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<p>My brother goes to IIT (no, I don’t mean UIUC, my sister goes there). He said that at one time IIT was actually competing against MIT for rank (I’m pretty sure), but as we can see MIT won (IIT was still close). I don’t know, my brother told me about it and he is going to be a grad student there now.</p>
<p>A very good formula back in the 80s and 90s was IIT and then UWisc if you wanted to go into database.</p>
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<p>No we don’t. We can just agree that we don’t know instead of making guesses.</p>
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<p>I don’t know that either. There is the small matter of geography.</p>
<p>Salve! if your criteria of a #1 school is US News (which is not accurate but shows the reputation of the school), IIT is in the 50s or 60s, not exactly close to #1</p>
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<p>Yes, yes, I know this, but the idea that the rankings are not so accurate is exactly what I am trying to get at. Someone on here said that IIT is not comparable to an MIT or UIUC, but I was disagreeing with them. I was saying sometime in the PAST IIT was competing with MIT. I think it is comparable in the education coming out of it, but people go so much by rankings that they say “no, why would you want to go to IIT when MIT is so much better and gives a much better education”. IIT specializes in engineering and is a very well respected school, I honestly think its quality of education is up there with MIT, but the “rankings” try to say otherwise and therefore so does everyone who takes the rankings as fact.</p>
<p>I think that you are going to another extreme. Just because US News isn’t accurate doesn’t mean that all of a sudden IIT and Colorado State are competing for #1, don’t get me wrong IIT is a VERY good school for engineering but it is not in the same league as MIT. The education is basically the same if not comparable but ask employers who they would hire after graduation, a IIT or MIT graduate with the same grade and same resume. That’s what really matters.</p>
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<p>That’s the sad part :(</p>
<p>I agree Salve! I know this is very unfair, but life isn’t fair :(</p>
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<p>True…true…</p>
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<p>I’m afraid I still have to push back on the notion that the education at MIT and IIT are the same, although I suppose some of the confusion stems from what we mean by ‘education’, which I take to mean more than simply the components of the formal curriculum, but also incorporates the general atmosphere of the school that fosters the uptake of that curriculum, of which arguably the most important feature is the student social network. Let’s face it, people are social creatures and tend to copy what they see around them. When surrounded by motivated and dedicated people, you tend to want to become motivated and dedicated yourself. But when surrounded by people who are not highly motivated, you tend to become unmotivated. The grade curve at a more demanding school only serves to reinforce social strictures by forcing you to study harder for fear of flunking out. Most people tend to work only as hard as they must, and if they can get top grades without putting in much effort, they will do just that. </p>
<p>Relatively little of the college educational process occurs within the formal classroom. Rarely will you spend more than 20-25 hours a week in the classroom. Far more of your time will be spent interacting with other students, and that is where much of the real education occurs. As a case in point, I personally learned practically relatively little about thermodynamics from the formal class I took, relative to the great deal I learned by debating the finer philosophical implications of entropy and free energy with other students. But that could only happen because the other students had insightful comments to make. </p>
<p>Now I agree that a student at IIT can, in theory, obtain an education that is just as good as at MIT. But, again, the real question is, will he? There’s a chasm of difference between what people can do and what they will do. Like I said, when placed with in a social environment where your colleagues are less motivated to learn, you will tend to become less motivated yourself. You may also lack a student social environment that fosters the rapid exploration and generation of ideas. Granted, you can make up for this too through diligent formal study - but the question again is, will you?</p>
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<p>I again have to push back on this notion of unfairness. Is it really unfair? That is to say, are the students emerging from IIT really just as good as the ones from MIT? If so, then why do companies continue to (unfairly) prefer the ones from MIT? Are they just being stupid? If they’re really being stupid, then that logically points to a ‘brilliant’ business strategy: a company should then simply refuse to hire any engineer from MIT or any other top school, but instead should scoop up all the undermobilized talent from the lower-ranked schools, and hence outcompete all of the other companies who are still foolishly fixated on the MIT students. Why then hasn’t any company managed to figure out such a brilliant strategy?</p>
<p>I suspect that’s a strong indication that the hiring process, on the aggregate level, is actually fair: that the MIT grads actually do offer superior productivity to the IIT grads. If that wasn’t true, then companies should have figured this out by now.</p>
<p>Personally, I think much of the mystery stems from social networking. Many former MIT (and Stanford, Berkeley, etc.) engineering students occupy management positions and they tend to prefer hiring from their old schools because that’s what they know best. They understand what the graduates from their own school know because they went through the same program. Search costs are therefore reduced.</p>
<p>Consider the hiring practices of Google, in the pre-IPO days, which is precisely the best time to have joined Google.</p>
<p>For the most part, it takes a degree from an Ivy League school, or MIT, Stanford, CalTech, or Carnegie Mellon–America’s top engineering schools–even to get invited to interview. Brin and Page still keep a hand in all the hiring, from executives to administrative assistants. And to them, work experience counts far less than where you went to school, how you did on your SATs, and your grade-point average. “If you’ve been at Cisco for 20 years, they don’t want you,” says an employee.</p>
