Bill Gates: Why MIT matters | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates: Why MIT matters

boston.com

87 pointsrobg34 comments

Was there some dispute I didn't hear about? I'm pretty sure everyone knows that MIT is pretty great. Did Gates just copy-paste info from the recruitment packet?

I suspect that if this was not written by Bill Gates, it would have never made it to the front page of HN.

It reminds me of a Point/Counterpoint from The Onion:

"Why MIT Matters", by Bill Gates

"MIT Sucks and Everyone Who Goes There Is A Huge Fag, lol" by A First-Year Engineering Undergrad at Caltech

Sad that we can't take time - even just a moment - to appreciate nice things. Is the default really to assume a conflict? It's like the internet really is a fifteen year old - highly opinionated and easily slighted.

I've been affiliated with MIT for three years. I hope to never leave. I wish I appreciated education as a kid and I might have arrived much sooner.

The internet used to be cool. It was full of smart people saying smart things.

Now it's mainly a communication tool for 13 year olds and desperate housewives.

I wouldn't go that far. I'm just surprised when the internet culture dictates the zombie response.

If someone sat next to me on an airplane, heard me mention MIT, then waxed eloquent for an hour, I'd be nodding along with a big grin. Contrast that with me asking if MIT was involved in a conflict or if the speaker wanted a donation. It would make no sense.

So why do we allow and enable that attitude online, especially here at HN? It's not just mean, it's vapid.

I think an airplane, and face-to-face life in general, is actually a much more exclusive and filtered place than you realize.

On the internet you are interacting with people who you would never run into face-to-face. They don't have a position in the world where they ride on airplanes. They dress in such a way that you would not even consider them for a conversation. Their body language communicates hostility and fear.

They generally won't even live in the same city, or even the same country. How often do you visit Montgomery, Alabama? How often do you visit Turkey and strike up conversations with the local neurotics?

The internet is where these people go to dump their neural refuse. People who are seen as pathetic hobgoblins when face-to-face use the internet megaphone to spew bile everywhere.

The internet used to be cool. It was full of smart people saying smart things.

Yeah, maybe in 1992. For all practical purposes, the quality of Internet discussions been at its current state for the past two decades. Complaining about it won't make it any better.

Yup, right up until September 1993. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Eternal_Septe... Complaining might not be productive, but reminding people that things used to be nicer is a good way to stave off despair that it can never be nice again. The Internet was nice, for years and years, and if we remember how to do it right, maybe we can make it nice again.

Are you sure you're not overinterpreting things here?

I was only pointing out that it's a bit of a silly headline, "Why MIT Matters", since nobody is out there trying to argue that it doesn't.

Now, the same article with the headline "Bill Gates says nice things about MIT for its 150th anniversary" might be much better.

All I was saying is that this site is for news. A piece about MIT being a good school is not news, it is utter fluff.

I was disappointed when I googled and saw the second did not actually exist.

It's MIT's 150th celebration now. It's why they have been so loud as of late. Probably a good way to get the donations to come in.

people would up-vote a bowel movement if "MIT" was in the title.

If there is an article about bowel movements with "MIT" in the title, chances are that it's interesting.

You created an account just to post that deep thought? Why troll?

Really wasn't meant to be a troll honestly, just an observation of the sometimes undue attention MIT gets. This happens on slashdot and every other forum. There are plenty of great schools doing great things, yet media has cast MIT as `the` place for all things tech. When there's a character in a movie who's a cool techie, they went to MIT. If you're a fictional character joining the CIA, you went to MIT. I can see how my comment unduly denigrates the judgement of the community in general, I'm sorry for that. Invariably however, maybe due to the name recognition at the aggregate, MIT stories always rise the top. It was a pretty stupid way of putting it originally, sorry.

I might be wrong, but haven't there been some talk about MIT not getting the funding they used to?

I.e. maybe it's not aimed at the already converted?

It's much more than "talk": the end of the Cold War (plus perhaps other things and I would expect the dot.com crash didn't help) resulted in MIT receiving a lot less money and way prior to the Great Recession it's been in what seems to be a nearly eternal retrenchment mode, with frequent administrative downsizing and layoffs (something that was previously unheard of, at least in the post-WWII period). I can remember when they changed the cleaning of most bathrooms from every day to "frequent cleaning" (they said every other day at the time).

