Why Are Some Universities More Prestigious?
When people find out I’m from MIT, they immediately respect me more.
And they should; they have verification that I am smart and that I work hard. This is worth respecting, certainly.
But did I learn anything while I was there? You don’t know whether I did. At all. And very rarely has anyone ever asked me whether I did.
MIT has incredibly smart graduates. It also has the smartest people in the world applying and entering. If you take the smartest people in the world and let them do whatever they want for 4 years, you’ll still have the smartest people in the world graduating, and those smartest people will go on to do great things. Cognitive Ability, which we can roughly measure in a population with IQ tests or the SAT, is by far the strongest predictor of future success.
MIT’s successful graduates don’t mean that MIT’s education is the best in the world, or anywhere close. Those smart kids could learn a lot from terrible teachers. MIT’s successful graduates certainly mean that the students are wicked smaht, but it is not useful data to determine whether MIT is a great school.
In an ideal world, you don’t need to go to MIT for 4 years to prove you’re smart. You could, instead, just wave your acceptance letter around and skip the process. Or, better yet, just show off your SAT score. Doing so is considered a faux pas, and it shocks me to this day that employers don’t ask for it.
Does MIT Provide a Great Education?
The reality is: we have no idea if MIT provides a better-than-average education. How could we measure it? How could we compare that against other schools? There have been a few complex attempts to do so, but it’s really hard to control for the cognitive ability of the students. Would I have been made a better mechanical engineer elsewhere? It seems almost impossible to make the comparison.
There’s reason to believe that less prestigious schools might actually offer better teaching. While their professors may not be top experts in their fields, this can benefit students. At MIT, for example, undergraduates are unlikely to work on cutting-edge research projects, because the undergrads are still learning the basics. MIT’s professors are recruited because they’re on the cutting edge, and this is their primary focus. MIT professors might well be worse undergraduate teachers than those you’d get at Georgia Tech.
Do you really need a top-10 physicist to teach you thermodynamics, astrophysics, or even particle physics? A smart teacher with a top-25% physics background can easily know enough to teach even advanced undergraduate physics; a passionate one is likely to teach it better than the top-10 researcher who specializes in a very very narrow field.
You might actually get a better education at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I’m not saying you will, but I’m certainly saying that we don’t really know.
So, why are MIT and other Ivy’s prestigious? They take in the smartest kids and spit them back out. Those smart kids do great things as adults, raising the prestige of the university, inspiring the smartest kids in the world to graduate. All of these institutions are riding on their legacy reputation, not their teaching. It’s as simple as that.
