<p>Well, apparently there is a 50,000 character limit on all posts. Trust me. I’ve tried it.
But to answer your question more directly… it’s bad form to ramble on for 100 lines about anything, just because you’re almost surely wasting everybody’s time. Such things become unwieldy. This is a discussion forum, not a monologue forum.</p>
<p>BCEagle:</p>
<p>I have far more spam than you have things to write out by hand. Let’s not make this a contest. I have 4 more posts of comparable length to round out HoD, and then think of all the other public domain works out there. It boggles the mind.</p>
<p>If you post a lot of off-topic material, I’ll just report it and it will get deleted. If you wish to start your own thread on reading materials, please do so with my blessing.</p>
<p>^Ahh! heart of Darkness quote. That, imo, contains one of the best openers in literary history (except you quoted all the way to the station :)). The line:
<p>This officially no longer has anything to do with schools but, instead, locations to work. The OP has said his question is answered. Let’s end this.</p>
<p>There are clusters of similar businesses, and there are some outliers. That is life.</p>
<p>BCEagle – Have you read Malcolm Gladwell? You really should check out Outliers. I think you will find it to be a fascinating read.</p>
<p>Sorry to keep the thread alive… but just seconding Explorer’s recommendation of Outliers. Just read it, and he has some very interesting things to talk about.</p>
<p>Your and sakky’s argument had as much to do with the topic of this discussion thread as did my section of Heart of Darkness. That was the point.</p>
<p>As the OP, I am very thankful for you that made this a deep and interesting thread. However, my thinking has to resemble sakky’s. I find his posts to be very insightful and actually substansiated. I do not believe Salve is qualified to give any input as he isn’t even in college yet. You cannot truly evaluate engineering programs if have no idea of what one consist of. You stating that your brother went to IIT and is a “good” engineer, possibly just as good as an engineer from MIT is not justified. You can’t have an idea how much your brother knows if you have no idea about the field. This is more an admiration of your brother than a justified claim which is completely understandable. </p>
<p>All in all, most of you have failed to realize that probability is far more important than once in a while occurences. Theorectically I could self teach and learn more than an MIT engineer but it is not probable. This world revolves on probabilites which is why we have statistics. My question was more concerned with probability. “Could happen” serves no purpose.</p>
<p>The main question I purposed is “do the programs cover the exact same material?” And I’m convinced the answer is “no.” This is based on the agreement that top universities have more rigorous programs so there has to be more taught/more in-depth. Thus, on average, a grad from a top-university comes out with a higher quality of education. Now whether this quality is needed for a regular entry level engineering job is a whole different topic.</p>
<p>I think there’s a non-sequitur between “being taught more” and “having a higher quality of education”. Technically speaking, “education” is inherently something that comes from inside the student, and as such, it’s not so much what the student is taught, but what the student gets out of it. At the risk of committing a straw-man fallacy, I could teach my dog calculus for thirty years, and he probably still wouldn’t be able to do a trig substitution correctly.</p>
<p>(Perhaps it is a little picky to distinguish between education and instruction, but then again, such differences are insightful.)</p>
<p>I don’t think anybody’s arguing that, ceteris paribus, going to a better school will probably lead to the student’s getting more out of it. That’s almost the definition of the “goodness” of a school. It’s a matter of degrees, though, and there is a lot of wiggle room. I don’t think anybody would disagree with these statements (maybe I’m wrong?):
If the entire student body of MIT was transported to JSU, then JSU would be a better school than MIT (in the same sense that someone would say MIT was better than JSU prior to the swapping)
It is possible, whatever the probabilities involved, to get as much education at JSU as at MIT.
it is possible, whatever the probabilities involved, to get a much lower quality of education at MIT than at JSU, under the proper circumstances.
