The View From MIT

I have blogged many times about the problems with UC Berkeley’s undergraduate education (here, here, and here, for example). For all the conventional talk about “the value of diversity”, I never see recognition of diversity of interests and diversity of skills. Everyone in a class is taught the same material (and expected to be interested in the same stuff as the professor); and everyone is graded the same way (and expected to imitate the professor). Of course, UC Berkeley is hardly unique. Practically all higher education works this way, more or less. Berkeley is just the example I know. It is a particularly egregious example given the diversity of vocational interests among its students (much more diverse than Caltech, say), its status as a public institution (with a charter to serve the public rather than its professors), and the exceptionally high research focus of its professors (making them even less interested in what students want).

At a school like Caltech or MIT, the talents of the students are closer to the talents of the professors, but I heard David Brin, the novelist, complain that after he finished Caltech with a low GPA he felt like a worthless human being. Caltech and MIT, like Berkeley, also fail to teach their students about the outside world. From an MIT professor:

Most of the sweeping generalizations one hears about MIT undergraduates are too outrageous to be taken seriously. The claim that MIT students are naive, however, has struck me as being true, at least in a statistical sense. [Could the MIT faculty have anything to do with this?] Last year, for example, one of our mathematics majors, who had accepted a lucrative offer of employment from a Wall Street firm, telephoned to complain that the politics in his office was “like a soap opera.” More than a few MIT graduates are shocked by their first contact with the professional world after graduation. There is a wide gap between the realities of business, medicine, law, or applied engineering, for example, and the universe of scientific objectivity and theoretical constructs that is MIT.

It’s Veblen again: MIT professors would rather teach “scientific objectivity and theoretical constructs” than “the [dirty] realities” of the world in which their students will spend the rest of their lives. Law schools, especially elite ones, are notoriously like this: To teach how to practice law is beneath the dignity of their professors.