<p>siserune,
I am sorry, it's too much for me to take. :) MIT is COLLEGE, yes, an excellent one, a very rigorous one, but not an only one of it's kind. Some of its graduates become "movers and shakers" and some don't( I've met both kinds) . And MJ is not some Svengali single-handedly creating a new breed of graduates in her image, she is an administrator who lied on her resume.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If you think that suddenly now an entirely different category of people will get admitted to MIT, then I suppose there's possibly some indirect consequence of a change in authority, but it still does not compare with stealing & fraud on the grand scale of the energy crooks.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>It doesn't have to be an entirely different category of people.<br>
If over the next couple of generations MIT is associated with, say, 50 billion dollars in wealth creation, and due to a somewhat different category of people being admitted that contribution drops by 2 percent, that is a billion dollars. If Marilee Jones is one percent responsible for the shift, that's ten million dollars. These are hypothetical figures, but it should be clear that there are potentially significant economic consequences to the actions of MIT admissions director taken over a decade.</p>
<p>Marilee Jones was quoted above saying that about 10 percent of MIT admits under current policies wouldn't have gotten in under the old admissions regime. It's hard to directly quantify what that means, but I imagine it's a drop in productivity (and in efficient allocation of MIT resources to US engineers-in-training). "Stealing and fraud" and "devils" are irrelevant to whether the net financial effect is comparable to Enron or not.</p>
<p>If this country goes to pieces economically in the next 20 years, it all will be MJ's fault. :) siserune, where do you get your numbers? :) not all engineers in the country go to MIT, if I am not mistaken, why is MIT be-all and end-all all of a sudden?</p>
<br>
<blockquote> <p>MIT and its alumni have a big long-term effect on the economy, probably a lot bigger than anything related to Enron.<<</p> </blockquote>
<br>
<p>Oh please, let's not get carried away. I'll be the first to state that MIT is a special place. But it's not some sort of foundation that is holding up the US economy. If aliens flew down out of the sky tomorrow and abducted everybody at MIT the ecomony would carry on just fine. The other 3000 or so colleges in the US would have no trouble taking up the slack.</p>
<p>The career salary total alone for ten years of MIT grads (about 15000 people, 40 years in workforce times, conservatively, 50K/yr) is 30 billion dollars. They have to make <em>some</em> money for their employers, and we assume that MIT engineers are somewhat productive. 50 billion dollars was an absolutely unscientific figure solely for purpose of discussion, but if you want to really analyze this point it is probably an underestimate.</p>
<p>There is a famous statistic that the annual income of companies started by MIT alumni would rank MIT respectably on the list of countries by GDP. I don't remember what the numerical rank was, unfortunately.</p>
<p>Note that the issue is one of differential cumulative effect of the MIT admissions office, not a claim that they outright destroy the total value of all MIT-alumni engineering or wreck the US economy if they accept applicants with 50 points lower on the SAT's. The assumption is that inefficiencies in resource allocation (top engineering applicant rejected at MIT, gets degree at RPI instead) translate into some economic losses.</p>
<p>coureur....touche!</p>
<p>siserune,
I may be somewhat dense, but I still don't see how an alleged "different standards" ( for all I know this whole thing was mostly talk and very little action) of admission will affect the economy. Until you show me numbers side by side, for "before" and "after" MJ's tenure graduates, this whole discussion is moot. I also don't fully understand what resources allocation you are talking about. Have the standards of teaching at MIT fallen drastically during last 10 years? I don't think so. So the quality of the "final product" should not have changed either. I would consider us pretty safe in this aspect. :)</p>
<p>
[quote]
If aliens flew down out of the sky tomorrow and abducted everybody at MIT...
