Rebecca Frankel explains the difference between Stanford and MIT by explaining the difference between the Army and the Marines:
Recently I was at a Marine publicity event and I asked the recruiter what differentiates the Army from the Marines? Since they both train soldiers to fight, why don’t they do it together? He answered vehemently that they must be separate because of one simple attribute in which they are utterly opposed: how they think about the effect they want to have on the life their recruits have after they retire from the service.
He characterized the Army as an organization which had two goals: first, to train good soldiers, and second, to give them skills that would get them a good start in the life they would have after they left. If you want to be a Senator, you might get your start in the Army, get connections, get job skills, have “honorable service” on your resume, and generally use it to start your climb up the ladder. The Army aspires to create a legacy of winners who began their career in the Army.
By contrast the Marines, he said, have only one goal: they want to create the very best soldiers, the elite, the soldiers they can trust in the most difficult and dangerous situations to keep the Army guys behind them alive. This elite training, he said, comes with a price. The price you pay is that the training you get does not prepare you for anything at all in the civilian world. You can be the best of the best in the Marines, and then come home and discover that you have no salable civilian job skills, that you are nearly unemployable, that you have to start all over again at the bottom of the ladder. And starting over is a lot harder than starting the first time. It can be a huge trauma. It is legendary that Marines do not come back to civilian life and turn into winners: instead they often self-destruct — the “transition to civilian life” can be violently hard for them.
He said this calmly and without apology. Did I say he was a recruiter? He said vehemently: “I will not try to recruit you! I want to you to understand everything about how painful a price you will pay to be a Marine. I will tell you straight out it probably isn’t for you! The only reason you could possibly want it is because you want more than anything to be a soldier, and not just to be a soldier, but to be in the elite, the best of the best.” He was saying: we don’t help our alumni get started, we set them up to self-destruct, and we will not apologize for it — it is merely the price you pay for training the elite!
This story gets to the heart of what I am trying to say is the essential difference between Stanford and MIT. Stanford is like the Army: for its best students, it has two goals — to make them engineers, and to make them winners after they leave. And MIT is like the Marines: it has only one goal — to make its very best student into the engineering elite, the people about whom they can truthfully tell program managers at DARPA: you can utterly trust these engineers with the future of America’s economic and military competitiveness.
There is a strange property to the training you get to enter into that elite, much like the strange property the non-recruiter attributed to the training of the Marines: even though it is extremely rigorous training, once you leave you can find yourself utterly without any salable skills whatever.