Interestingly, my son reports that the MIT kids are much more collaborative and willing to help others than the Harvard kids. Admittedly, he’s only taken two classes there, but the difference was striking.
Part of the reason might be that MIT has less of a spread between the top students and the bottom students, so the person you help this week may help you next week. Harvard admits some students for reasons other than their academic prowess (for good reasons, such as David Hogg’s community leadership). While they add to Harvard’s community, they might not be the best project partners.
Ok, so if I read this thread, the MIT kids/parents are “lacking humility” and the Harvard kids with the exception of kids like David Hogg “might not be the best project partners”
Got it. And still laughing. People are people. There are literally thousands of kids across those campuses. To think there are not good and bad kids who lack humility or who are good/bad project partners says a lot. I’d never think that someone from a particular school held any particular skills or not. They are individuals. And how would someone judge those statements. Did they get to know every student and then make a judgement on their humility and collaborative skills?
He doesn’t need to get to know every student. He is just reporting upon the people he has interacted with. At Harvard there are several kids who don’t show up for class, which is their choice, but then want the notes from the people who did show up. Doing that once or twice is fine, but no, my son is not going to do that repeatedly. Or who get on group projects and do as little as possible. You get the point.
Do those kids exist at MIT? Probably, but my son hasn’t seen them. One of the reasons might be that they actually focus upon admitting nice kids. It is one of the major things they list on their applying sideways page.
Duly noted, thus my disclaimer distinguishing parents from students.
And to be clear, I know some very humble and self aware people who attended or currently attend MIT. But they didn’t choose MIT over other elite institutions because of how many contest winners it produces, or for its starting salary numbers, or because they think that “something very special happens at MIT that doesn’t happen at any other institution in North America.” They chose it because it was a good fit for them and because they got accepted.
So your son has taken two classes at Harvard but believes based on handful of kids who are trying to crib notes that this is not a collaborative place. Ok.
Yes, they exist at every college.
Getting Back to the OP and the thread, Vandy or MIT?
The OP has already considered many factors and has gathered a lot of intel including perceptions and opinions about the two schools (and even a bonus ) from many. Hopefully during visits they can gather all of the additional info they need to make a decision. Good luck OP.
He’s a student at Harvard, and therefore his observations there are across many classes. He is smart enough to know when people are sincerely asking for help and when people are trying to take advantage. I will leave it at that.
There is a certain inherent asymmetry to these eternal discussions which makes me reluctant to get involved, and is part of the reason I’ve been absent for a while until my serendipitous return in post #18
It is easy, socially, to make an argument that it is not the places that grace men, but men the places (DS made that very argument in his Common App essay with some very striking personal examples from his own and his Dad’s, mine, story, which I can not share as they would deanonymize us), and that any differences are marginal and ephemeral, while cost savings are concrete and compounding at 8% a year.
It is harder to share an opinion that despite the timeless truth of the Plutarch’s maxim above, there can be important differences still, without sounding elitist, even if all you really did is pointed out some very obvious patterns in a list of Putnam winners (an objective measure of excellence in Mathematics, which Carl Gauss called “the queen of sciences”, but I sidetrack).
Agreed as its clear from @TheVulcan 's posts. But the extrapolation from that to some broadly applicable thesis based on awards and “atmosphere” at the expense of actual outcomes and the needs of the OP is where we start getting into trouble.
I have from the very beginning repeatedly stated that what is right for one family may not be right for another, and that no one can make that final call for them.
Most of my replies are in the “general discussion” section, detached from OP’s particulars.
A school can simultaneously be a good fit and a bad financial decision. Ideally, a well vetted list will only contain schools that fit, and that should include financially, whatever that means for each family.
I have no doubt that it is/was a good fit for your son. The question is, fit aside, is it worth $210,000 MORE than Vanderbilt, with three children in the queue, and no concrete plans for how to pay for it? That’s what was asked of the forum, not whether or not MIT is a good school.
As for Putnam winners, it is certainly an impressive accomplishment, but it can be trained. It’s a contest of undergraduate math concepts. Math competitions are something that MIT emphasizes over all other schools, even Caltech, the best I can tell.
In the 2000s there have been 18 Fields Medals and 24 Abel Medals awarded. If a MIT undergraduate degree was the key to unlocking success in mathematics, you would think it would be overrepresented among that crowd. Not one attended.
My understanding is that OP’s daughter has been offered a full tuition scholarship (not a full ride award) to Vanderbilt University and no financial aid award from MIT. Is this correct ?
Although MIT is, in my view, the better school for OP’s daughter based on her interests and goals, if MIT is not an affordable option for the OP’s family, then there is no real choice to be made between these two universities.
MIT has never had a winner who attended for undergrad. But what’s not widely appreciated is how diverse the undergraduate institutions are for American winners of these math prizes. There’s no single dominant undergraduate college for Americans in the same way as Trinity College, Cambridge dominates in the UK or ENS dominates in France. Harvard had something of that reputation in the 20th century but not the same dominance -Princeton and Berkeley were always important too. Maybe MIT will replace Harvard as the pre-eminent US math institution in the next few decades, but given the size of the US and the number of very strong universities, I think that winners are much more likely to come from many different undergraduate colleges.
The question in our mind was not so much who will win Fields Medals twenty years hence (which is unknowable), but rather what the peer group looks like today in terms of both abilities and priorities (which is known a little better).
