MIT is a national treasure

My friend and business partner Tom Pinckney started two companies with me and one company before. He invented many non-trivial patented inventions and raised many millions of dollars in venture capital, and returned capital to those investors many times over.

He got his Bachelors and Master degrees from MIT. He’s the nicest, smartest, and most decent guy you’ll ever meet.

But my favorite thing about Tom is he never got he never got a high school degree. High school students today optimize their grades and SATs and after school activities. They speak French and Chinese, play piano and paint abstract art. They dance around and play hockey and act like they help homeless people.

Tom grew up in rural South Carolina and mostly stayed at home writing video games on his Apple II. There was no place nearby to go to high school. He took a few community college classes but none of those places could give him a high school degree. It didn’t really matter – all he wanted to do was program computers. So when it came time to apply to college, Tom just printed out a pile of code he wrote and sent it to colleges.

Stanford, Berkeley and everyone else summarily dismissed his application on technical grounds – he didn’t have a high school diploma.

MIT looked at his code and said, “we like it” – we accept you.

For his Masters the best four CS schools – Stanford, Berkeley, Carniegie Mellon, and MIT — all recruited Tom He stayed at MIT, the school that gave him a chance without a high school degree.

MIT is a national treasure. If you believe in meritocracy and the American dream, you believe in MIT.

http://walkercorporatelaw.com Scott Edward Walker

My father-in-law had a similar experience. He was a poor kid from a broken family, with an extraordinary aptitude for Chemistry. MIT overlooked many technical issues and awarded him a full scholarship. He paid for his books by working at a local fish restaurant washing dishes and making tartar sauce. Thanks to MIT he went on to have a brilliant career as a Chemistry Professor at Cornell University. MIT is indeed a national treasure.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Mason-Gentry/1207875707 Mason Gentry

This is pretty remarkable considering all the channels his “application” must have gone through to get vetted. Someone in admissions had the wisdom and patience to take that code to a CS professor and discuss the matter with him/her.
http://www.kidmercuryblog.com kidmercury

MIT has also been charged with fraudulently manipulating data. they research hot fusion and can be threatened by cold fusion. eugene mallov, a professor at MIT, quit when he discovered this. here’s more information from free energy activist wade frazier:
http://www.ahealedplanet.net/journey.htm#mallove
http://twitter.com/lanka79 Yelena Kadeykina

thanks for sharing the story. as an alum, i truly believe that MIT is very unique and democratic in its selection process: the school cares about your potential, your drive, your desire to change the world. it pays attention to all these standard factors but they like you being different.
http://twitter.com/Radlein Ray Radlein

One of my best friends in High School went to MIT without having a high school degree. He dropped out of high school before our Senior year to start taking classes at the University of Tampa; after one year of that, he went to MIT. He may have bothered to get a GED at some point, of he may not have; I don’t remember for sure.

Of course, Johns Hopkins tried to talk ME into dropping out of high school at the same time as Frank did to enroll with them in Baltimore; so I guess there do exist other schools who can look past the diploma.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Jordin-Kare/100000001775415 Jordin Kare

Also an MIT alum, and I agree. On the other hand, there’s always the classic quote: “Getting an education at MIT is like taking a drink from a firehose: it’s difficult, unpleasant, and you’re sure to get soaked!”
http://jasoncrawford.org jasoncrawford

I dropped out of high school halfway through because I was bored and figured I could learn more, better, faster on my own. Technically I was a homeschooler for a year, and then an official dropout for a year. I did take the GED and got my diploma, but I didn’t finish normal high school.

Before making this decision—with the support of my amazing parents—we asked schools including CMU and MIT what they would think of a homeschooler like this. They said it would be fine as long as you documented your work and could show that you’d actually been studying and learning during those years.

I ended up applying to CMU and Caltech and got into both. I agree that this kind of meritocracy—and knowing when to bend the rules—is important and should be prized.
http://www.bp-3.com/blogs sfrancis

I went to Stanford and there were at least two kids in my class who never went to highschool, let alone graduated. Homeschooling wasn’t quite as popular back then as it is now. I don’t know enough about their individual circumstances to be able to explain why they were accepted over candidates with 4.0 GPAs and highschool diplomas.

But then, I was lucky. the Privacy Act was passed and I actually got to look at the comments that had been written on my own application. I was not a 4.0 GPA high school student, but yet something like 2000 4.0 GPAs were turned down for admission that year at stanford. I read the remarks on my application (as did many of my contemporary students) and all I can say is, it is not a highly objective process. I’m glad I was fortunate enough to be accepted and fortunate enough to have parents that encouraged me to go to a school on the opposite coast.

I’m glad for MIT, and for your friend. And I agree that MIT is a national treasure. But I wouldn’t let one great story confuse your data on the other schools you put down. Stanford is also a national treasure, and that should be pretty obvious. So much of getting accepted is luck – who reads your application, and whether they like your approach to it or not. The more “different” your response on the application is, the more variance there is going to be in the reaction to that application. I’m not sure its a *bad* thing that the process is so subjective – it allows each school to have a different “personality” in their student body, despite all having rigorous academic requirements or standards.
Pingback: Getting Into MIT Without a High School Degree
http://derrinyet.tumblr.com/ derrinyet

No argument at all that MIT is a national treasure – most American universities are. But, as several people pointed out, this kind of open-mindedness about admissions isn’t unique to MIT.

The question this raises for me is how the practices of MIT’s admissions department can be exported to other universities and thus allow many other people (some of whom might share your friend’s circumstances, but self-select out of applying to a place like MIT) the same opportunities without rejecting them on a technicality.
BuyGiftsItems

He left school before our last year to begin taking classes at the University of Tampa, after a year of that, he went to MIT
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Chris Dixon