I can't even begin to express how nutty this idea is. MIT's existence is certainly in the national interest. MIT is the world's best university for training engineers and the world needs good engineers. The more, the better. The better they are, the better. MIT is also excellent in other fields as well. I.e., stuff that the world needs.

> Let them lose non-for-profit status and have their massive endowments get taxed.

More insanity!

Look, I work at a famous research institute that is affiliated with MIT and Harvard. Our goal is to do fundamental research aimed at treating and curing cancer and other genetically-based diseases. Many people want to work here because it is so prestigious. And it's a non-profit because it makes no money.

But getting a job here isn't egalitarian or "fair". The people who are hired are hired because the people hiring them believe that they are the best candidate for doing the job. Modulo affirmative action considerations, etc.

So now you'd want to take away our tax-free status? The consequence of doing this is that some terrible diseases that might otherwise be cured might not be. And the same thing is true if you were to take away MIT's and Harvard's tax-free status, because the research institute where I work has close research ties to both MIT and Harvard.

You seem to have lost sight of the purpose of research universities. They do research! Valuable research. And students get to come and be with the researchers and learn from them.

At MIT, every undergraduate student can participate in research. Often with the leading expert in the field.

Regarding sailing being for the rich, it costs $90 a day to rent a four-person sailboat on the Charles River. Anyone in Boston can do this who knows how to swim and sail. Divided by 4, that's $22.50 per person for a day of sailing. Is this really a sport only for the rich?

Let's get rid of the tennis courts and the swimming pool and the bowling alley while we're at it!

> Unless you're arguing that folks that get into MIT are just inherently superior

Inherently superior? No, of course not. But MIT's difficulty level is "calibrated" to those in the top 1% of scholastic aptitude. If someone doesn't have an aptitude somewhere in this ballpark, MIT is probably not going to be a rewarding experience for them.

In the US, the last I checked, 50% of high school graduates went on to college. MIT's difficulty level is clearly calibrated to only a few percent of these college students.

Also, clearly, if we crunched the numbers, we'd quickly determine that there are lot more students in the country who are at an appropriate aptitude level for MIT than MIT can actually admit. Well, such is life. There are plenty of other great schools. MIT can't take everyone who is qualified to attend MIT. No college can.

Life isn't always fair, nor can it be. Just like not everyone can work at my research institute that might want to.

On the other hand, there are plenty of other high-quality choices for education. You don't have to go to MIT to get a high-quality engineering education. And there are plenty of other opportunities in the world for those who wish to do genomics-based disease research.

Yup! The world needs American engineers and scientists. MIT is a fantastic school. I'm failing to see how it's irreplaceable compared to University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, University of Washington, UIUC, my alma mater...

> But getting a job here isn't egalitarian or "fair". The people who are hired are hired because the people hiring them believe that they are the best candidate for doing the job. Modulo affirmative action considerations, etc.

Sure! Nothing wrong with that! I'm sure that can still happen if it was affiliated with UMass Boston. Public, less-selective institutions like UNC Chapel Hill do lots of fundamental research too.

> At MIT, every undergraduate student can participate in research. Often with the leading expert in the field.

That's great! I did undergrad research and I'm sure lots of undergrads do!

> Regarding sailing being for the rich, it costs $90 a day to rent a four-person sailboat on the Charles River. Anyone in Boston can do this who knows how to swim and sail. Divided by 4, that's $22.50 per person for a day of sailing. Is this really a sport only for the rich?

Interesting aside, but that's actually a lot more than I expected for a sailboat on the Charles and I was looking into it earlier. I know a few people that sail and it seems like an awesome hobby. Guess I'll have to re-evaluate.

> There are plenty of other great schools. MIT can't take everyone who is qualified to attend MIT. No college can. On the other hand, there are plenty of other high-quality choices for education. You don't have to go to MIT to get a high-quality engineering education.

Yup! I went to a lower tier institution and got an OK quality education. But if you're really going to claim that other schools also provide high quality engineering educations without the social engineering, hate to say it but I don't think you're making a great case for it!

