How MIT Became the Most Important University in the World | Hacker News Reader

How MIT Became the Most Important University in the World

bostonmagazine.com

61 pointsmartincmartin39 comments

Speaking as someone who went to a university that could also claim this title, I think there's a tendency to overstate these things because it makes a good story (case in point with this article). The difference between top-tier and mid-level universities seems a lot bigger from the outside. The truth is, there are smart people everywhere (and, conversely, dumb people too). Someone with a game-changing idea is almost as likely to come from somewhere completely "random" as to come from MIT.

I'm not saying there isn't a difference. The difference is definitely there. MIT is great, and is a pioneer in many respects (to pick just one example, their OpenCourseWare initiative is wonderful, and MIT's entrepreneurship drive is good too). It's just that the difference isn't as great as articles like this will claim, and it does a disservice to the people doing great work at other universities to say things like this.

"it does a disservice to the people doing great work at other universities to say things like this."

Totally agree, and I write that as an MIT alum.

This is just Boston Magazine link baiting targeting the MIT and Harvard communities.

This article was something of a joke between me and my friends here at MIT- while parts of it are true, parts of it are also patently false ("MIT kids are [...] covered in tattoos—they’re cool and hip and very different. Their clothes are edgy.")

The types of people described in the article definitely exist here. They're also definitely a lot less common then the article suggests.

My theory is MIT has really good PR (in addition to a lot of really smart people). Over many years I've noticed when research comes out of MIT headlines almost always state "MIT does X". I haven't noticed this pattern as much with other Universities.

Here's a test, go to google news, and search for '<university> researchers' and look for articles about research results/breakthroughs from that University. I tried it with MIT and Harvard, here are the top three results about research for each:

* MIT figures out how to power tiny devices with... the ear

* MIT Breakthrough Could Lead To New Military Body Armor Only...

* New MIT Method Could Help Communities Plan For Climate Risk

and for Harvard:

* Tiny, Artificial Lung On Microchip Used To Test Drugs

* Harvard Research Finds New Ways to Change Coating Colors

* Bio-battery could power medical implants

Can "any" University claim to be the "most important" ? One of the most important, yes, but "most" .. I doubt it.

Somewhat related:

"As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. I realize that seems a preposterous claim. What makes it true is that it's more preposterous to claim about anywhere else." -- Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html)

I always thought this was really silly of PG to say. If you had some "intellectuality index" of cities and Cambridge _just_ inched out other cities, it'd be true that it'd be more preposterous to call any other city the intellectual capital of the world -- but it doesn't mean it's still not preposterous to say it about Cambridge.

It also seems to assume that there is an intellectual capital of the world.

I lived in Cambridge for a while, and that's absolutely preposterous. The city is merely very full of itself and pretentious, and simply does not have an absolute concentration or monopoly on brains.

In fact, most of the "normal" population of Boston and Cambridge rather resent having to play host to the universities.

Harvard and MIT are practically adjacent by West Coast standards

Given that they're less than two miles away from each other, they're practically adjacent by any standards. You can ride the #1 bus for a while or the Red Line just two stops from MIT to Harvard or vice-versa.

I'd rather say Oxford is ;)

I might believe Cambridge to the academic intellectual capital of the world, but I don't think it's even close to the overall intellectual capital of the world. For that you'd want to look at economic powerhouse cities like New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.

Applied intellectualism is just as significant - especially for us here in startupland. All of these world cities represent an enormous mass of smart, motivated, educated people who are generating huge impact, much moreso than even the collective sum of a few of the world's best academic institutions.

The claim is pretty absurd whichever way you look at it. As much as I love entrepreneurship, acing that doesn't necessarily make you the most important university in the world. Even if you narrow down the list of candidates to just 2 schools (as, surprise surprise, B Magazine seems to have done out of the gates), Harvard does pretty well in basic science and medicine for example - one would think those count for something...

It's just an opinion with a linkbaity title attached imho.

Literally speaking, of course not since the set of universities doesn't have a universally accepted ordering. The article is making the rhetorical point that at this particular moment other universities are following MIT in a direction which has historically been very alien to them and that this makes MIT the "most important" right now.

This article reads like an advertising pamphlet. It also awkwardly avoids mentioning that the university most often described as the center of tech entrepreneurship is Stanford. Boston seems to be developing an inferiority complex regarding Silicon Valley.

Boston has an inferiority complex about everything.

Admittedly, it's entirely justified in seeing how much-loved New York City's "entrepreneurial scene" has become, when NYC has maybe half the concentration of serious technology companies, universities and talent available in Boston... but has several times the money.

This reads more like "Why MIT is better than Harvard and Harvard can suck it and how MIT's dad could beat up Harvard's dad" than MIT becoming the most important university in the world...

Is it because people from MIT go around saying it is the most important university in the world?

Just curious, are there people here who went through or are going through the MIT Tech Entrepreneurship program? Or maybe just took some courses from them? What are your thoughts?

Sincerely, Boston Magazine

I'm still on the election. It took me a while to realize the title if referring to the university and not the presidential candidate.

Can we please stop using "sexy" to describe tech work? It isn't sexy, it requires a LOT of knowledge and a LOT of critical thinking. That it gets called "sexy" and is "the thing that teens and twenty-somethings flock to" just shows the culture we have here. "Oh that's cool, I wanna try it!" 90% of the people who ever start in "tech entrepreneurship" are going to fail, because they have absolutely no idea what they're doing, other than following the trendy train. Drives me nuts.

