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^ Are you kidding me? The highest density of top colleges in the country is in the Northeast, including more than half of the top 50 LACs and such major non-Ivy research universities as MIT, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Tufts, Lehigh, Brandeis, NYU, U Rochester, Boston College, and RPI, all of which outrank most (or in a few cases all) of the UCs. What's more, no one says a kid in the Northeast has to stay in the Northeast. Lots of Northeasterners end up at Stanford, Caltech, Duke, U Chicago, WUSTL, Northwestern, Rice, Vanderbilt, Emory, Notre Dame---all good schools that many (including US News) would argue provide at least as good an undergraduate education as Berkeley or UCLA.
Now I agree that Californians are especially fortunate to have such an outstanding state university system that provides a reasonable, low-cost alternative to the Ivies and other expensive private schools. Same for Michiganders, Virginians, North Carolinians, and Wisconsinites. And yes, it's to their misfortune that the residents of most Northeastern states don't have comparably high-quality, low-cost public options. But to say that East Coast kids who don't get into the Ivies are stuck with "much lower ranked schools" is simply erroneous.
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