Look, the way I see it is:

1) Either the "MIT woman/man" is so much better than everyone that doesn't get in (like myself) that the cost of re-evaluating the influence of these selective institutions would be enormous to world productivity or

2) These schools are good, but them being selective isn't actually that beneficial to the national interest more than brownie points in a credibility name drop and the specializations that exist there because of the added credibility.

I simply don't see this argument working without admitting to being fundamentally superior.

MIT IS a fantastic school. I'm not sure what you mean by "irreplaceable". MIT is irreplaceable only in the same sense that Picasso's art is irreplaceable. There's nothing else quite like it, but there's plenty of other great art in the world: Dali, Van Gogh, Vermeer, Calder, etc. If there never was a Picasso, the world would have been fine. It just wouldn't have been as good as a world with Picasso's art in it.

You're also irreplaceable, as is everyone. Since everyone is different.

Re where I work, there are plenty of other labs that do similar things, but none of them seem to do it as well. It used to be part of MIT but eventually decided to be its own thing. Much of of the original sequencing of the human genome was done here when it was part of MIT. Would that have been done at UMass Boston? I think not. Might it eventually have been? Who knows? Would the human genome eventually have been sequenced anyway? I'm sure. How much longer would it have taken? Who knows, but I do know it would have taken longer.

If MIT hadn't existed this lab would not exist. Why do so many biologist want to work here? Because there are few other places like it, and if knowledge on how to cure various diseases comes to fruition, it's likely to happen here. If and when that day comes, how many lives will be saved and how much suffering will be prevented that might otherwise not have been? I don't have any crystal balls, but these things matter.

In addition to going to MIT as a student, I worked at MIT for quite a few years. I got to redesign the computing and network infrastructure for a world famous lab. I wrote software that was essential for the operation of an X-ray telescope. 1,000 peer-reviewed astronomy papers were published using results from the telescope and my software.

I got to adapt brain imaging software to visualize radio astronomy data for star-forming regions of space. Now I work on software to design CRISPRs to help bring on the zombie apocalypse. Or at least I can dream, can't I?

Could I have done all this somewhere else? Who knows? My backup school was Johns Hopkins. They have a cool physics lab. Who knows what might have happened if I'd gone there instead? Would I have done such interesting things at Chapel Hill? Maybe, but I doubt it.

If I had gone to Johns Hopkins, my life would have been different. But it probably would have been just fine. I got into MIT, where I wanted to go. I consider myself lucky. If I'd gone to Johns Hopkins I would also have been fortunate. If Picasso paintings had never existed, I wouldn't have missed them. As I mentioned, there's plenty of other great art. But in that Picasso works do exist, isn't it just so unfair that I can't afford to buy one! I demand a fair and equal distribution of his art, or it's really not a good thing after all!

Your #1 doesn't parse to me. Who said anything about any person being better? MIT choses its student body to be beneficial to itself, the student body, and the world. Considering MIT's success, it seems to be doing a fine job at this. But you would rather fix something that isn't broken?

Re #2, again you want to fix something that isn't broken. How about MIT just admits students via a completely random lottery of everyone who applies? Do you think that would work out well?

Re fundamental superiority, once again I find you clear as mud. I'm certainly not claiming to be fundamentally superior to anyone. I was just lucky enough to be born smart enough to do very well in high school and then lucky enough to be admitted via MIT's secret sauce selection methodology.

If your question is whether or not MIT is fundamentally superior, I don't know about "fundamentally". It's long been considered the world's best engineering school. As it turns out Harvard has better astronomy due, in part, to its close ties to the Smithsonian. I originally went to MIT for astronomy, and if I had only known at the time, I suppose I would have preferred Harvard. Oh, well. And maybe Caltech has better astronomy too. It turns out I settled for third best.

On the other hand, I got to learn SICP before the book was even published, and that changed my life. That couldn't have happened anywhere else.

