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4) I also strongly disagree that one can learn as much taking graduate classes at a "top 50-100 school" as one can at Caltech, MIT, or their competitors. In part this is because grad student quality falls off much more quickly than faculty quality does, and this serves as a constraint on the classes.
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There's also the added factor of the Internet. Now whenever one has some time, one can always head over to the MIT/Caltech website, download problem sets + solutions, and work on them in one's own spare time, in conjunction with the textbooks from the university library. Moreover, one can always ask for help at places like artofproblemsolving.com and physicsforums.com, but those sites aren't a pure substitute for real life social interaction.
That being said, the social element in those universities is often missing, since few students are purely academic in such universities (and consequently, one has a smaller pool of personalities with whom one can become study buddies with). It depends on the personality of the student as well (is the student an awkward nerd?). There just isn't the close-knit community like the Caltech house system. The very top students at state universities are generally comparable to students at Caltech/MIT, but since there aren't very many of them, it can be likely that very few will have any similar academic interests as the student.
A truly self-motivated and intelligent student, however, can mitigate the gap. Professors at those universities can recognize talent and encourage it. The student can take graduate level courses, do additional problems by himself (remember, in math/science circles, one learns more by doing problems than by attending lectures), do research, and grab excellent recs for grad school.
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Simfish thank you for posting that ********* thread, it's really making me take another look at Caltech.
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lol, statement acknowledged.