TIL of “The Milk”. In 1994, a student at MIT bought a carton of milk but forgot to use it, and rediscovered it 10 months later. Instead of binning it he threw a ‘birthday’ for it. A cult following developed for this legendary expired dairy product. In 2015 it celebrated its 21st birthday.

You have no clue what you’re talking about. MIT is completely free if your parents make less than six figs, and they eat a huge percentage of the bill even above that point (or if your parents won’t support you).

The hard part is getting in, which is a combination of luck, how well you do in whatever school you go to, etc. money doesn’t play an ingredient, and you don’t see generations of legacy kids there like you would at an Ivy League (which MIT is not) so the nepotism angle doesn’t work either.

Basically if you’re good at math and can ace one of those national math exams like the AMC, you’ll get in - and you don’t have to be rich to do that. In fact most rich kids I’ve met spend more of their time in high school trying to be popular, go to parties, impress their friends, etc than they do focusing on “nerd shit” like math / science competitions that they make fun of “losers” for participating in. That’s because they don’t need to do well in school because their parents are rich and will get them a job anyways. Why would someone like that want to go to a pressure cooker like MIT? They would get much more “respect” among their upper crust friends and have a much easier time in school somewhere like Harvard.

A big reason you see this mental health / suicide stuff at MIT more so than actual rich people schools like Harvard / Princeton etc is that lots of MIT students aren’t from rich families and they probably feel lots of pressure that if they fuck up their chance at MIT they’ll miss their big opportunity.

/r/todayilearned Thread Parent Link - alum.mit.edu