[/quote]
</p>
<p>:(</p>
<p>nodont</p>
<p>Different standards are not alleged, they are stated as fact by Marilee Jones. I assume you would take her word for it when she says that "10 percent wouldn't have gotten in". Now, maybe some of those new ten percent are better than some of the old-style matriculants whose place they're taking, but my guess is that admissions are diluted compared to the old days and the average capability level of matriculants is lower. </p>
<p>I use the term "resource allocation" in the standard economic sense. Here efficient allocation means more resources (instruction, labs, libraries, quality faculty) going to the students who are more able to make use of them. If one of the ten percent high-credential applicants who no longer gets in goes to RPI instead of MIT, and a lower-credential applicant who would have gone to RPI goes to MIT under the new admissions arrangement, that's a misallocation. If the RPI-level applicant can produce one widget per dollar of resources invested in him and the MIT-level applicant can produce 1.2 widgets per dollar invested, the highest productivity for the economy will arise by placing the MIT-level applicant at MIT. Marilee Jones claims this is happening less often under current admissions practices.</p>
<p>I don't think the admissions process is so precise and valid that anyone can say "10% shouldn't be there." Honestly, the whole thing is about as clear as the tax code. There will always be disagreement on the correct rubric for admissions, but I think it's overgeneralizing a specific situation -- MJ's deception -- to assert any question about the abilities of students admitted during her tenure. I really think that anyone who couldn't hack the classes would drop out, or not apply at all. Anyone who can make it through the first couple of years is probably capable of graduating and performing well in his/her selected field.</p>
<p>siserune...I really have a hard time with your analysis. Who cares who got admitted to MIT? They all had to achieve to make it through to graduation. They all received an MIT education and apparently the college's high graduation rate demonstrates that all these students were able to hack the level of MIT and make it through. </p>
<p>Beyond even that, many people who come out of the many other schools a tier down from MIT also can achieve similar success and similar levels of economic output. Geez.</p>
<p>At the most selective schools in the country, of which MIT is one, they can fill the class two times over and have a fairly comparable level of student body. So, even the next 10% of kids on the list at MIT who don't make the final cut, are usually just as capable of the level of work at MIT and as capable of similar levels of economic output once they graduate. I believe ALL the students accepted to MIT were capable of the work and most were able to graduate. Enuf said by that fact alone. Who cares what their SATs were? They graduated, didn't they?</p>
<p>EDIT...I cross posted with sjmom but kinda said the same thing! :D</p>
<p>hmm....I am not especially inclined to believe anything MJ says, in light of the original topic of this thread. :) Overall it's all a lot of guessing on your part and a lot of grandstanding on MJ's part. also I find the notion that a more "high-credential" applicant will make a better use of resources available than a "less-credentialed" ( and what kind of "credentials" are we talking about exactly? ) flawed.</p>
<p>Another point is that at the most selective schools in the country, they do not accept by stats alone....it is not like they take the highest SAT scores, GPA, and rank off the pile and admit those. It is not that simple. Actually, if it were, the whole application and review process would be easy. Rather, many students get in who have lower SATs or GPA or some other criteria than someone who did not get admitted. Schools like MIT accept a balanced class of students. The criteria are many. So, again, the next 1000 kids on the pile of applications that do not make the cut, usually have as good of stats as the ones who did make the cut. That is the status of elite college admissions today, including at MIT. None of that has to do with Marilee Jones.</p>
<p>MJ's fraud was shameful, but I hope that those who vetted (or didn't) her resume feel some heat too. Their names are missing from this discussion. I assume they were making the big bucks to make personnel decisions, and quite obviously they weren't thoroughly doing their jobs. Or should we forgive them, since everyone else in higher positions took resumes at face value - everyone else was (not) doing it?</p>
<p>"also I find the notion that a more "high-credential" applicant will make a better use of resources available than a "less-credentialed" ( and what kind of "credentials" are we talking about exactly? ) flawed."</p>
<p>I agree.</p>
<p>Post # 651 has the names of those on the Search Committee, relisted here:
[quote]
Professor John B. Vander Sande, associate dean of the School of Engineering, chaired the search committee. Other members of the search committee were Professors Harold Abelson (PhD '73); Lawrence S. Bacow (SB '72); Evelynn M. Hammonds (SM '80); and Robert J. Birgeneau, dean of the School of Science. Tony Chao, a junior in electrical engineering and computer science, and Michael Wong, a graduate student in chemical engineering, were also on the committee.
