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Comment by laidoffamazon | Hacker News Reader

I think it would be beneficial if every Stanford admit just went to their state schools.

The purpose of these institutions isn't to educate, it's to confer status (in a tax efficient and positive-eugenic way)

These schools can offer harder, accelerated courses under the presumption that the floor of the student body’s ability is higher than average. In that sense, the education can be more rigorous and faster. Is that actually the case in practice? I’ve never gone to a mediocre university so I can’t compare.

But I can say that aside from intellect, attendees of top universities are not ethically superior to the average person.

Berkeley is an objectively lower tier school than Stanford that has a 4-5x higher acceptance rate but Berkeley most definitely has a more "rigorous" CS program for undergraduates. Same applies to the honors classes at other public ivies that are accessible to "good students" without the need to be superhuman like the HYPSM+ admits.

This is why acceptance rates cannot be considered in a vacuum as a measure of universal quality. Informed people generally understand that there is a lot of overlap in the bell curves of the intellectual abilities of Stanford and Berkeley undergrads. Stanford may generally have a higher stature in that it has a stronger association with wealth, but only fools believe it has the monopoly on student intellect in the Bay.

Have you attended any of those institutions? That's not my experience at all. The education was off-the-charts good. In more detail:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38829116

Of course not, I wouldn't get in.

But I never said the education is bad. I just said their purpose is not to educate. Morill Act institutions were developed to educate, and by accepting the vast majority of people that apply University of Oklahoma will always exist to educate. The same cannot be said for Brown or Stanford.

I got master's in CS from Brown. Fwiw, I was really pleased with the instruction.

Again, never said the education was bad! Just that their purpose isn’t to educate as evidenced by the fact that they don’t let in 95% of those that apply. Maybe Brown MSCS is 94%, I don’t know.

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