Lessons of an MIT Education
&gt; Lesson Six: You must measure up to a very high level of performance. I can imagine a propective student or parent asking, &quot;Why should I (or my child) take calculus at MIT rather than at Oshkosh College? Isn&#x27;t the material practically identical, no matter where it is taught, while the cost varies a great deal?&quot;<p>Is there any truth to this? Because it seem like classical university jingoism to me. &quot;My institution is better than yours.&quot; Anecdotes like &quot;All MIT graduates I&#x27;ve met were dumb&quot; or &quot;All MIT graduates I&#x27;ve met were smart&quot; does not count.<p>Because I looked at the DE course he taught (18.03) and I completed harder math courses than that in my non-MIT education. I&#x27;m sure many other HN readers have too. I wonder if there is some test you can take to see if you are just as good as an MIT graduate?<p>The EU has done great work in this area by trying to standardize the university curriculum across the union. What that means is that a master&#x27;s degree in computer science from the university of München is mostly comparable to one from Madrid, so name-dropping your university &quot;does not work.&quot; It also means that it is trivial for a Spanish student to study one year in Germany and then come home to Spain (see Erasmus). The US system, where some colleges are rated higher than others for irrational reasons, is strictly worse.