All ABET accredited programs in engineering must be doing something right, that is, teaching a fundamental core in a good way to graduate competent engineers; so whatever differences in education, they’re fundamentally “extras”, or icing on the cake.</p>
<p>wait, what? do you mean arguing against? cetus lapetus.</p>
<p>I’d disagree with:</p>
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<p>If somehow they kept the curricula and course offerings fixed through the switch, then I think that JSU would still not be better than MIT.</p>
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<p>This isn’t that relevant to the question of “are all schools created equally?” It is more relevant to the question of “does getting a better engineering education matter when getting a job?”</p>
<p>Internships are usually highly recommended on CC as it provides you with some job experience that can give you a leg up on landing your first professional job. It can also provide you with expertise in areas where you know more than senior staff. Work experience is another aspect of education and my observation is that relevant work experience is a very important factor in landing the job.</p>
<p>No, ceteris paribus, all other things being equal. I mean to say that for two identical students going to a better school and a worse school, for roughly the same effort, the one at the “better” school will probably receive a “better” education.</p>
<p>I find it strange that you consider a school to be better or worse based only on its course offerings. That seems a bit silly to me… are you saying that if all schools offered exactly the same curricula, then no school would be better than any other? It seems like JSU is shooting itself in the foot by not just adopting MIT’s courses, books, and lecture notes. Whether the difference is in the teachers or the students seems to me to be a more valid question; I tend to think it’s more on the student/students than on the teacher.</p>
<p>I would argue that “extras” don’t necessarily contribute to the quality of an engineering education. Depending on how you define it, the “engineering education” could consist just of the ABET required material. The rest could be considered electives… good to know, but not required. Clearly, the more courses you take - especially the technical courses - the better. But whether taking a glut of extra classes means you have a better education than otherwise… I find a contentious matter.</p>
<p>hey buddy. look. i can wiki latin phrases with the best of them. i know what it means. i suggest you do the same with my pertinent latin phrase. cetus lapetus.</p>
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<p>Yeah. But it isn’t very realistic to expect this.</p>
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<p>this is a good argument made with a limiting case, but i think you lost something in translation. when in rome, you might say . . .</p>
<p>You realistically can’t teach at high standards when your student body isn’t of high caliber. You need to know your audience. The few good students would get a lot out of it, but the majority of the students at JSU wouldn’t. So you could say that high standards realistically is coupled with the quality of the student body. My “assume the the curricula at both schools are fixed” is a pretty unrealistic assumption, I admit. mea culpa. i plead the fifth.</p>
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<p>you are making this more complicated that it needs to be. sic transit gloria. it’s quite simple really. more knowledge means that your education is more better.</p>
<p>I don’t know what you’re doing with all of those latin phrases. As far as I can tell, cetus lapetus doesn’t mean anything… I’ve never heard it, don’t recognize either of the words as having meaning outside of the mythological context. A quick search on Google gave 258 results, most of them to do with teenage girls. Maybe this is a joke I’m just not getting the humor of. I assure you that “ceteris paribus” is a well-known phrase with a clear meaning… the reason I tend to use it is because it’s literally shorter than writing “all other things being equal”. I assume the other irrelevant Latin phrases in there are other similarly flat attempts at humor.</p>
<p>As to the points…</p>
<p>I still say that the courses offered don’t make the school. It’s a combination of teachers and students. The courses have a minor role, at best. If all a school had to do was adopt the same courses and curricula as MIT to become a top school, then schools would do that to become the best to attract better students until all schools were equal. Your system isn’t coherent because no school could have become better than any other that way…</p>
<p>"you are making this more complicated that it needs to be. sic transit gloria. it’s quite simple really. more knowledge means that your education is more better. "</p>
<p>I continue to disagree that more knowledge means that education is better. Also, there’s a non-sequitur between being taught more and having more knowledge. Like I said, I can teach my dog calculus…</p>
<p>I pretty much only reentered the thread to say cetus lapetus (i can’t believe you were too lazy to figure out that this was from a disney channel movie. come on) and imitate will ferrell.</p>
<p>But while I’m still here. . .</p>
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<p>I still maintain that having high standards in courses is a pretty key component in what makes a school good. I’m surprised that this is controversial. I did cede the point to you when I said that you can’t hope to do this without having a student body of high caliber or professors to do justice to the material.</p>
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<p>Well some schools don’t attempt to become great schools. Some are in the business of teaching guys/gals that don’t live and breath academics and that’s fine.</p>
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<p>I recognized that non sequitur and ceded the point to you.</p>
<p>AuburnMathTutor 1
silence_kit 0</p>
<p>Ok I was posting while dumb, so I didn’t articulate my point clearly (or at all?). This is what I meant to say. “I am still surprised that you don’t agree that a program that manages to instill in its students a stronger understanding of the fundamentals and a more diverse cornucopia of technical knowledge is better than the other one.” Yeah, it is true that schools with better students will have an easier time doing this.</p>
<p>Just because I am not a college student does not mean I know nothing about it. I have a brother in undergrad and a brother and sister in grad school. I think I have an idea about how everything works (by the way, my sister is a grad student at UIUC with full tutition payed and a very large stipend). Also, I can have an idea about how much my brother knows. I believe it is impressive when he goes to work for ITW (a company spread over the nation) and within the first week they want him to not go to grad school and work for their company (they also volunteered to pay for him to be a part-time student at any university). I’d say when someone is recognized this much they indeed have a decent engineering background… </p>
<p>Also, you don’t have to be smart to realize that a person can achieve in whatever they set their mind to. You definitely don’t have to be in college to say that. So before you post a criticizing post saying how “unqualified” I am to make arguments, I think you should read everything. On a side note, how can you be qualified to say the quality of other institutions when you have only experienced one schools environment and coursework? I see a flaw in this.</p>
<p>Anyway, no one can argue against what I have been saying throughout most of my posts. “A person doesn’t need MIT to be successful”, even an “ignorant” high school senior realizes that.</p>
<p>Sidenote: Watch out UIUCfinest. This ignorant high school kid might be an incoming student in the UIUC engineering program (Unless I choose Rose-Hulman or U of Wisconsin instead… or maybe even IIT). UIUC is near the top of my list though…</p>
<p>I don’t mean anything though. I respect you for being a UIUC student (engineering at that). I just don’t like people putting down high school kids because they do not have any “experience” in anything college related (especially when following your siblings college career definitely provides experience).</p>
<p>Yeah, I’m going to agree with Salve!, UIUCfinest.</p>
<p>Your argument is sort of an ad hominem. Let his sources and evidence speak for themselves. You never know what anybody’s qualifications are on these forums.</p>