MIT Missing Semester 2026

There's definitely a tension at top STEM schools (probably especially in CS) between assuming students have some baseline knowledge of whatever field and just tossing them into the deep end of the pool and figuring out the practicalities on their own.

I did take one of the MIT intro CS MOOCs at one point for kicks. Very good. But it was more or less learn Python on your own if you don't already know it (or how to program more broadly). That doesn't really happen in a lot of other disciplines other than some areas of the arts.

At one university I went to, the head of the CS department was quoted as saying "[We don't need to care about the job market,] Our job is to create researchers."

I thought that was pretty strange at the time because like 5% of the students end up going into research. So that was basically like him saying I'm totally cool with our educational program being misaligned for 95% percent of our customers...

Maybe it makes sense for the big picture though. If all the breakthroughs come from those 5%, it might benefit everyone to optimize for them. (I don't expect they would have called the program particularly optimized either though ;)

> I don't expect [the 5% of students who end up going into research] would have called the program particularly optimized either

This. I went to the University of Iowa in the aughts. My experience was that because they didn't cover a lot of the same material in this MIT Missing Semester 2026 list, a lot of the classes went poorly. They had trouble moving students through the material on the syllabus because most students would trip over these kinds of computing basics that are necessary to experiment with the DS+A theory via actual programming. And the department neither added a prereq that covers these basics or nor incorporated them into other courses's syllabi. Instead, they kept trying what wasn't working: having a huge gap between the nominal material and what the average student actually got (but somehow kept going on to the next course). I don't think it did any service to anyone. They could have taken time to actually help most students understand the basics, they could have actually proceeded at a quicker pace through the theoretical material more for the students who actually did understand the basics, they could have ensured their degree actually was a mark of quality in the job market, etc.

It's nice that someone at MIT is recognizing this and putting together this material. The name and about page suggest though it's not something the department has long recognized and uncontroversially integrated into the program (perhaps as an intro class you can test out of), which is still weird.

>It's nice that someone at MIT is recognizing this and putting together this material. The name and about page suggest though it's not something the department has long recognized and uncontroversially integrated into the program (perhaps as an intro class you can test out of), which is still weird.

While this comes out of CSAIL, I wouldn't ascribe too much institutional recognition to this. Given the existence of independent activities period, it's probably a reasonable place for it given MIT's setup. Other institutions have "math camp" and the like pre-classes starting.

It's probably a reasonable compromise. Good schools have limited bandwidth or interest in remedial education/hand-holding and academics don't have a lot of interest in putting together materials that will be outdated next year.

> Good schools have limited bandwidth or interest in remedial education/hand-holding and academics don't have a lot of interest in putting together materials that will be outdated next year.

I think they rarely escape doing this hand-holding unless they're actually willing to flunk out students en masse. Maybe MIT is; the University of Iowa certainly wasn't. So they end up just in a state of denial in which they say they're teaching all this great theoretical material but they're doing a half-assed job of teaching either body of knowledge.

I also don't think this knowledge gets outdated that quickly. I'd say if they'd put together a topic list like this for 2006, more than half the specific tools would still be useful, and the concepts from the rest would still transfer over pretty well to what people use today. For example, yeah, we didn't have VS Code and LSP back then, but IDEs didn't look that different. We didn't (quite) have tmux but used screen for the same purpose. etc. Some things are arguably new (devcontainers have evolved well beyond setting up a chroot jail, AI tools are new) but it's mostly additive. If you stay away from the most bleeding-edge stuff (I'm not sure the "AI for the shell (Warp, Zummoner)" is wise to spend much time on) you never have to throw much out.

The whole container universe is pretty different even if the process/threads/etc. foundations aren't that changed. Certainly <umm> a book I wrote about the state of computing in the early 2010s--largely derived from things I had written over a few prior years--was hopelessly out of date within just a few years.

There certainly are fits and starts in the industry. I'm not sure the past 5 years or so looks THAT different from today. (Leaving aside LLMs.)

From my peripheral knowledge, MIT does try to hand-hold to some degree. Isn't the look-left and look-right, one of those people won't be here next year sort of places. But, certainly, people do get in over their head at some places. I tutored/TAd in (business) grad school and some people just didn't have the basics. I couldn't do remedial high school arithmetic from the ground up--especially for some people who weren't even willing to try seriously.

> Isn't the look-left and look-right, one of those people won't be here next year sort of places.

the same MIT that doesn't give out grades in the first year? (just Pass / NoPass)

the high achievers who scored solid grades to get there literally kill themselves when they pull Cs and Ds, even though it's a hard class and is sort of "look left, look right"