A Vagary about a misunderstanding
Three of the Top Five from California (Stanford, Berkeley, and Cal-Tech), four in the Top 20 (adding UCLA)
Three of the Top Ten from the Big Ten (Illinois, Michigan, and Purdue), 6 of the Top 20 (adding Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Ohio State)
Two of the Top Ten from the South (GT and U. Texas), five in the Top 20 (adding Texas A&M, Virginia Tech, and Duke)
Three CHYOS schools (most famous for Humanities and Law) in the Top 20: Stanford and Columbia, plus Ivies Princeton, Cornell, and Ivy-except-for-no-football-team* MIT, for a “washed up actress” total of five.
Regional comparisons in the Top 20: Seven (7) from the Northeast (adding Carnegie-Mellon, John’s-Hopkins, U. Maryland), Six (6) from the Midwest, Five (5) from the South, Four (4) from the West Coast.
You have every reason to be proud of Georgia Tech. Your WSJ article is interesting but hardly conclusive. GT presently ranks fourth on the News & World Report List, but that does not mean that you’re closing in on MIT in the top spot. It’s great that GT is listed as a Top 3 leader in almost all the engineering specialties, but those specialties aren’t all equally important in the scheme of things. Here are some of the facts I’ve been able to gather:
And MIT costs a whole bunch more than GT to attend.
Needless to say, 2024 was a very bad, not good, dreadful year for Harvard, but here they are.
[*A many years old joke about the frequent question, “Why doesn’t Harvard have an engineering program, given that they excel at physics, mathematics, applied mathematics, and most of the natural sciences. Answer: If you want to rule the world, go to Harvard. If you want to be an engineer, go about a mile down the street in Cambridge and enroll at MIT; that’s our engineering school. Another popular joke is about a pissed off supermarket cashier confronting a student-type person with 15 items at the 8-item-limit express lane. She puts her hands on her hips and says, “I don’t know if you’re from Harvard and can’t count, or from MIT and can’t read. Get out of my lane.” Both schools are about equally resented by their neighbors. Interestingly, Harvard has added an undergrad engineering program for some reason… raising the question, Why would an engineering aspirant go to Harvard when he could go to Harvey Mudd instead?]
You told me your personal story, your odyssey to Georgia Tech. Now I’ll tell you some of my personal story, enough to demonstrate that I’m hardly a naïf or ignoramus about the engineering profession and educational traditions. In family profession terms I come from an engineering family. My dad majored in chemical engineering at Cornell, worked at the DuPont company for 37 years, and was nominated for a Lifetime Achievement Award by the American Society of Chemical Engineers for his leadership in the automation of chemical manufacturing plants. My uncle on my father’s side also worked at DuPont for 35 years (he picked Rensselaer over MIT because he thought they had “better equipment”; he’s also the grownup he told me Superman was dead when I was six.) my mother’s dad (BSE, Ohio State) was a career-long plant engineer for Anchor Hocking Glass and designed what is still the tallest building — a batch-house tower — in my hometown. My dad’s dad was not an engineer but a chemist for, wait for it, the DuPont company, who was an executive troubleshooter on chemical manufacturing processes for the Chambers Works, then the largest chemical plant in the United States My dad told me throughout my childhood he’d pay for any college I wanted to attend but Harvard, because he’d never met a Harvard guy he liked, so I went to Harvard (he paid), majored in English and History, and defied the consensus of all my family friends that I had to go to law school. I went to business school at Cornell to make up for the Harvard defiance, where I had to join other liberal arts majors in a pre-enrollment math course — one 8-week of hr days each for algebra and calculus — and I competed with the many Cornell engineering graduates in the make-or-break Statistical Probability course offered by one of the school’s most illustrious professors. On the very first day, he offered a specific warning to the engineers. “You think this is going to be easy after all the math you’ve had already. It isn’t. I make this little speech to every incoming class. Year after year, the best graduates from this MBA program were English majors in college. Why? They learned how to think. They’ll be catching up with you here. No laughing. Be ready for them.”
Our first midterm in his course was open book. So a lot of people didn’t study. They could just look up what they needed in the exam. But the exam questions were all word problems. Within the first 15 minutes you could see people turning the pages of our looseleaf binder textbook, slowly, helplessly. I got over the panic by reframing the first questions into statistical type statements, There has to be a probability of what is, and a probability of what is not… Bingo. The question was a disguised wording of a straightforward application of Bayes Theorem. Once you knew what to plug in it was easy. The rest of the exam yielded the same way. People were still paging back and forth in the binder when time was called. The median score on the test was a 30 on the 100-point scale. I got a 75, which looked unfair to me given all the little dings I got in the margins of my correct answers. Turned out that 75 was an A. By the end of the year I was in the top 25 percent of my class. I had made my peace with math.
