This is an awful take even considering how bad your track record is.
1) Did you say that MIT is not worth the cost, not knowing that MIT is as cheap or cheaper than a state school for the vast majority of Black students? If your family makes under $140,000, tuition is absolutely free. If your family makes under $75,000, you don't pay a single cent for tuition, room and board, books, fees, or anything. 86% of MIT seniors graduate with zero college debt and the remaining 14% average about $15,000 in loans each.
Meanwhile, the median MIT graduate with a B.S. is going to make $126k his first year....which I'm sure just any state school will match on a regular basis.
2) Did you say that Harvard connections are priceless while MIT connections are worthless, not even knowing that MIT admittance also gives you admittance into Harvard courses and MIT students can take up to half of their yearly courseload at Harvard, for free? Not to mention the Harvard students who are cross-enrolled into their MIT courses. MIT students not only have access to MIT connections, they can also cultivate Harvard connections to a significant degree.
3) Not to mention that your claim about the worthlessness of an elite STEM education is utter idiocy for STEM fields outside of computer programming, which you've made clear is the only field you know anything about, and even for that field isn't actually true. Besides the incredible level of education offered at MIT and the work ethic they help you to develop, just having the degree in hand opens doors virtually everywhere and will get you in a good position literally right out of the gate. Whereas someone who chooses another route will have to independently fight and perform to impress themselves upon employers and work their way up.
This thread is filled with poor takes, but I'll try and break everything down a bit while I wait for this load of laundry to finish.
I can revise my statement a bit, the vast majority of high-school kids (black or otherwise) are
far better off
focusing on attending their local state school. As I said, the vast majority would be better off attending community college for two years and transferring to their flagship state school. They would do better both socially and economically.
I would argue the vast majority will get more out of attending Eastern Washington or Northern Arizona than they would trying to grind out MIT or paying for Stanford.
Life isn't Good Will Hunting where some genius just appears and is able to solve graph theory problems without much effort.
A girl I used to rock with (I wanted to marry her, still do), attended MIT undergrad/grad. She went to a magnet school tailored for pre-engineering majors. She told me the school had a handful of kids that qualified for free lunch, less than 5. She was taking college courses her junior and senior years. The school was located on a community college campus and had a track record of sending kids to MIT. That means her parents had a plan for her, her community had a plan for her, and her school had a plan for her. Everything in her life was setup for her to attend MIT or a similarly competitive college.
When she graduated, I was like, "congrats, you're amazing," the first thing she acknowledged was, "it took a lot of people for me to do this."
If you have that kind of support system, and you have the grades, and you can get in, please attend MIT. Most kids simply do not and most kids should not be focused on that.
An elite STEM education? Listen, MIT isn't teaching a different version of calculus and linear algebra. You can look at 18.01/18.06 online and see for yourself. Studying MechE at University of Florida Honors College isn't vastly academically different than studying MechE at MIT.
Google recruits from community colleges and state universities. So do hedge funds, so does Honeywell, and GE. So does Apple, so does Intel, so does whatever other firm you want to name. I mean, they have to.
Since the vast majority of even extremely driven kids in say, California, do not attend MIT, Stanford or CalTech, what the hell do you think they're doing? Giving up? No, they fill up UC San Diego, UC Irvine, Cal Poly, and UC Santa Cruz. They hit up Cal State Long Beach. A lot of them attend De Anza or Santa Monica College and transfer to a state school. They hit University of Arizona, University of Oregon, and Washington State.
My overall point is, stop focusing on what is happening with 1000 kids.
All facts especially if you applying to these big tech companies
None of this is true, especially over the last decade. The majority of employees at "big tech" companies did not attend M.I.T.
The majority of them studied (especially undergrad) at schools like the University of Washington or Georgia Tech. Some at Carnegie Mellon, Stanford or MIT.
www.nytimes.com
