At the prospective student orientation, the admissions committee stood up in front of us and said (paraphrasing since this was a decade ago)

>after careful deliberation we have concluded everyone standing in the room has what it takes to graduate, and that we consider it our duty as a department to ensure that everyone who is admitted does graduate. We are committed to provide you whatever resources--be it academic, financial, emotional, etc--you need to graduate, and we want you to focus on doing the best possible possible research.

Needless to say I picked them over Stanford, where it was a battle royale to see what 2/3 of the class would graduate. Got out in 4 years for my masters/PhD and loved every minute of it.

Lots of schools that are hard to get into try to make it (relatively!) easy to graduate. The average GPA at Harvard is like 3.7. I do wonder if part of it is to prevent students that were really successful in high school from having imposter syndrome when they don't get straight As in college.

MIT graduate here. It’s a hard school to get into. It’s not especially hard to graduate from (given that you were admitted), as long as you’re willing to grind out the work.

These kids mostly got straight As and perfect SAT scores in high school, so I don't think it should be that surprising that it continues in their college studies also. I think it kind of depends on whether you think students should be evaluated on their own or in comparison to the rest of the class.

Not sure about MIT, but Ivy League schools have always inflated grades.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. I went to a state school that had bell curve grading. Brutal.

It's possibly a factor of how selective they can be by reputation. If the number of candidates is a few times higher than your college (which to be clear I have no idea about), then it's possible their selection criteria also selects for those likely to graduate, whether on purpose or as a side-effect of other things they attempt to select for.

they're hyper-selective, but there's no particular reason to arbitrarily fail 1/3 of their students. you could just make the classes harder until this happens, but employers/grad schools seem to be pretty happy the way things are, so why do it? Yale students even mostly get As in most classes and it works out fine for everyone.

Yep, 70% percent of my freshmen engineering cohorts had flunked out by 4th year.