I mean, I wasn’t so your first statement contradicts the next. It seems like you’re saying the ultimate value of a person’s accomplishments is decided when they choose a college. That certainly has disturbing implications for me if that’s the case!

Ultimately this appears to just be beating around the bush. If this institution is so special a random lottery wouldn’t be that different of an outcome. Some folks have proposed that at other institutions [0]. Personally I disagree because I genuinely don’t think who they admit actually matters for 99% of the country. Society should start considering the value of the P50 instead of only lionizing the contributions of the P99.

[0] https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2019/01/08/why-harva...

That's nonsense. I never said anything of the sort.

I've been engaged in another debate here concurrently, which you can easily track down. The originator of that debate posted about a study showing that where you go to school has little impact on your lifetime income. My response argued that income isn't the only benefit that one gets from an education. But I'd readily admit that income is certainly one of the most important benefits.

Unless you have a hankering to work on a small team developing, maintaining, and operating an X-ray space telescope, or to become a prestigious researcher, I'm sure that your education is just fine. That's what the data shows. Also, if you go to graduate school for a PhD, the graduate school you go to is way more important than the undergraduate school you go to. There are plenty of people I know who went to non-elite undergraduate schools but then went on to elite graduate schools.

Personally, I wanted to go to MIT for CS grad school, but I didn't get in. (Despite good grades and excellent GRE scores. How unfair!) I got into BU's PhD program, but BU wasn't doing the kind of research I wanted to do. So I bailed and just got a job at MIT. Though I learned incredible stuff as an undergrad at MIT, it was also difficult to distinguish myself, other than in a few classes for which I was particularly well-suited. Why? Because before I went to MIT, I was the best student out of a thousand. And my SAT scores were the best out of 5,000.

At MIT, though, I was just average. If I had gone to a school where I could have been a bigger fish, maybe I would have gotten into MIT's CS Phd program. Or maybe not. Life is too short to try to second-guess all the maybes. But I have a friend who went to UMD for both undergraduate and graduate school and now he's an Associate Professor at UPenn. Now that he's doing scientific research and applying for grants, etc., it certainly helps him to be a professor in a research lab that has some other very fine minds working with him.

> Society should start considering the value of the P50 instead of only lionizing the contributions of the P99.

Society values research universities based on the quality of the research they do. This is determined largely by the volume and quality of their peer-reviewed publications. Also, I imagine by the publication of influential textbooks, like SICP. Etc.

When the P99 produce results that match that of the P50, then your dream will come true, and not before that. But that's unlikely to happen since universities that are more selective are more likely to attract higher quality researchers. Which will affect their ability to get research grants. Etc.

As for where one should get an education, this is clearly a personal choice. I've gotten to do some interesting things in life due to my education and by staying at or near MIT. But my brother, who went to BU, and never worked on anything of note (other than running Westchester's slam poetry team) is a lot happier than I am, no doubt. Why? Because he found a loving, supportive relationship with a great woman.

This has alluded me. At this point, I'd trade everything I've ever done in life for a job that pays me well enough and a lasting, harmonious relationship.

Did my brother going to BU and me going to MIT result in him ending up happier? Who knows? But ultimately, he's won. At least for what's most important in life.

Regarding my suggestion for where kids should go to school today, I'd probably recommend that if they have enough discipline, they should just get their education from Coursera and/or edX. For whatever reasons, a college education has just become too expensive these days, leaving many students with a terrible debt load that will harm their wellbeing for decades. Whatever benefit you'd get from MIT or Harvard or even University of Arizona might be offset by suffering from crushing debt.

I've taken a bunch of classes on Coursera and edX (including the original machine learning and database classes that were offered online by Stanford for free before there was a Coursera), and they were excellent experiences.

Though actually going to college has a lot of benefits that self-learning in your parents' basement doesn't have. E.g., making life-long friends, getting nookie and learning to navigate sexual/romantic relationships, developing relationships with professors and other researchers, etc. It would be interesting to see data on how the lives of people who take these two different approaches turn out comparatively.