University reputations have a few decades lag. MIT did it's greatest work in the 20th century. It's since brought in people attracted to fame, power, fortune, and, again, fame.
Harvard and MIT have a lot of clout, and it's partly because of how incredibly massive they are. The Harvard network has more professors than some universities have pupils, (above two-thousand). Consequently just the amount of output due to a large number of people working there gets it placed high up in rating indices and such.
It's tough to say if it can keep up with its reputation. In some ways this phenomenon is comparable to gentrification: the beauty and soul of a place sometimes dies when the people who made that place what it is are displaced, like how Somerville and Berlin changed/are changing. It makes no sense for someone to remain committed in an academic career track when they're paying the kind of rent they do when around MIT/Harvard area with the income they make, so I agree with you that it's no longer attracting the kind of people that made MIT what it once was.
There are some institutions, that not many know about yet, that I'm confident in a couple of decades everyone will know about like U of Copenhagen and KIT & U of Stuttgart in Germany, and I think some in the midwest (Purdue, UMich, etc.) will one day have their day to shine too.
MIT was established 161 years ago and Harvard was established 386 years ago, both young relative to Cambridge established 813 years ago and Oxford established 926 years ago. The clout of universities will ebb and flow, but I wouldn’t bet on 100+ year institutions losing their ability to attract talent anytime soon.
MIT lost its ability to attract talent about two decades ago. Talent wants to work their. The endowment is obscene, and they won't lose their ability to afford talent.
What they cant do is screen talent.
For faculty positions, the competition is extreme; around 1000:1. That lends itself to people who cheat the system. In this case, it means, at the very least, overselling results, baking data, and giving TED-style talks. In many cases, it results in much worse.
The extreme competition also drives off many people who just want to nerd.
MIT isn't going away anytime soon, but that's why I think the problems may be hard to fix. The culture is broken.
I agree - network effects predate the internet after all. As long as good universities keep producing talented graduates it will be hard to undermine their reputation. And I don't think ambitious people being driven towards certain universities for clout is a negative. I say this as someone who went to an increasingly recognized yet still underdog state school. Maybe instead of discarding MIT's reputation a nudge in the direction of increasing editorial oversight can suffice. Though sensationalism seems to be a prerequisite for visibility these days
I liked MIT when it was "increasingly recognized yet still underdog" a lot.
With ambitions, there are different levels:
- An ambitious scientist should be driven to make ambitious discoveries
- An ambitious scientist should not be driven to steal credit, fake results, hype, oversell, and defraud
MIT's culture changed over the past 20 years. High competition (e.g. 4:1) leads to the type of people who do good work. With insane competition (e.g. 1000:1), the only way to "win" is to cheat.
In Germany a lot of research is not done at the universities but at various institutes such as Max-Planck, Fraunhofer, Helmholtz, Leibniz and a lot more.
> University reputations have a few decades lag. MIT did it's greatest work in the 20th century. It's since brought in people attracted to fame, power, fortune, and, again, fame.
> I don't think it will dig itself out again.
I don't think it will dig itself out again.