Then "At night, the ice weasels come", or the Great Recession wacked a good part of their endowment like most ever other institution like MIT. They didn't get caught out like Harvard but it's caused a lot of problems, e.g. last time I checked freezing the conversion of the old graduate student dorm into a refurbished undergraduate dorm.

Well, apparently many HNers believe that where you go to school "doesn't matter", or even that getting a degree doesn't matter anymore ("it's just a credential"). So I'm not sure that everyone knows that MIT is great.

I wish I had had the cojones to apply to MIT when I was looking at undergraduate schools. I was afraid I was too fail, and I was terrified of the debt I'd accrue. Today, I think I could have made a competitive attempt to get in.

If you're a nerdy high schooler: Don't let that be you.

Not that state schools are much cheaper these days, but do you really think it's good advice to suggest accumulating 200K+ in debt to get an undergrad degree?

If its an MIT degree, it might very well be worth it. For better or worse, its easier to get a job if the company you're applying to has a lot of alumni from the same university. Given the high placement of MIT alumni in Silicon Valley, getting the MIT brand on your resume might very well be worth the debt you accrue.

People need to understand that MIT and most other top tier schools have insanely amazing need-based financial aid programs. If you really can't afford it, don't worry, you won't have to. Yes, you'll accumulate some debt, but it's more like 16,000 instead of 200,000 (at least in my case). Plus, again in my case, it's interest-free for as long as you're in school and 9 months after you leave.

So yes, I strongly advice any high school student from any economic background to apply.

Edit: changed "keeled" to "need" in first sentence; damn phone auto-complete!

This is also true for middle income students. I qualified for $1,000 of aid at my local state school, and enough aid at a high caliber liberal arts school to make the difference on the order of hundreds, not thousands of dollars.

I went with the liberal arts school, and haven't been disappointed. I'll have debt, but I've have a job lined up to pay it off.

This. So much this. After I had graduated, I had the chance to read some discussion from people who went to private schools, and ipince is 100% right.

Same here - I had about 20k of debt (low interest, deferred, and tax-deductible interest) when I graduated from MIT. You'll find that MIT, Harvard, etc. all tend to match or charge less than what FAFSA says you should be able to comfortably pay.

MIT makes it clear that they want you there regardless of whether you can pay. I definitely recommend that any high school student who's interested and passionate about technology apply, and not weigh the cost too heavily in considering where to go.

When it came down to everything, the amount of aid I got from MIT made it cheeper than going to my state university. I paid it off over the course of 6 or 7 years, with a payment that was less than a car payment.

It really doesn't hurt to apply - I got my aid package before I had to decided to commit to any school.

I am eternally grateful that MIT has provided me unbelievable aid which without it would've been extremely difficult on my family to send me to college. Hopefully one day when I'm making money in the work force, I'll be sending money back to my school and paying it forward.

On the other hand do not worry too much if you do not get in MITas an undergraduate.

A friend of mine did 4 years at a state school of little note, but absolutely did excel at it. He also paid almost no tuition. He now has a full ride at the graduate school at MIT.

This "first in village" hack can save you hundreds of thousands. Obviously, you have to put in the work in any case.

Indeed, and it should be noted that if MIT judges that you can do the work (survive/thrive the environment and curriculum) your odds of getting in are 1 in 3: 13,000 applicants per year last time I checked with around 3,000 making that cut.

Although if their rejection letter is like CalTech's (roughly "We receive many more qualified applications than we have slots for", Heinlein even commented on the letter's quality in his "what you have to do to get into a good university" book, Have Space Suit, Will Travel), if you don't get in you won't know where they judged you to be.

One last bit of info: MIT really likes evidence that you can projects. Beside geographic diversity it's pretty clear that's what made the difference for me in 1979.

Bill is right that MIT is a great school.

His statement "almost half (48 percent) of MIT’s undergraduates are minorities" is a bit misleading.

According to MIT:

"The class of 2014 is 36% Caucasian, 30% Asian, 14% Hispanic, 9% African-American, a few percentage points for assorted "other". All in all, it's about 75% "over-represented" and 25% "under-represented."

Sounds to me like it's 100% minorities.

My great-grandfather fled Mussolini and came to the USA. Does that make me a minority, or does it still count as a majority because my skin is white? :)

Not that anyone would ever accuse Bill Gates of copying anybody else but this seems pretty similar to what Chris Dixon blogged about a couple of months ago:

http://cdixon.posterous.com/mit-is-a-national-treasure

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