@hebegebe - agree with your posts that suggest there’s potential for MIT to compete outside of strict STEM categories and your data in #47 is a great way to assess the overlap with UChicago.
MIT is pretty innovative. The school probably doesn’t come to mind when one is thinking of the arts, for instance, but educators like John Maeda (former pres. of RISD, lead promoter of STEAM) is an example of how MIT technologists think outside the conventional boxes to impact other disciplines. It might be a more natural path for STEM to foray into non-STEM than the opposite, esp. given methodological trends. With so many humanities departments losing enrollments due to silly subjects and lack of rigor, it’s a real opportunity for tech’y schools like MIT to create something more genuine and rigorous in this area while sticking to its original mission to advance the cause of science and technology. It doesn’t necessarily have to apply the scientific method to English Lit - it merely has to impose the same high standards of excellence and rigor.
My D didn’t apply to MIT but she did apply to CMU-Deitrich to do either History or Economics and would have attended there had she not gotten into UChicago. They have a quantitative methods option for historical research that sounded intriguing. Not sure she was quite interested in that; however, she recognized that, like UChicago, CMU was (in her words) a “serious school”. She definitely liked that about it.
@Chrchill last summer (at admitted student day) we sat down with a applicant that had decided on UChicago over MIT. He simply liked the physics program better at UChicago. So I imagine they compete for a lot of non engineering majors.
I can think of one answer to this. MIT is not a knee-jerk mentioned as UChicago competitor because although there are a lot of overlaps, if UChicago tries to target MIT where it is strongest, it will lose. MIT is just that strong in Engineering. UChicago has a comparatively better chance competing head to head with Yale or Princeton, and I daresay even Harvard. Only Stanford can go toe to toe with MIT and have a great chance at winning. Harvard can lose to MIT.
Caltech is not a perfect comparable to anything. (Sheldon Cooper makes them the best school in the Universe )
MIT and UChicago converge at the top primarily because they are both serious and geeky and not Ivy League. There are 3 “permanent” non-Ivy members of “Ivy Plus” - a group of universities that the Ivies benchmark themselves to: Stanford, UChicago, and MIT. Almost as often mentioned are Caltech and Duke. To me, these 5 are the best alternatives to Ivies. Or rather, the Ivies are the best alternatives to these 5 (if you accept that Stanford > Harvard).
Too bad there is no way to make them into a sports conference, since that would be a marketing bonanza for UChicago.They are so far apart and the sporting skill levels are too far apart with Stanford and Duke at the very top of many of the “popular” games and MIT, UChicago somewhere in the lower tiers and Caltech… do they even have a sports team?
^^As a parent, it would also be fun to watch them play on tv. I have a feeling if UChicago really wanted to ramp up their sports to that level, they would be able to. I’m blaming Robert Hutchins ;).
“There are 3 “permanent” non-Ivy members of “Ivy Plus” - a group of universities that the Ivies benchmark themselves to: Stanford, UChicago, and MIT. Almost as often mentioned are Caltech and Duke.”
Stanford and MIT are always mentioned. Chicago and Duke are almost always mentioned as well. There is no indication that Chicago is mentioned as frequently as Stanford and MIT.
Wikipedia:
In his book Untangling the Ivy League, Zawel writes, “The inclusion of non–Ivy League schools under this term is commonplace for some schools and extremely rare for others. Among these other schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University are almost always included. The University of Chicago and Duke University are often included as well.”
In their 2015 book Acing Admissions, Mehta and Dixit write, “The [Ivy Plus schools] include, but are not limited to: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University and Northwestern University. Besides selectivity, these Ivy Plus colleges are thought to share similar values around academic and professional excellence, intellectual curiosity, leadership and civil engagement.”
Dont correct me with Wikipedia - I am personally allergic to a source that not even grade school teachers would accept as authoritative.
btw, Google is your friend.
If you did and not relied on unreliable crowdsourced information like wikipedia or unreliable anonymous people on public forums like me , you would have found that there are now a lot more members and that Caltech is not in it.
Duke University
Georgetown University
Johns Hopkins University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Stanford University
The University of Chicago
I did not make any claims about Caltech. The wikipedia article is quoting books written on the subject. The graceful thing to do when you are completely wrong is to acknowledge that you made an error and apologize. The apology would have been accepted.
Instead of cherry-picking data from random conferences (the link for the “Ivy Plus Symposium” redirects to a Chinese language website), how about an article from the NY Times.
Ms. Anderson said that the “plus” institutions — including Stanford, Duke, M.I.T. and West Point — are those with a “natural affiliation” with the Ivies, in addition to top business, law and medical schools. “If you wanted to describe these schools, these are all highly selective, academically rigorous institutions,” she said, although social reputations also come into play. “The Duke people are so much fun. There’s just some schools you want to make sure you include.”
Harvard co-hosts it. It is in their website. Other Ivies and Stanford have similar lists. You really must be daft to make a conclusion that just because a Harvard web article links to Chinese website that is written in Chinese then it must be false.
Here’s one more for you. On the footnotes it states clearly in the notes: The Ivy Plus group includes Brown, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Stanford and Yale.
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, you would have found that there are now a lot more members and that Caltech is not in it.