Here’s the skinny:
I applied to two schools: MIT, and a bigger-but-less-prestigious school we'll call Z. Growing up, I always wanted to go to Z: my parents met there, my extended family lives in the area, and I have friends and cousins there. But MIT has also always been a dream (and I have friends there too). My original plan was to go to Z for my undergrad, then go to another school like MIT for grad school. I applied to MIT for the sake of completeness, and honestly didn't expect to get in. For that reason, it’s pretty easy to see how getting into MIT has thrown a big wrench in my plans.
To make matters worse, MIT hasn’t offered me any financial aid. My parents have saved enough money to help me pay for some of the tuition costs of Z (which I’m immensely grateful for). But other than that, it is clear that I’m fully responsible for paying for the rest of college on my own. (To contextualize how expensive MIT is: the college savings I have now are barely enough to cover one semester at MIT.)
On top of that, Z has offered me what essentially amounts to a full-ride scholarship. If I went to Z, I could realistically finish my undergrad in two to three years (from the college credit I’ve accumulated in high school) without going into debt. If I went to MIT, I’d be paying sticker price for a full 4-year degree: even with well-paying internships/work-study, I’d still be close to $180k in debt. (I realize that to some in the tech industry $180k may seem like nothing, but for an 18-year-old right out of high school, it may as well be like asking a dolphin to swim to the moon.)
After my undergrad, I want to pursue a Master’s/PhD in Machine Learning or Symbolic Reasoning. The problem with getting into MIT now is that I feel like I have a proverbial ‘foot in the door’: MIT has a lot of undergrad programs that feed directly into their graduate programs, which are top-notch for these areas of research. If I decided to go to Z, I’d have no guarantee that I’d be accepted to MIT’s (or a similar school’s) graduate program, even though I was accepted to their undergraduate program previously. (Of course, I have no guarantee that I’d get into grad school at MIT even coming out of MIT’s undergraduate program, but the chances are significantly higher.)
Additionally, just because I have no financial aid from MIT now doesn’t mean that I won’t have financial aid in the future. My siblings will be starting college in a couple of years; there are a lot of changing factors to consider.
Regardless of whichever path I take, I want to work for a larger tech company to gain experience before I bootstrap a sustainable startup (I mean, that's the dream, isn't it?). I would like to weave together some of the disparate threads I’ve started with my open source work to pursue an idea I think could have a really long-term impact on the way we communicate and collaborate.
So here’s my question: Although I know they’re both really good paths, how would you weigh this choice? I’d love to hear about your experience with college (especially if you went to MIT), your career path, and any advice you’d have for someone in my situation. Thank you!
As someone who went to a flagship state school for undergrad and ivy for phd…
A) Most of the people I know who turned down higher-ranked schools for lower-ranked ones because of money regret it. You will make a lot of life-long friends in college, and you will just be exposed to a different caliber of person on average at mit. Random people you meet through friends of friends at brunches or happy hours will be weirdly accomplished and teach you things.
B) Your analysis seems to hinge on doing a phd at a top-n school. What if it turns out after a few years of college that you don’t want to do a phd after all? Then instead of being either mit phd, or mit bs, you are z school bs. This may not be terrible, but not optimal.
D) On the other hand, I think the differences in career outcomes on average are small, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the probability of starting a company with any given level of success x is 10 times higher for mit alum than Z school alums. Anyway, median mit cs alum has some faang-y job throughout their careers, and these companies all know/understand that many top students can’t all afford top colleges, and so they recruit from state schools as well. So the tail outcomes can be quite different, mean/median isn’t that much.
E) For careers like management consulting or investment banking, some top firms only recruit at top-n schools. However, eg mckinsey even does on-campus recruiting at places like ut austin or georgia tech now, so then it doesn’t matter. You just need yo be at an on-campus recruitment target school.
In my opinion, the lifetime of friends and network effects is most of the benefit, and not to be underestimated. You only live once.
There are many reasons to choose MIT, but I don't think this qualifies.
I studied at one of Canada's top schools, and also have the qualified experience of a drop-out.
Some of the people who impacted my worldview, and also earned the most respect I have for anyone, were a selection of Vietnamese refugees† I worked for in a warehouse after dropping out. At U of T I met some smart people, but also some of the thinnest people in terms of personality, worldliness, and compassion (worse, many of them thought they were already the tops in all of those categories simply because they were where they found themselves in life—often because of where they were born).
No matter where you are, if you go looking for people who will influence your life in an expansive, positive way, you will find them. You don't need to go to school for that. There are countless other reasons to choose one school over another.
