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Best Tech Colleges Are Harder Than Ever To Get In
alphadogg writes "Results from the early application rounds at the nation's best technical colleges indicate that it will be another excruciatingly difficult year for high school seniors to get accepted into top-notch undergraduate computer science and engineering programs. Leading tech colleges reported a sharp rise in early applications, prompting them to be more selective in choosing prospective freshmen for the Class of 2017. Many colleges are reporting lower acceptance rates for their binding early decision and non-binding early action admissions programs than in previous years. Here's a roundup of stats from MIT, Stanford and others."
I already got my degree.
Was it worth it?
I have no idea. As I climb the hill I'm seeing all sorts of people with and without degrees at all levels.
So don't go. A year of junior college did wonders for my career, and I didn't deal with self-absorbed pricks who couldn't be bothered to profess (something I encountered often in the course of getting my worthless physics degree).
The cool kids go to Yale. Then regret associations with fellow classmates.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
ITT Tech accepted me no questions asked.
Part of the perception of low acceptance for these schools is the concept of a "reach" school that counselors push on students. The idea is you apply to schools from different strata: safety, match, and reach. Your safety school are your fallbacks that you'll likely get into with no problem. The match school are those which you exceed or meet the qualifications. And the reach schools you can guess are the dream schools you apply to. You don't meet the acceptance criteria (grades, SAT, extracurriculars too low) but you apply anyway on the off chance you make it in somehow. The thing is, this batch of reach schools is the same for everyone: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, etc. This is why you see 6000+ applications for MIT, Stanfard, etc.
Take a look at lesser known CMU (and I should know, I went there. When friends and relatives ask me where I attended, it's always followed by "Oh... and where is that?"). They admitted LESS students than MIT, but ended up with double the acceptance rate because 6x as many students applied to MIT, most of them probably completely unqualified because they chose MIT as a "reach" school.
Previously on Slashdot: Could You Pass Harvard's Entrance Exam From 1869?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
In 2012, half a million students took the test to vie for a paltry 10,000 seats. Acceptance rate of 1.9%. The acceptance rate has crept UP because they have increased the number of seats by an order of magnitude since my days. In my year the closing rank (last student admitted to a real IIT, not Banares Hindu University which shared the entrance examn) was 1350. The number of applicants in my year was also less, around 100,000.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
For the Ivy League schools, being Asian American is makes it even harder because they implement soft quotas on them (around 20%) in the name of diversity.
If you are a member of an underperforming race, then you stand a better chance, grades and test scores being equal.
Fact.
...It's 8th on the list, but still don't get no respect!
For what it's worth, GA Tech was my "match" school, and the one I attended. I don't know why I even bothered applying to a "reach..."
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Factu.. Factu.. Factu..
"couldn't be bothered to profess" their love for teaching....
About 25% acceptance rate when I got into MIT decades ago. But then applying to more than 3-4 colleges was unusual. Computers/Internet make it somewhat easier to churn applications now. So with twice as many people applying to college at three times more college since then increases applications around six-fold.
Personally, I don't think MIT is the "Best" tech college. I went to a state university, (and have a lot less debt than i would have racked up at MIT) and I still got a job that pays me well to do the kind of work I like.
The tuition & fees for my BS in Electrical Engineering and my MS in Computer Engineering combined from a state university were cheaper than one year of tuition & fees at MIT.
I know it's in the list, but is Harvard generally considered a tech school? I know personally I never have. Law, medicine, liberal arts and sciences, sure. But I've never considered them up there with MIT, CMU, Cal Tech, GA Tech, and Stanford.
the math is pretty easy, latin who cares, geography is ok as well.
I dont know how it is at other colleges, but MIT's desire to have nearly half women makes it a little harder for guys. They accept about a quarter of the women and less than ten percent of the guys.
I dont know when this changed. It was predominantly male before 1990. I think they always wanted more women apply, but they did not apply in large numbers before then.
When I hire new graduates, it usually matters little what school you went to, as long as it's a real, accredited program. I look for project involvement like the solar car, co-ops and internships, little side jobs of a technical nature, and so on. Unless you have that, your resume looks just like everyone else's: Name of school, list of classes, GPA. Who cares? Your resume might as well be one line. I know what classes are required for an engineering degree, don't repeat the school catalog to me.
How many of the world's billionaires graduated from one of the aforementioned universities?
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The value of a big-name school degree is immense and going up. Students are correspondingly applying to them in droves.
...it will be another excruciatingly difficult year for high school seniors to get accepted into top-notch undergraduate computer science and engineering programs.
Isn't it supposed to be excruciatingly difficult to get accepted into top-notch programs?
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
And yet information is easier to get than ever.
Someone who really puts their mind to their studies will excel more by studying by themselves than someone who only does the bare minimum at MIT.
I've never really understood the allure of going to an ivy league school as opposed to a more obscure state university or smaller private school. This isn't 1960 anymore, the information presented in an MIT, Yale or Harvard lecture is available online to anyone with an internet connection. The technology is the same at a small state school when compared to MIT for all practical intents and purposes. Sure, if your focus is on supercomputers MIT might have hardware that is unavailable at a smaller school, but for most people, the hardware is identical.
