As someone who went to Harvard, I'm pretty sure there are a lot of extremely decent universities that all basically provide the same quality of instruction. People just get unreasonably hung up over the 'best' schools, but there are easily at least like 100+, if not several hundred, that provide easily roughly the same educational experience as far as I'm aware.
The peer group may definitely dramatically different from what I can tell, but if you're a serious student and there for the learning above all, very straightforward to get into a school that will teach you just about anything you could learn at Harvard or any other Ivy League or similarly 'elite' school.
The thing is what makes a university good has more to do with the quality of the recruitment of its students than the teaching. In fact much of the teaching in ellite US colleges is done by researchers that are not particularly good at it.
While I agree with you, as someone that is inherently inferior to someone like you (on the basis of not getting into any elite school, much less Harvard) currently that inferiority has a cascading effect throughout life. I think the goal should be to equalize opportunities for everyone instead of just people who might be borderline elites at 18.
The dramatic difference between Harvard and an average university is that at Harvard you're probably going to bump into half a dozen people who will either inherit a business, or a fortune to start a business, or just start a business on their own. Guess what, knowing the CEO of companies is a bloody good way of getting a nice job in that company.
The connections you make are what the elite institutions really do to differentiate themselves.
+1.
A new member in our team has PHD from a top university and an MBA from Columbia business school.I don't how he got there but it was definitely not for the intelligence or smartness. First time I've understood that CBS graduates can be with zero knowledge or smartness.
The thing that still bothers me is the cognitive dissonance of being told by people orders of magnitude smarter than me that institution doesn’t matter. Yeah, if it didn’t you wouldn’t have gone to a HYPSM or out of state public ivy.
There's still a massive difference between schools that don't fall into the private/top-tier bin. Sorry.
I am from a family of 10 kids and we all went to and were accepted to different schools (all non-private/non-top tier)...there is a massive difference in education levels between schools (maybe it won't affect your career trajectory, but I didn't go to college for a career, I went to learn and be surrounded by others of my caliber).
The peer group may definitely dramatically different from what I can tell, but if you're a serious student and there for the learning above all, very straightforward to get into a school that will teach you just about anything you could learn at Harvard or any other Ivy League or similarly 'elite' school.