I don't doubt your claims about the amount of the work the two courses at MIT require. However, you're forgetting that for some of those 140 hours you're being lectured by the top professors in the area. You're unlikely to have a question that they can't answer. Other parts of those 140 hours are spent talking with some of the smartest students on the planet. Some more of those 140 hours are spent solving problems carefully designed to maximize understanding. If you can't figure something out, you have fellow students, TAs and professors to harass. Somebody studying alone at home doesn't have this environment.
And then you need to take into account the fact that if you're undergrad at MIT you're already smarter than 95% or so of the population. Basically, the takeaway here is that your 70/140 hour number applies to something like 0.1% of the population under the assumption that they're studying CLRS at home.
You need to see this in context. This is advice for CS undergrads looking for jobs. This advice is being given out on reddit. Anybody who needs this advice (and CS undergrads from MIT certainly don't) will not be able to work through CLRS in a week.
I don't doubt your claims about the amount of the work the two courses at MIT require. However, you're forgetting that for some of those 140 hours you're being lectured by the top professors in the area. You're unlikely to have a question that they can't answer. Other parts of those 140 hours are spent talking with some of the smartest students on the planet. Some more of those 140 hours are spent solving problems carefully designed to maximize understanding. If you can't figure something out, you have fellow students, TAs and professors to harass. Somebody studying alone at home doesn't have this environment.
And then you need to take into account the fact that if you're undergrad at MIT you're already smarter than 95% or so of the population. Basically, the takeaway here is that your 70/140 hour number applies to something like 0.1% of the population under the assumption that they're studying CLRS at home.
You need to see this in context. This is advice for CS undergrads looking for jobs. This advice is being given out on reddit. Anybody who needs this advice (and CS undergrads from MIT certainly don't) will not be able to work through CLRS in a week.