About the only advantage I can see going to a larger school would be networking and getting a higher paying or more enjoyable job, something that is defeated by the much, much, much, higher prices of going to a "prestigious" school, where one year of tuition costs as much as 4 years at a different school.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Previously on Slashdot: Could You Pass Harvard's Entrance Exam From 1869?
Well, would you want a Harvard degree from 1873?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Come now. This has been discussed many times; heck, read the very first comment in that thread.
How do Harvard and Columbia make the list when UIUC, Berkeley, Michigan, Cornell don't?
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
like good little drones..
Well, the math is trivial, but dull. My Latin's rather rusty, but that doesn't look much harder than the senior school entrance exam I took aged 13. I've never leaned Greek, and would score close to zero on the History / Geography paper (but set the equivalent paper in Mediaeval Europe, rather than Ancient Greece, and we'll talk.
Parts of IT need trades / apprenticeships not just schools like the one listed they are good for high level design but not so much for day to day desktop / sysadmin stuff.
Also CS is not IT it's more for high level design / coding.
Also way to much is put on the college degrees even harvard says that.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0202/Does-everyone-need-a-college-degree-Maybe-not-says-Harvard-study
Massive Open Online Courses are the hot new thing, and they allow unlimited enrollment without any class-size restriction, and often without any tuition cost. They're all about *access* - if you want to study to become a neuroscientist, then who says you can't? After all, it's your time and effort to waste, isn't it? Accredition is a different matter of course, since just because you feel you have what it takes to be a good neuroscientist, doesn't mean others will agree with you. But as far as getting the opportunity for learning and studying the field, then it should be your own choice and your own risk.
I see MOOCs as being the future - then anybody will be able to study whatever they want, regardless of their prior credentials or their past assessments. Accreditation and evaluation will be strictly controlled by professional bodies, but learning will be available for anybody to partake in.
I imagine that MOOC materials could be built up Wikipedia-style, by crowd-sourcing the information and even practice exercises for self-assessment. That information will be textual, audio-visual, etc. Just as Wikipedia rapidly grew to surpass Britannica and other established encyclopedias, likewise the MOOCs and their content could rapidly swell to exceed that of established course curricula in size and quality. Even mainstream university instructors may tell their students to go to a corresponding MOOC to look up practice problems, or further explanations of things. Once a new solution is big enough and useful enough, the world will no longer be able to ignore it - MOOCs are that solution waiting to happen. They're in their infancy right now, but it's only a matter of time before they take over.
Partying doesn't matter - you can go anywhere for that, rather than a technical university.
As for those who see universities as providing resources beyond just coursework, I would then coin a new phrase - "social learning". The idea behind social learning would be that you would form social circles with like-minded people having the same learning interests, and that your social interaction could be a strong supplement for reduced teacher-student interaction. As a result, you would rely primarily upon your social circle for most of your learning support, and would only consult with teachers as a last resort. This would reduce the burden on teachers, especially in connection with extremely large class sizes.
Touching back on the partying thing again - I guess that could be called the social part without the learning. ;P
MOOCs would be available for free, or for much lower tuition cost than we see now, and it's mainly the exams that you would take for accreditation purposes that you would pay for. Also, online access would mean not necessarily having to move away from where you already are, allowing you the convenience of learning within your current lifestyle. Access barriers would be reduced, so that motivation, discipline, and focus become the new challenges.
MOOCs would also promote uniformity in the learning experience, and would reduce the variations in quality by creating a single comprehensive source. The MOOC material would include a myriad of different explanations for the same thing, so that if you don't understand a particular explanation, you can look at other explanations until you find one that clicks.
Very importantly, MOOCs would allow metrics to be taken, so that expert systems could intimately monitor your learning progress, finding your defects and roadblocks, diagnosing and prescribing the best solutions to help you move forward. Learning would become a truly interactive experience, again reducing the burden on a teacher, especially with large class size.
MIT is a school where professors make a lot more money doing industry sponcered research. As an undergraduate, you will likily be ignored because the graduate students will get most of the time and attention by the professors. The graduate students are unpaid slaves conducting research on behalf of the professors who hope to graduate and get out of their predicament ASAP. Most professors at MIT are there because of their great research record and previous accomplishment and not because they can explain themselves well or teach.
OTOH, a school like Dartmouth values undergraduates and rewards professors who teach well.
To stay in. Although, to a person, every single person I've ever met who went to Harvard proudly told me that it was FAR easier to stay in than to get in. So it's simply more of the same and getting worse. And given 30% of the admissions are legacy, that means that for the vast sweep of the 'elite' of this country, their entire future is settled by the time they're 17. Awesome.
...It's 8th on the list, but still don't get no respect!
It's the only public school on the list, which goes a long way toward explaining why its stats are so different from the rest.
The criteria they use for the list are pretty nebulous (other than that they "...offer early admission programs" which presumably excludes a lot of the other public tech schools.)
for the company of your peers and the connections...and the reputation
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
... those who think that a preposition is something that someone might end a sentence with which.
We're clawing our way up the stack (says this lowly dev from Harvard SEAS). But yeah, we're generally not thought of in the same way as the ones you mentioned. Part of that is the fact that the Engineering school only became a "School" as such in 2008; so we're behind in terms of time to start with.
(Posting anonymously because I've never been real keen on tying my employment to my pseudonym.)