[/quote]
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?p=4053574#post4053574%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?p=4053574#post4053574</a>
Original source: <a href="http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1997/jones-1217.html%5B/url%5D">http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1997/jones-1217.html</a></p>
<p>No doubt there was some Human Resources staff person that assembled the packets of the 65 plus Candidates for the Committee to consider, and we don't know who that was.</p>
<p>But we do know, NOBODY checked the references or degrees. ;)</p>
<p>
[quote]
Who cares who got admitted to MIT? They all had to achieve to make it through to graduation. They all received an MIT education
[/quote]
</p>
<p>That does not answer the argument, which was about "cumulative differential effect". </p>
<p>What an MIT education is, is inseparable from the level of the students, both individually and institutionwide. The classes are hard because the students are smart. If the average level of students is lowered, it is inevitable that the education level (both from professors and peers) drops with it, or the dropout rate rises. Less capable students will choose easier and less instructive courses, or do worse in hard classes, so what is an MIT education will also vary across individuals. What is an "MIT education" is related to admissions practices, in other words; it's not some fixed quantum of learning that is instilled in all graduates, rendering them equally competent on exit.</p>
<p>It also doesn't help to point out that there are other engineering schools where the rejected MIT applicants can go. The resource allocation issue applies to the entire system including MIT and all other schools, even if a specific inefficiency is introduced only at MIT. If you imagine some ability ranking of all high school applicants to engineering schools, and a parallel ranking of available matriculation spots at MIT, Caltech, RPI, etc all the way down to East Nowhere Technical Institute, efficient resource allocation tends to place higher-ranked applicants in higher-ranked slots. Admissions policies that upend this by reducing the correlation between ability rank and college destination (e.g., switching 10 percent of MIT admits for students admitted on criteria unrelated to the ability rank), are ones that tend to misallocate resources. Whether the upending takes place solely between MIT and RPI or percolates down the list doesn't matter, there is some reverse correlation being introduced in either case. </p>
<p>"higher-" and "lower-credentialed applicants" was a shorthand for the two categories of 10 percent admits implied by Marilee Jones under the old and new admissions policies. It is not meant as a platform about the use of any particular credentials in admission.</p>
<p>siserune,
can you tell me what, "exactly," MJ meant when she referred to the 10%? IMO that definition is key. Perhaps there were other factors that would have played a part and they might not necessarily have meant lower standards.</p>
<p>I don't think those names that you just posted on there- the deans of the various departments and professors who chaired the search committee- I don't think a part of their job (as a final decision-maker) was to call up and double-check each of 65 resumes.</p>
<p>siserune- I don't think that's fair. What Marilee Jones was referring to with the -10% wouldn't have been admitted- were the flaws of the old system of admissions of only looking at numbers and GPA and raw test and competition results to determine who is "more-competent" and who is "less-competent". In fact, she was criticizing exactly your way of analyzing things.</p>
<p>Washington Post Article - Heaven's Gate
[quote]
Research implies that . . . the Ivies and other elite private schools simply aren't worth the money.
In the late 1990s, two academics decided to measure whether those elite private schools really delivered on what they promised. Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton, and Stacy Dale, a researcher with the Andrew Mellon Foundation, compared 1976 freshmen at 34 colleges -- from Yale, Stanford and Wellesley to Penn State and Miami University of Ohio. They separated out a subgroup of those freshmen who had applied to the same pool of elite colleges. They then took that subgroup, now full of elite and public school grads, and compared their wages in 1995.</p>
<p>The findings? The income levels of these graduates were essentially the same, though very poor students seemed to get a slight benefit from an elite private education. For most students, there was no real post-college earning benefit gained from an elite undergraduate degree. The better predictor was where the students had applied.</p>
<p>"Essentially, what we found was the fact that you apply to those kinds of elite places means that you are ambitious, and you'll do well in life wherever you go to school," Dale says.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So Marilee couldn't do much harm, and may have saved some families a lot of money. :)</p>