Reading stuff like that generally makes me feel much less insecure about my college. It used to be that hearing that someone was from an ivy-league/ivy-league equivalent would make me think they were really, really smart. (narcissism warning) I've come to realize that on average I'm probably about as smart as people from more prestigious universities, if not smarter, despite being an MIT/Columbia/Princeton/Cornell reject and a CMU waitlist.
MIT is vastly different than Yale: it is a vocational school in the best sense of the world. Possibly slightly less so now that 6.001 isn't LISP-based, but I still can't imagine a MIT CS grad not understanding bits.
People coming out of a liberal arts college I tend to expect to know algorithms, state machines, possibly data structures, probably C++ and/or Python and have next-to-zero useful code-writing experience unless they got it elsewhere.
6.001 doesn't exist anymore. The new set of intro courses are completely different. It sounded like you thought 6.001 is now taught in some other language.
There's a lot of spread, as in all things. I did the Ivy League thing many (yikes, many!) years ago, and met plenty of genius types and a handful of dunces. And in programming, the divide between people who can learn the subject well enough to pass the course and those who can Get Things Done is very pronounced even at top schools.
