Hacker News Reader

Learning calculus is table stakes.

While you're almost certainly wrong about "not learning calculus or chemistry better at MIT than in an unknown university", learning happens outside the classroom just as much as within it. Students at random Italian University don't have a connection to people doing the most advanced research in the world. At MIT, that person is there and the people they are mentoring. You can work with those people and learn things that won't be taught in classrooms for at least a decade. That isn't happening at Podunk U.

> Students at random Italian University don't have a connection to people doing the most advanced research in the world.

I did graduate in an Italian University I'm co-author of multiple high-impact papers.

Each and every one of my professors led advanced research in their field. Yes, they were limited in their budgets, had a handful of postdocs, not 50, in their labs, but that didn't make them any less good or prepared as scientists.

And I've also studied and worked in an American university, Ohio State in my case, as did several of my peers that went to ivy league ones.

I stand by my opinion: what makes some universities better is funding and the average quality of the student being impacted by the acceptance filtering.

The argument you bring up, if relevant, makes a difference when your education ends and your research career begins. Does not make you better at understanding organic chemistry or calculus.

You call them table stakes, yet, lack of fundamentals is widespread even among ivy league graduates in my experience.

That's really interesting, so why is Caltech losing student cross-admits to MIT and the Ivies/Stanford?

Yes and no, it depends on the program. I definitely agree when you get to choose your students it's a lot easier. But as far as course content, maybe not chemistry or calculus, but for capital-intense programs like robotics definitely. At CMU, there was a class students could take where each group gets to use a $15k humanoid robot (Aldebaran Nao) for the semester. When you take a class on super computing there, you get terminal access to a super computing cluster for your homework assignments. That's just not something you get at every school.

Moreover, when it comes to teaching load, some schools you have a course load of 4-5 classes each semester, maybe more; whereas at other schools you only have to teach 0-2 classes. There's a big difference in the amount of face time you get with a professor who has 300 students versus 30. Also there are big differences on whether a school can attract enough grad students for TAs, whether there are research opportunities for undergraduates, whether there are campus jobs for undergraduates, etc.

You're absolutely right, capital-intense programs may make a difference.

E.g. while during the cold war US excelled in multiple chemical fields like photonics or organic chemistry, the Soviets smartly focused on less capital intensive ones like electrochemical chemistry and they excelled there.

But I hope you understand my perspective: I've graduated at a university nobody has ever heard about and at no point in my chemistry career I was anywhere behind in preparation to people from top tier colleges.

And the fact that this gets repeated endlessly and taken at face value is a gigantic distortion of what makes an individual prepared, because there's way too many variants.

I can easily stand by "on average ivy leagues produce better graduates", but there's no chance in hell I will ever buy the "top educators" argument. It's plain and simply false, with 0 hard data to back it up.

On top of that, this is repeated by the people that attended those very institutions but had no experience of how it is elsewhere.

If you've graduated like me, you know very well that each program has a wide variety of different educators. Hell, even the same university from year to year may change who holds what, with dramatic differences in the quality of teaching or difficulty and requirements to pass an exam.

I had an easy time doing Organic Chemistry 2, but those who enrolled just an year prior had to scale the Everest just to pass the exam. The reverse was true in calculus. And this is the same all over the world.

This isn’t just limited to ivy leagues, the same thing happens at state schools.

Many of my professors were from other countries. I literally wouldn’t have an education without immigrants.

> Many of my professors were from other countries. I literally wouldn’t have an education without immigrants.

Curious take; do you think if there were a no-immigrant law on the books those professorial positions would have gone completely unfilled? You _GOT_ an education with the help of immigrants, but that does not imply you wouldn't have had they not been there.

If we are talking about a no-immigrant law, the whole United States would be deeply impacted. The US would have a negative net population growth without immigration. That would mean institutions of all types are going to contract in size and start closing down and consolidating. Your local schools, libraries, police stations, road maintenance departments, etc.

Universities can't just replace missing students with American citizens. University enrollment peaked in 2010.

Universities are deeply impacted just like other immigrant and migrant worker-concentrated industries like farming, construction, and hospitality.

I am obviously not saying that I would not have gotten any kind of education. But what could happen is that there could be less supply, higher pricing, decreased research output, and/or lower academic standards to make up for headcount shortfalls.

Around 10% of Ohio State University students are international, but this number is higher for postgraduate at approximately 16%.

Remember that research is a huge function of universities. Having no international students doing research would be devastating to the USA. International students attend US schools and the schools then keep intellectual property rights of those inventions.

Yes, you heard me right, international students literally come to the United States, pay top tuition rates for their education with no state subsidy, and then their research IP is owned by those US institutions, with the researchers only receiving a tiny fraction of royalties from profitable innovations.

This is an amazing deal for the United States.

Obviously there is a selection effect that confounds any causal comparisons between those who do and do not get into MIT. But the better counterfactual is students who are accepted but do not attend. A diff-in-diff study with these two groups would be a better test. There are unique features of MIT: more money, elite network, etc. I do share your skepticism though - I've worked w/ MIT people before. I think they are very smart but also very lucky.