I’ll skip ahead in my career because it was a few years before I ran into engineers in the workplace. After turning my back on business, I goofed around for a few years and after getting fired from an editorial job took a position as proofreader at a nuclear engineering firm. This was in the aftermath of the near-disaster at Three Mile Island and we had a lot documents to read that were responses to directives of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The company had a lot of contract engineers from overseas, notably India and Russia, and spelling and comma corrections were not enough to make their writing clear or understandable. I discovered a knack for intuiting what they were trying to say and doing the rewrites necessary to fix them. Some came back to thank me, others reported me to my supervisor for disciplinary action. She compared what they had submitted to what I gave them, asked them if the new version was factually accurate, and when they admitted it was, sent them on their way. I was reminded of what I had learned in my childhood; engineers are a lot like lawyers. They don’t like to be disagreed with, can’t admit when they’re wrong, and keep splitting smaller and smaller hairs until the opposition gives up or goes away. They have big picture problems big time. How we got the Edsel and the Vega. (My dad and granddad both had to take mechanical drawing in college, and their printing by hand was identical. Always correct does not mean always right.)
I ran into a new batch of engineers at my next job, as an editor for a publisher of looseleaf subscriptions on computer products. The editor who interviewed me explained that her hiring decisions were usually a dilemma. Hire a writer who doesn’t know anything about computers or hire a computer jock who doesn’t know how to write. Either way you have to teach them the half of the job they’re unqualified for. My first week I wasn’t even allowed into the main building. I sat alone in a satellite office, where my editor showed up first thing with a three pound stack of paper she dropped on my desk with a thud. “These are IBM product announcements,” she told me. “We get one of these every week. You are going to read all of these page by page, learning the acronyms, what they mean, and what they’re used for. You are to pay close attention to exactly what they say a new product or point release will do, understanding that this is IBM, and whatever they do not say some product will do, it will not do. It will be your job to know these things and write accordingly.”
When Imwas allowed into the building a couple weeks later, I found that we learned by doing and by talking. We used the products we had to write about. We compared notes with the computer jocks and with the other writers. I went to multi-day training seminars on data communications, network architectures, and the leading manufacturers, especially the Big Eight companies who controlled the mainframe and minicomputer markets. I went to industry conventions in Philadelphia Las Vegas, met the leading pundits in the exploding new microprocessor industry, and generally immersed myself in the technology. Inside of two years, a headhunter found me and led me to a competitive analyst position at NCR World Headquarters in Dayton, Ohio. I met the mentor I had been hearing about at the old place, an in-house expert who had begun his own career in computers by building microprocessor circuits by hand in his own garage. He took me under his wing. He knew what worked and what was a lie, and I knew how to write and promote and fight for what was right while working hard to defeat what was dangerous to the company. We both risked our jobs to save our division and we were defeated. The division would fold. I wound up as a consulting analyst to a penthouse committee of vice presidents tasked with learning what we had learned from our failure and preparing the company for alternate strategy in the burgeoning office information systems market.
I wrote the RFP for a consulting project designed to map user environments for common activities and processes that could be met by a new and better system design. They picked the wrong bidder, then started whittling down the costs of every line item, and I resigned my position before project work actually got underway. I got multiple offers from hiring managers inside the company, but I had learned enough about NCR.
My next stop was the freelance writing market in Dayton. My income increased immediately. I had two computer companies as clients, a video company in need of scripts for customers like the University of Dayton, a pet food company for whom I rewrote veterinary white papers, a couple of marketing communications suppliers, and… a $3 billion dollar division of General Motors. Which came rather quickly to account for all my time and availability. For the next four years. Engineers again. Another new technology to learn. Just-in-Time Manufacturing. My second straight Fortune company division that was fighting for its life in a rapidly changing industry. My first assignments were video scripts for the division manager as he tried to sell a huge change process to his manufacturing employees, who were UAW members of course and suspicious of every word uttered by a company management that was steadily relocating component manufacturing to Mexico.
The “please believe me” sell was out of the question. What had to be sold instead was the JIT approach to manufacturing, which was in many ways a complete reversal of traditional assembly methods. I had to become a student of the Toyota Production System, a comprehensive rethinking of manufacturing the Japanese were using to beat the pants off GM, Ford, and Chrysler in terms of cost, quality and lead time to finished product. My business grew with the resources allocated to implementing a divisionwide changeover to JIT. I continued to write executive scripts, but in partnership with two of the Big consultants whose proposal had won my last NCR RFP, I built a consulting firm and managed the production and delivery of technical training manuals for manufacturing engineers and supervisors, as well as colloquially written manuals for factory floor employees. Our scope of work increased as the Dayton division I’d started with, Inland, was merged into a new Detroit-Dayton division called Inland Fisher Guide for whom my first assignment was development and production of an executive-level presentation by the business unit directors of the new division to GM Europe, who had little regard and less business with the American units of the company.
