This is obviously one sided, but assuming most of this is factual… not good.
My understanding is that besides its reputation and the fact everyone knows about it, MIT is fundamentally not really different than any other great tech university. And many big universities are starting to turn more into businesses. The "admins have seized the Ivory Tower" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33856624&ref=upstract.c...) applies to MIT as well.
At least 20 years ago, MIT's greatest strength was its student body and its culture. You got the sense everyone was striving to learn as much as they could, and most students reveled a bit in their nerdiness. In high school, I took classes at a well-regarded state school, and didn't get the same sense of intellectual hunger. IHTFP (simultaneously I Have Truly Found Paradise and I Hate This F'ing place) summed up culture pretty well. You got the sense that you and everyone else had lined up to drink from the fire hose, and were going to struggle through it together, and come out the other side better for it. I have several friends who got grey patches in their hair during undergrad from stress, that went away shortly after graduation and didn't show up again for another 15 or 20 years.
I hope that pressure cooker feeling isn't actually necessary for rigor. I hope MIT has found some way to keep the rigor while being a bit more easy on the mental health of the students. MIT ensured every month had at least one holiday by inserting one fake Monday holiday in each month without a holiday, as a mental health break. I heard the mental health breaks were a result of the high suicide rate in the 1980s. Thankfully, none of my friends committed suicide, but a few friends of friends committed suicide in my time.
It’s a bit tragic that a lot of times this comes at the cost of mental health, though MIT has gone a long way to improve that.
They also made freshman year courses pass or fail.
The university in 2019 signed a five-year extension of its lucrative partnership with the Russian technology research institute, which has long raised espionage fears among foreign policy experts and the FBI. The extension came just three months after the federal government announced it was investigating MIT’s compliance with reporting requirements for the Russian money it had received in connection with the project.
The article notes MIT only ended the cooperation after the invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.wgbh.org/news/local-news/2022/02/25/mit-abandons...