Don't quantize your life, kids. It doesn't work that way. It's only you who has to live with yourself your entire life. You've got a heart—use it.
† turned out these brothers I ended up working with were bloody genius-level electrical engineers who designed and resolved bugs in high-powered lighting systems in their sleep. And some of the kindest souls I've ever had the pleasure of knowing
I agree with this. Also less prestigious universities can have better people to influence the OP right now, even if the end goal is to do a PhD at MIT.
For example, take a look at how some great football (soccer) talents are managing their careers. Many deliberately decline offers from top teams in order to keep growing organically. Knowing when to get into a top team (or university) without getting burnt out is an important aspect in managing your career.
Depending on the OP's personality, getting into MIT too early might be detrimental. Lots of students might not enjoy an excessively competitive place for an undergrad for instance.
In my case, if I was going to college again, I would probably consider small liberal arts programs and some ivies (with access to great CS coursework, e.g. Dartmouth) rather than MIT, if both admitted me of course. That's just me, as I value more that kind of academic lifestyle.
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What do you base this on? What about people who went to higher-ranked schools that regret having 100k+ in debt when they graduate. College helps you get your first job, but after that I don't think anyone cares in most fields (true in engineering from my experience, as long as you have a technical degree and even then you can get by). A lot of the difference in outcomes is selection bias. You should look to see how someone who got in a selective school but didn't go compares to someone who got in and went. I've read that the differences are not that stark.
> You will make a lot of life-long friends in college, and you will just be exposed to a different caliber of person on average at mit.
I don't know. I went to a mid-tier state school and my friends were just people I happened to be lumped together in housing. Is it "optimal"? No, but I enjoyed it. My friend crew consisted of a stoner, a very religious dude, a meat head and a Brooklyn hipster. I don't know, I liked it like that. None of them really taught me anything (wtf does an 18 year old know), but it might be different in technical fields. Both have trade offs.
> On the other hand, I think the differences in career outcomes on average are small, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the probability of starting a company with any given level of success x is 10 times higher for mit alum than Z school alums
It'll probably help you raise money, but I think being ex-[FAANG] would be better at least now. And raising money is not the same as starting and running a successful business. FAANG has considerably broadened their outreach and hire outside of top schools. I have a non-technical degree from a mid-tier state school and interviewed with a few FAANGs, more than once.
> In my opinion, the lifetime of friends and network effects is most of the benefit, and not to be underestimated. You only live once.
From what the author stated, I think he would have more experiences from going to school Z with his friends and family. Unless he really wants to get away from everyone, which doesn't sound like the case.
If you have a degree from Harvard/Stanford/MIT/etc, this is not true. Those name brands will help you for decades after. Plus they will also help your college friends, so your network will be much better than if you went to a state school.
Yeah, my ug friend group was similar. It’s completely valid to have different preferences in what one wants out of life. However, I personally did feel much happier / interested later on in life being in friendgroups where everyone had some kind of serious career aspiration.
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So long as you don't get distracted by the freedoms of university, MIT will pay for itself many times over. It's an unfortunate reality that there are prestige doors everywhere and merit only gets people so far. MIT will blast those doors wide open in fields like VC, consulting, and academia.
My MIT friends seem to largely have been underwhelmed by the quality of instruction (as with students at any university), but the career opportunities the brand and connections have opened for them have been enormous.
One caveat I'll give here is to be honest about your academic ability. The worst ROI by far is flunking out of MIT and other $$$ elite universities. MIT is actually pretty generous about how they treat freshmen, but you should 100% focus on ensuring that you can pass (or ideally excel at) your classes. Depending on your educational background, you may never have been properly challenged before and it can be a bit of an adjustment. In my experience the easiest techniques for doing well at top universities are sobriety, 8+ hours of sleep, strategic course selection, and tutoring at the first sign of trouble.
While it of course doesn't always get it right, MIT is very serious about undergraduate education. For example, with 1-2 exceptions that prove the rule like SF author Joe Haldeman, all classes are taught by tenured or tenure track professors, and you don't get tenure at MIT without being a adequate teacher.
Professors who break the rules about the work they assign can have their class taken away from them, and many if not departments also closely monitor student assessed quality of instruction.
I've witnessed first hand from the administration.staff viewpoint a well known professor who is very serious about teaching royally screw up a class on a subject he's not so good at, every student evaluation except for one special case was negative (I and another staff member read all of them). The department head sat him down and made him read every one of them, and then told him he'd never be allowed to teach that course again (which we could overhear because of how our offices were laid out).
