While this is a common belief (and many people, before I went to MIT, were very effusive in telling me how much it would benefit me), my experience is that it is a myth (or at least it was at MIT when I was there). Of course there were high achieving people at MIT when I was there, but there were also plenty who were not; overall I don't think the distribution of motivation was much different from high school. (Motivation is not the same thing as grades: most of my fellow students at MIT got straight A's in high school for the same reason I did, that for us, high school was simply not that challenging academically, so we could be lazy and still make the grades.) As for what I learned from my fellow students, I can't say I learned nothing (since, for example, learning what pot smells like counts as learning something), but I don't think I learned anything significant academically that I wouldn't have learned from my peers at a less selective school.

There are plenty of top quality professors at such schools.

Not every professor can make things work for their family at Stanford or MIT. Maybe their partner has a modest income so to afford a house so they go work at Penn State or whatever.

We are...

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/mathematics/18-100b-analysis-i-f...

Yes, fair point.

> suggesting it can substitute actually studying at MIT is a bit too... optimistic

My personal experience at MIT was that I didn't learn much from lectures; too long, too boring, and too much tailored to the professor's style instead of the student's. In this respect lectures at other schools where teaching is valued more relative to research might actually be better. (One of the professors I had at MIT who was the exception--an excellent lecturer, who actually responded usefully to questions from students in a freshman-level class of 200 or more--was criticized by the MIT administration for not publishing enough research papers.)

Or if you mean there's more to the experience of going to college than just the coursework, of course that's true as well. But if everyone went to MIT (or any other selective school), that experience would change too; all those people would not be getting the same experience that people going to MIT now are getting.

In short, it is not really possible for everyone to "go to MIT" (or any other selective school) in either of the above senses. So I was focusing on what is possible, namely, for everyone to have access to the same actual learning materials that MIT students have access to.

There is one other thing you could be referring to that the online materials can't give you, namely in person instruction and feedback. Personally, if I think back to the classes I took at MIT, I didn't learn anything significant in those ways; everything significant I learned, as far as the actual academic material was concerned, I learned from reading the course notes and textbooks and working the problem sets and taking the exams (and seeing what I got right and what I got wrong). And all those things are available to anyone who goes to the OCW site. I can't say for sure what other people's experiences are, but I think this quote from Gibbon is relevant:

"The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."

It's the labs and the projects. Especially for engineering degrees, a good part of learning comes from shipping projects. I think it's where "everyone doing MOOC" falls short.

True, this is one thing that online course materials can't give you. But I also don't think a school like MIT has any real advantage in this respect over other schools. At least, not if the labs I had there are any indication; the materials we were given to work with were just as half-baked as anywhere else.

I think these things can be found at any decent school. Or, for that matter, in many kinds of activities outside of any school.

At the senior level, folks have typically carved a path out for themselves. College is typically the oldest thing on their resume anyways.

I think a lot of people here assume a fairly linear SWE progression beginning with a CS degree but that's not the norm for a lot of people who work in the computer industry in various roles even that didn't involve wholesale career shifts.