To throw out some more numbers, the last I got for MIT, which was before a degree from it was perceived as being relatively more valuable in the Great Recession, it received 13,000 applications, 3,000 of which were judged capable of doing the work, and the admissions office aimed for a yield AKA class size of 1,100.
Luck only gets you into MIT after you pass the cut of it deciding you can do the work, most especially a term of the calculus past the AP BC sequence, and calculus based mechanics and E&M. When I last had figures (since then I gather applications have increased), about 13,000 applied, and about 3,000 were judged to be able to do the work, from which MIT had to extend enough offers to get a class of ~1100.
MIT does a good job of this, as a rule students who choose an appropriate major make As and Bs, unless they're having personal problems.
However these sorts of smarts have no bearing on the failures experienced by this guy; heck, he would have been better off staying longer and rubbing shoulders with people who've had success in business. There's plenty of opportunity for that, from the professors who are given one day a week for their own business pursuits to all sorts of formal entrepreneurial stuff.
But it's not something MIT cares about in admissions, besides looking for evidence you can do projects, which has no bearing on projects producing stuff people will buy; note this guy did not fail from an inability to make something work per se.
Yes, I see your point, and it's a significant and important one (but I'm not in position to comment well on it, knowing only MIT and Harvard students, the latter through various friends of mine from Up Chuck River :-).
It's significant based on what I've heard of India's famed IITs. They don't have top of the line equipment, their professors aren't always the best; it's their student bodies that make them more than anything else. When you get the very best (in their areas) out of 1 billion people....
As for MIT numbers, you might find these interesting/useful: current yearly applications are something like 13,000, a bit more than 3,000 are judged as being able to do the work (that's the number one thing that's important to MIT; while mistakes are inevitable, it accepts no one who they don't fully believe can make it).
10% of those are "obvious admits" and the admissions staff, augmented by anyone on the staff with a clue who volunteers (especially to make absolutely sure every application gets at least two readings) then agonize over who amongst the rest to offer a slot to. (It's hard and not really fun; I have a very good friend who does this on a time available basis and I helped her a bit one year when I was on the staff.)
MIT shoots for a yield of around 1080 the last time I checked (that figure is old, but is tightly constrained by available student housing, all freshman must spend their first year in it; one year the the admissions office made a big enough mistake they had to turn a graduate dorm's basement into makeshift housing, which perhaps not surprisingly worked out very well (they bonded into a tight and self-supporting group)).
The self-selection in applications is tremendous. Nobody attends MIT who doesn't think they wanted to (that can of course change once they arrive ^_^, but I didn't see much of that in the '80s).
Thanks for the intelligent discussion and observations.
Make that 500. Isn't it comparable to MIT that takes about 1000 undergraduates a year? Normalize by country population and you'll see that MIT is even more selective.
It depends. MIT has seen something quite different, EECS enrollment from at least the '80s to the dot.com crash was ~ 400 students per class of ~ 1050. Then it crashed hard down to as low as 180 and only very recently got over 200. MIT hasn't seen anything like Stanford's increase but that probably has a lot to do with the different student bodies and the very different introductory courses (e.g. they no longer have a hard introductory course suitable for non-majors).
"It will be interesting to know how many undergrads graduate with CS/EE degrees from MIT...."
Before the dot.com crash, it was ~ 40% of the undergraduates for more than a couple of decades, ~ 400 students. After, enrollment dropped by a bit more than half, and as of late it's climbed back up a great deal.
Is that 140-150 students total for those 4 ITTs, or for each?
"MIT doesn't accept anyone who they don't think can make it. This works in part because of the self selection in applicants, although nowadays they're getting 13,000 per year, 1/3 of which the Admissions Office judges can do the work."
If you think about it though, for an incoming class size of about 1000, they're still rejecting 3/4ths of the qualified applicants. Assuming a legacy applicant is qualified (and I'd suspect for a number of reasons that they're more likely to be qualified than the median applicant), that second look can be a big benefit.
Exactly. Even if we take MIT which seems to graduate AT MOST 10,000 students each year -- times 10 (10x)-- it's only 100,000 graduates. The 1 million comes from where?
In reply to you and yajoe, obviously it doesn't hurt to be the child of an alum. But first MIT has to decide if you can do the work, e.g. the calculus and calculus based physics all students must take.
That sets a pretty high bar. The last time I checked, which was before the Great Recession changed the game and increased applicants, MIT was getting 13,000 applications a year despite the extreme amount of self-selection, of which they judged 3,000 could do the work. From that they construct a class of around 1,100 students.
That's a pretty broad statement. I can think of a number of measurements where MIT comes out ahead of Caltech - entrepreneurship (measured per-student) would be one particularly relevant to HN.
But it is a combination of scarcity and quantity, interestingly.
By any measure that is per-student, Caltech grads for instance are far superior to the average MIT grad.
However, MIT has better name recognition and looks far better in stats like "number of publications in top journals" or "number of Nobel price winning alumni", just because it has five times as many researchers and pumps out five times as many alums every year. So the winning strategy is to get as big as possible - but only as long as the majority of your intake is still in the top half-percent of the bell curve...
MIT classes are individually quite hard, but I also find many MIT undergrads simply try to do way too much. Students frequently sign up for twice as many classes as one should, volunteer in two or three labs at once, or volunteer in three or more organizations. Success during high school and college admissions is largely based on quantity over depth, which is poor preparation for actual college and life.
P.S. I don't mean to blame the students for the consequences of these choices. I think the administration could help by providing a clear picture of success, and providing better services. I just think this is a source of stress outside of individual class difficulties.
I wish the author would "do the math": of the 42% female freshman class of 2004 entering in 2000 (which at CMU for this major requires a direct application for one of 135 (last time I checked) seats), 29% failed to graduate in the major within 4 years.
Now, that might be partly an artifact of the dot com crash convincing a subset to transfer to another major, but it otherwise looks very bad; if that happened at MIT for any reason other than transferring out (which I can check on if desired, the department did lose more than half its enrollment during this period as measured by freshman declaring a major), there would be serious hell to pay.
Seems like a simplistic analysis. If the programs are of equal difficulty and MIT admits more a more qualified class, MIT will have a higher graduation rate.
I'm surprised at the 100 student limit they impose. I'm currently following MIT's 8.01x Physics course on edX along with 33k other students. So far I haven't had an issue that's a direct result of the number (like felling I don't get enough attention from the staff.)
So on one hand we have options like edX, which reach a lot more people and are mostly free ($50 for a verified diploma) that reach orders of magnitude more students, and on the other a paid-and-accredited degree.
I personally hope they'll be more of the first ones, because of a) not being able to spend $6k and b) the warm feeling I get in my stomach when I think about free and high-quality education that reaches tens of thousands of people.
MIT caps the foreign students in a class at about 15%, so you were competing for one out of a bit over 150 slots. You very possibly made the "Can you do the work?" cut; overall, before applications shot up from 13,000 to 18,000, about 1/3 made that cut, but MIT has room for only a bit over 1,000.
It's nothing personal, and the people involved in admissions do not like turning down qualified applicants, but they don't have any choice.
To throw out some more numbers, the last I got for MIT, which was before a degree from it was perceived as being relatively more valuable in the Great Recession, it received 13,000 applications, 3,000 of which were judged capable of doing the work, and the admissions office aimed for a yield AKA class size of 1,100.
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