After the success of that effort, I spent a lot of time on the road shuttling between Dayton and Detroit, managing the external resources needed to support internal projects, including the troublesome partnership with GM’s new EDS unit, acquired from Ross Perot. I was up to here with engineers, and it was actually a relief when I was named as the only outside consultant approved for membership in the newly minted UAW/GM Quality Network. The UAW factory floor guys were easier to work with than the salaried GM folk. I even pitched and won a contract with the UAW to develop a strategy for how the union should deal with the “transplants”; that is the Japanese makers who were now building plants in the right-to-work south. Keying cars in transplant parking lots wasn’t winning union votes at those factories. My partners and aI had some novel ideas about future cooperative efforts our client was willing to consider if we executed the first couple of phases successfully.
This all went south when my mainstay partner and I had a disagreement we couldn’t resolve. The partner in question was an MIT guy who had majored in management science and graduated into the Arthur Andersen Consulting boot camp, where he was one of the minority who survived a training environment in which there were only two grades for each task: All Correct, or All Wrong. He left a partnership at another illustrious consulting firm, Coopers & Lybrand, to join me in pursuing the GM opportunity. He taught me to how to write a winning, profitable Big 8 proposal. We used it make a lot of money at General Motors. He was also into growing his/our way out of having to do the day-to-day grunt work with clients, which meant adding more partners and delegating progressively more of the tasks to juniors. He was a good man, a fine friend, and in many ways my complementary opposite number. I wore the gray suit, white shirt, and silver tie. He wore a rumpled version of same and took off his jacket in client/prospect meetings to make them feel more at home with my aloof demeanor. He was an Irish Catholic, a union guy, an FDR Democrat, and a henpecked husband also in constant trouble with the IRS. We was also my biggest cheerleader. We forgave each other our excesses (he left me high and dry during the GM-Europe project to try a leveraged buyout of a failing department store in Wooster, Ohio. We nearly came to blows on that one, but we managed to weather that storm. The UAW project was different. Everything about it was going to be tricky, and I gave him the lead role based on his understanding and sympathy for the union mindset. When we had Phase 1 given a go for implementation, he assigned the whole phase to a new partner I had voted against because he was a journeyman freelance writer who cut corners and was inattentive to details. We simply couldn’t afford the inevitable screwups we’d be faced with.
Neither of us backed down. I responded by dissolving the partnership altogether and proceeded to go back to work on my own first priority, finishing The Boomer Bible. It was years later that we buried the hatchet, but he died shortly after that, just a little more than 50 years old.
I had another all-consuming client in a two-man partnership for another Fortune manufacturing company facing huge organizational changes. That’s another story, but I visited more manufacturing plants, including the antique facility that had made my dad’s P-47 fighter plane, and I also spent more time teaching and consulting in Europe than I had spent in Detroit during the GM years, while writing, writing, writing everything from speeches to a bi-monthly management magazine, and even a company wide 7-step “Continuous Improvement Model” I first sketched on a barroom napkin and was then stuck documenting and implementing and training on for several years. Whirlpool was going global in a big way through acquisitions, but they had started as a Midwest manufacturing company who sold their products directly to Sears Roebuck. Marketing was alien to them, not in their DNA. I was even pressed into service one year on Christmas Eve, to rewrite a Harvard Business Review interview with the Whirlpool CEO under an HBR byline. The article made no sense apparently and would embarrass everyone if published as is. HBR didn’t like working with consultants, outside their protocol, but I was the only one who could turn a rewrite around in less than 24 hours. The editor called me afterwards, and he liked my idea for an article on corporate DNA, but he got fired before we had the chance to talk again. Innovation is a popular word in corporate America, but it is thrown to the wolves whenever it can be done so safely.
I’ve been putting off writing the second part of an Instapunk Returns post called “Too Big Not to Fail.” Writing this has helped. I admire your emotional attachment to Georgia Tech, but the bigger “Rambling Wreck” in this plot line is the array of prestige institutions of higher education who have controlled the political thought process in this nation for generations and are now actively engaged in destroying their students’ minds and the freedoms of the nation as a whole. One well meaning university is not going to overthrow the immense amounts of money and power and influence wielded by the Ivy League, the Big Ten, the West Coast acolytes of the CCP, and their Oxbridge accomplices across the pond.
I am not the enemy of engineers. I am a critic but also a cheering section. Bear that in mind. I have no more ties to Harvard or Cornell. I am one of their fiercest foes. Please try to remember that.
More on MIT and Harvard in particular:
Seismic Cracks in the Icy Democrat Coalition
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