You can also be reasonably assured courses won't be cargo culted as I've seen in lower rank schools, and that the Institute will move heaven and earth to make sure you can graduate in four years, unlike some state schools which aren't quite the bargain they appear because they ration spaces in required classes.
Pay close attention to academia_hack's last paragraph: work hard on academics until you get them under control then you can commit to doing other things like the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) which incentivizes professors to hire students during summer and the January "Independent Activities Period" by not "taxing" them with the overhead they have to pay on all other types of people they might hire. And there are of course many student groups, many quite hard core.
As far as succeeding in any given class, if you diligently do the "problem sets" (homework) and picked the right major, you can expect to make As and Bs and have a good outcome. Note grading is by mastery, would be unfair to the student body to grade on the curve, nor does it follow the model of some state schools and I've heard also some European ones of allowing people it doesn't think can succeed and weeding them out in early required courses.
The real question you need to ask yourself is: what do you really want out of life? You say you want to get a Ph.D. and do a startup. But why do you want to do these things? Is it because you really want to do these things, or is it because you see this as a path to financial independence? If it's the former, then by all means, go to MIT. But if it's the latter, if what you really want is the freedom that (you think) money can buy, then you should think twice. For myself, my personal goal was to live a life where I was not beholden to anyone, and I accomplished that by going to a less rigorous school, staying out of debt, and having more than my share of good luck. So that worked for me. YMMV.
One thing I've learned: the hardest part of getting what you want is figuring out what it is. Figure that our first. Don't spend four or six or ten of your best years chasing someone else's dream.
I think compared to Boston, Pasadena or Stanford, Blacksburg is far more conducive to mental and physical health. And even without your scholarship, VA Tech is cheap, and absurdly cheap compared to you backup schools. Well done. Go Hokies.
FWIW my first choice was CMU, got in early acceptance, but my father's income prevented financial aide. It has increased since, but at the time CMU was $22K/semester while VA Tech in state tuition was $2500/semester. Rents are also much more affordable in SW Virginia than they are in Pgh (or Boston, Pasadena or Stanford). I looked at MIT, but I could not identify the campus; it was just city buildings. To me, Harvard reminded me of a penitentiary.
And I agree. Blacksburg was certainly better for my mental health than Boston. But again, this all turns on what you want out of life. Mental and physical health are not the only things a person could possibly desire. If what you really want is to be on the bleeding edge of something like science and technology, and you're willing to endure some stress and physical discomfort in order to achieve that, then Boston is probably a better place to be. This is why figuring out what you really want is really important and really hard.
Case in point for me: what I really want out of life is freedom: not being beholden to anyone, being able to do whatever I want whenever I want to. I've more or less achieved that, but it comes at a cost: I have no children because if you have children then you are beholden to them (or at least you should be). I have absolutely no regrets about this, but obviously many people want children more than they want freedom, and that's probably a good thing or we'd go extinct. Different strokes for different folks. That plus a free market is what makes technological civilization work.
In 30 years of working after college, with numerous job interviews along the way, the item most discussed in every single interview was that I went to MIT. Right or wrong, that is what has happened. To be clear, MIT teaches you how to think and that is what employers are looking for.
As for the cost, I agree with those above who stated that you should attempt to negotiate more financial aid from MIT. I also agree that MIT is one of the few (with the Ivy League schools, Stanford, and CaltTech) that are worth the cost. You will more than recover it over your career.
Finally, you can learn as much going to other schools such as Z. But, you will have to push yourself much harder whereas at MIT, the school will push you. It can make a big difference.
BTW, Boston is an amazing city in which to go to school. So much to do. So many other college age people there.
The latter group tend to be people who are "book smart" but otherwise out of touch with reality. For example: can't design or compute themselves out of a paper bag yet have disproportionate egos as if they could and well. Practicality isn't in their toolbag.
The out of touch is sometimes "in their own world" but it has also included "mentally ill" and "idiot savant smart in only one narrow area; utterly dumb in ALL others".
I've seen these also with other "elite" schools including East Coast Ivies as well as the West Coast equivalents; Stanford comes to mind, for instance.
On the other hand, when you get someone who is in the other group: actually able, it's a dream to work with them as long as their are low key about things. Truly smart people never have to "prove" or "brag" about their bono fides. They show by doing and being cool.
Numerically/Statistically I've found more people in this group will come lesser schools that value the process of teaching and students actually learning over pumping up their endowments or bleating about their pedigree or prestige.