<p><a href=“http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/08/355116/index.htm[/url]”>http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2003/12/08/355116/index.htm</a></p>
<p>Again, was Google just being stupid? Even if they were, I think many companies would like to be as ‘stupid’ as Google was. Sergey and Larry, despite their level of stupidity, are certainly laughing all the way to the bank</p>
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<p>I imagine at any school you’ll have more positive experiences between professors and students than negative.</p>
<p>Heck, I know of a student here at Caltech that knew he could get into grad school here if he wanted to work for the professors he had been with for three years if he wanted, but was very doubtful of his chances at getting into any other grad schools due to his lower than average GPA. I imagine there could be similar situations going on at MIT.</p>
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<p>You realize that you also are making your conclusions off of these rankings. Have you talked to an IIT grad, do you even know an IIT grad? How can you say that they are not just as good as an MIT grad? You are making conclusions that students are not as good from IIT. Why are you making these conclusions? Because employers prefer MIT students over all other. Is this becuase of the quality of the education or because of the rank that MIT grads are supposed to hold up to? I find this to be beyond a doubt ridiculous. The most acheiving students flock to MIT because it has been able to put its name out there as a superb engineering school. I have no doubt MIT grads are extremely intelligent. You are saying that MIT has an environment of students who want to acheive, and then you say that IIT students can acheive as much but probably aren’t as motivated. So do you believe then that the students who attend IIT are not motivated and are the “rejects” that didn’t get into “top-ranked” engineering schools? Seriously, people from all over the world attend IIT. If the school wasn’t that good, then why are there a enormous amount of international students? I attended a graduation there and I can tell you there are a lot of people who are international students. I’m in no way saying IIT is beyond MIT, I am just saying that they are comparable in what sort of education they have to offer. Many very intelligent students go there.</p>
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<p>Again, the idea that IIT students are not necessarily better than MIT ones, but they are comparable. I wouldn’t say that employers automatically prefer MIT to IIT grads, because this would be ridiculous. How can you base a persons experience on the school? Really, I think that everyone has the ability to suceed anywhere they go. So are all the engineers in the world that are in top positions graduates from MIT? Are all of the “smartest” engineers graduates from MIT? I highly doubt it. </p>
<p>You have to know about the program before you can automatically call it worse.</p>
<p>Some of the richest engineers don’t have degrees.</p>
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<p>Nice… true too.</p>
<p>My two cents:</p>
<p>Better schools give you better educations.</p>
<p>Much of my learning comes from discussing and applying material with my friends. The density of smart friends is much, much higher at better schools.</p>
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Much of my learning comes from discussing and applying material with my friends. The density of smart friends is much, much higher at better schools.
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<p>I agree with this point, but it raises interesting questions. If education mostly comes from cohabitation with other intelligent students, then why is the 4-year school so expensive? It shouldn’t cost very much at all to put intelligent people together, yet top schools are generally more expensive than mediocre ones (consider that community colleges often offer classes under $300). </p>
<p>If I took a community college and populated it entirely with brilliant students, would it be superior to HYPMS? If so, doesn’t it make the huge expenditures on higher education seem wasteful?</p>
<p>Salve! - Why do you ask for other people’s advice when you plan to immediately disregard any sort of standardized metric and then say that their opinion is wrong? No one is saying that you cannot be a good engineer and come from IIT. You absolutely can and probably will be. The difference is that IIT may be very respected in Illinois, but people say that Akron is like that in Ohio, too. Every state has one of those schools that is good… for schools in that state.</p>
<p>Sakky - I was waiting for you to chime in on this. Well-said.</p>
<p>^^Sorry, don’t mean to disregard, just don’t like how everyone only cares about rankings. Oh, and don’t know if I’m going to IIT, I just like defending the schools people forget about. I’m still looking into University of Wisconsin-Madison and Rose-Hulman and a few others…</p>
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<p>If cohabitation with other intelligent students is all that’s necessary, why bother with college at all? Or to a further extreme, why bother with an education at all? You can’t have elucidating discussions if you don’t have anything to discuss.</p>
<p>I don’t think just average student intelligence is the whole story. </p>
<p>Some of extra cost is due to prestige–when demand goes up, price goes up. Yet I think more of it comes from having better resources–better researchers, better labs, better support, better opportunities, etc. </p>
<p>To put it in other words, one does not go a community college to perform research on nanotechnology; ergo, cc’s don’t have to pay for such resources and don’t pass the costs on to consumers.</p>
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<p>They hire them because they have a proven track record–MIT, et al., have some of the best co-op/internship/UG research programs in the world. I’m not trying to argue that there’s anything wrong with an internship, etc., set up by IIT. However, the impressive companies will tend to hire interns from schools they know are good–not just from rankings, but to some extent, from anecdotal evidence. This is more true when there’s a good chance that some of the interns will return as full-time employees.</p>
<p>To the OP, they probably do learn better, once again because of opportunities. When even your foundation classes require actual thought-stimulating homework, etc., instead of “plug and chug”, you will understand it better.</p>
<p>^^maverick, for the record I didn’t post the first thing you quoted me on…</p>
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<p>You can if your mom or dad does research in nanotechnology.</p>