Sorry if you don't think that say a Spitfire isn't sexy and should make any engineers heart sing just to see it fly and to hear the sound of the merlin or griffin you have no soul.

And the sad grandeur of the last TSR2 (look it up) all alone at the back of a hanger with its wings off at Cranfield doesn’t make you sad you should not be working in technology not even on some little iphone fart app.

The Spitfire is sexy. The work that went in to producing it? Not so much. That's the issue: the people who are being attracted by the "sexy" tag are people who actually don't want to do any of that work.

I dont' see the problem. People are already attracted to engineering for the "wrong" reasons - most of them dig deep enough to discover just how much work it is, and run screaming in the other direction.

And that's fine, now we have someone who's doing something else and better informed to boot.

I'd venture this "problem" is neither a problem nor is it unique to our field. People think making video games is sexy until they see the innards of a game studio. People think making movies is sexy until they actually start doing it. People think being a musician is sexy until they've dealt with labels, marketing, and the royalty system.

So on and so forth.

Nothing executed at a high level is actually that sexy, but that's okay, because it's still sexy to the people who are doing it. Tons of rocket scientists, software engineers, automotive engineers, movie directors, and musicians wake up every day and can't wait to do the myriad of supposedly boring things they find sexy.

Sorry that would be Harvard.

Could you at least qualify that?

The guys at MIT makes things that the guys at Harvard make money off of. If you compare the two universities by who is running the executive functions and owns the capital of the tech companies where MIT folks do the grunt work, I think you'd see Harvard comes out way ahead. This is not to say that MIT grads don't also go into these roles (there area lot of MIT-funded companies, like BBN, etc), but rather that Harvard grads are more likely to do so.

Arguing that "importance" of a university can be quantified by "how much money the graduates make" is even more pathetic than bickering over which university is more important.

I sincerely hope this is tongue-in-cheek.

Partly. It's what I imagine would be the wildly self-important reply of Harvard graduates to the wildly self-important tone of the article.

But at the same time, "how much money graduates make" has a special relevance in a country where we determine how worthy you are of health care based on how much money you make.

Did you glance at the article before commenting? The whole thing is a comparison with Harvard, and explains why MIT is ahead of Harvard.

So you'll have to give far more detail for your comment to mean anything.

Different folks, different strokes.

I think everyone should realise going into this that the entire premise of the article is ridiculous. I think very few people in academia would disagree with this. MIT may be the most important university in the world for technology or entrepreneurship.

But if you're a arts student is MIT 'the most important university in the world'? No, probably not. It is extremely easy to myopically focus on the fields that are relevant to your own interests, and prioritise accordingly.

Of course, it's a magazine article, not a paper. People shouldn't take it too seriously - I went to Harvard, I also cross-registered at MIT. I enjoyed my time at both places. I now interview and help recruit international students in the UK. If your primary readon for choosing a university is a magazine article, or a ranking, or anything other than your own personal feeling you're doing something wrong.

I agree the premise of the article is ridiculous. I was taking a tongue-in-cheek jab at the self-importance exhibited in the article... Harvard absolutely dominates MIT in finance, business, politics, law, medicine, and all the fields of the humanities. I wouldn't be surprised if a higher proportion of Harvard graduates started their own companies, considering Harvard's massive MBA program.

Harvard absolutely dominates MIT in finance, business, politics, law, medicine, and all the fields of the humanities. I wouldn't be surprised if a higher proportion of Harvard graduates started their own companies, considering Harvard's massive MBA program.

You're very confused. Related: MIT does not have a law school or medical school.

What relevance does that have?

Would you consider a university the greatest in the world if it didn't have any engineering or science programs?

I'm already regretting replying to you, but in for a penny, in for a pound, I guess.

What relevance does that have?

Should be obvious. You've claimed that Harvard "absolutely dominates" MIT in law, but MIT doesn't have a law school.

Would you consider a university the greatest in the world if it didn't have any engineering or science programs?

Not sure the relevance here, as MIT has a full complement of humanities programs.

I wouldn't be surprised if a higher proportion of Harvard graduates started their own companies, considering Harvard's massive MBA program.

Doubt it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Sloan_School_of_Management

Harvard absolutely dominates MIT in finance [and] business

No. http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

... [and] all the fields of the humanities.

No. http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...

If you actually do want to see domination, though, feel free to check this out. http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/articl...

You've claimed that Harvard "absolutely dominates" MIT in law, but MIT doesn't have a law school.

If the other team doesn't even show up, the team that does gets the W.

While I don't mean to discount the importance of a law school, from a research perspective I think there is a massive order of magnitude difference between lacking an engineering or med school vs lacking a law school.

In short, I don't think a law school matters enough from a research perspective to factor here. The med school thing does, though.

The only university with top research programs in essentially everything is Stanford. If you allow UCSF to stand in for Berkeley's med school (which you can't really), then UCB/UCSF would be the other one.

While Harvard is an exceptional research institution, I think it falls just a little too far short of Stanford and Berkeley in engineering and applied science to qualify as the top research institution.

While I don't mean to discount the importance of a law school, from a research perspective I think there is a massive order of magnitude difference between lacking an engineering or med school vs lacking a law school.

MIT and Harvard solve this by partnering together for HST.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard%E2%80%93MIT_Division_of...

... all of which would be hard-pressed to try to claim that they deserve that title more than MIT.

MIT doesn't have a med school either. And while it has a good business school, Harvard's churns out far more CEO's, investors, etc. And while MIT has programs in the humanities, government, etc, Harvard's are far superior.

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