I’m not recommending against it, but it’s not all sunshine and roses. People there are not all “a different caliber of person”. Also being involved heavily in hiring, we don’t give that much weight to MIT just because it’s a top school. That being said, I did learn a lot, and some of the classes are taught with a level of completeness and internal consistency that for me lead to a deeper understanding and intuition for many concepts that is rare in other people. However I can’t say this is only MIT.
If you’re interested interested in talking privately, let me know and we can find a way to connect.
Accessing capital, board seats, “being picked” to be part of those teams, impressing people that wont scrutinize further just because MIT alumni? Absolutely worlds beyond what the plebs can do, and that requires an ambition unrelated to being an employee.
The education experience is irrelevant. Just twiddle your thumbs for 4 years for all I care. Good practice for “rest and vest”.
P.S. — I started programming when I was fairly young (about 10 years ago), and I've spent hours each day since then programming, reading blogs, and poring over books (SICP, Let Over Lambda, etc.). I'm especially passionate about OSS, and I've contributed to a number of projects of varying ilk over the years. Academically, I've worked really hard in school (while maintaining a balanced social life, of course). I particularly enjoy mathematics (I’ve taken up through Linear Algebra) and the sciences (I'm taking AP Physics II, AP Bio, and AP Chem this year). I understand that I’ve been very lucky, and want to make the most of my situation so that I may one day make the opportunities I’ve had access to more readily accessible
P.P.S. — I’m using a throwaway because, aside from this being a fairly personal matter, I've been active on HN for quite a while. A couple years ago, an open source project I started got a lot of traction on HN. Through HN, I have learned a lot from the blogs, books, and projects that have surfaced over the years. Needless to say, I wouldn't be in the position that I am today without your support, so thank you!
P.P.P.S — If you’d like to reach out privately, feel free to email
as I realize your replies may be, well, a bit personal.School isn't end-all, be-all of life. I'm a martial artist. Many people look at the martial arts and think obtaining black belt is the goal. Here's the secret - obtaining black belt is the start. Now you're ready to study the art!
It's the same with school. Getting degrees isn't the goal, it's the beginning. The beginning of what? That's up to you!
You already know you can learn on your own, so you should have learned by now you don't need school to learn. Your internships are going to be the most important thing you do - that's where the doors are going to be opened.
I'm not from the US, so I cannot give any direct practical advice. But, all I can say is, if you choose to go to MIT, just make sure that it is not the only worthy accomplishment in your whole life. Most people from prestigious institutions tend to say they they graduated from XXX/YYY as the only thing worth mentioning about them. While not bad, if that is the only worthy thing to share, then those prestigious schools are not great after all ...
Whatever you decide, all the best.
That's a great idea. I'll reveal the contents of this hash to prove that the person who posts in 10 years is indeed who I am:
> But, all I can say is, if you choose to go to MIT, just make sure that it is not the only worthy accomplishment in your whole life.Even if I decided to go to MIT today, I'd still probably say that some of the OSS work I've done is something I'm more proud of than having gotten into MIT. That said, I hope that in 10 years neither of those things is what I'm most proud of.
There is no question that the MIT brand carries enormous prestige, and very likely if you don't go, there will be a part of your brain that forever feels regret from having turned down an opportunity to be "in a club." That regret can be a powerful emotional force. But it is orthogonal to the actual decisions and behaviors that matter to your life- like debt. You have control over and can work through emotional burdens of your past decisions on your own time and in your own way. Debt IS YOUR BOSS. It MUST be repaid on the lender's schedule.
I was a relatively high performer at MIT, had a few classes where I tested above the second std dev on a final. But my experience after MIT, and from having worked with and at a lot of organizations- there are smart people everywhere. What matters more in the broad sense are relationships and capacities to understand and communicate and work with a variety of people.
From "a club" perspective- the world is actually smaller now than it ever has been before, and there are many more post-college clubs- like YCombinator- that allow for relationship-building and creative problem solving with a like-minded cohort. What is most important is to be in a place and in a mind that allows YOU to succeed, to be YOUR authentic and most capable self. THAT person will be able to get into the clubs that are of interest.
Maybe MIT is slightly better of a place like that than Z for you. But $180k of principal to return is an extreme constraint on the dimensions of that authenticity.
I would second some specific points of advice:
* reach out to MIT again about financial aid
* try to have conversations with your candidate cohort in both places
* try to have conversations with people who rather than advocate, offer contrary advice, and look for what rings true to you. People who have experienced both MIT and Z can be especially helpful here
* work out an academic plan at both places
* work out a financial plan to understand the impact of having to return that quantity of principal
* work really hard at visualizing both pathways
Best wishes!