Tag Archives: competition

College Acceptance Rates at an All-Time Low

This, at a time when the tech industry is polarized into two factions – those that say America is simply does not have enough talent to go around and the others that say that corporations are focused only on saving money by using lower-paid foreign talent. In this Information Week article, MIT Turns Down Record 11,842, Richard Martin discusses the increased competition for entrance into our best schools. [The link died.]

What caught my eye is this:

The increased competition for undergraduate slots at MIT comes at a time when fewer Americans are earning graduate degrees from the top math and science programs in the United States. MIT says that 35% of its students come from overseas, and many of the foreigners speak languages not taught at the school.

Next year my son enters high school. Topics like this are coming up in conversation at our house with increasing frequency. Ah, the future.

America… just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
-Hunter S. Thompson

“I Can’t”

You’re finished as soon as you say those words. You’ve set yourself up for failure. No, something less than failure, because you’ve already accepted, embraced an outcome with the same certainty as your next breath.

Infinitely better it is to try, no matter how feeble the effort. You have a chance. No matter how small the odds of success, it is opportunity measured as something greater than zero. And no matter how it turns out, you will have gained experience and probably a bit of knowledge as well.