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Comment by prodigal_erik | Hacker News Reader

If they're washing out, that's a terrible waste of the faculty's effort and limited seats. But if they're merely taking a fifth year to graduate, well, between unavailable prerequisite courses and part-time jobs, that was getting common at my state school long ago, and it wouldn't worry me much.

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It had better not be unavailable prerequisite courses, especially since there's no excuse during that period for insufficient lab hardware resources (not true in the bad old days before most everyone can afford a laptop more powerful than a Cray 1). That's one of the reasons for paying the big bucks to go to a private school, and why many state schools are not so much the bargains that appear to be if you can't graduate within 4 or even 5 years.

I can't speak about CMU, but I know there are basically no limits to what MIT will do to make sure every major can graduate in 4 years, and almost always take the courses they need when they want to take them. That has sometimes meant non-majors couldn't take courses intended for majors, but otherwise....

CMU has always been harsher and more unforgiving than MIT.

For the cohort entering 2006, MIT's 6-year graduation rate was 92% for men, 93% for women. CMU's was 85% for men and 90% for women. CMU's entering class of 2011 first-year attrition rate was 5%. MIT's was 3%. MIT's 4-year graduation rate is 85% versus 71% for CMU.

We don't know that. For better or worse---and I personally would rate CMU's CS undergraute education as superior to MIT's now, but that's because EE and MIT's vision for EECS graduates does little for me---MIT can attract a significantly better pool. E.g. before applications got really crazy in the Great Recession, when 13,000 were applying, it thought 3,000 "could do the work" and chose from that subset.

And MIT doesn't do legacy admits; I get the impression CMU may.

Seems like a simplistic analysis. If the programs are of equal difficulty and MIT admits more a more qualified class, MIT will have a higher graduation rate.

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