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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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Then take a reading class with a prof - where basically you run a specialized "class" of one student (yourself) and you do the assignments and readings that the prof wants you to do. I've done this. I know many others who have done this. I know molliebatmit is doing this right now. You don't need a formal class with lots of other students in order to interact with profs.
Heck, you may not even need the prof at all. You really want to learn advanced material that your school can't provide? Then get the textbooks and read them yourself. Or if the subject is so advanced that there isn't even really a textbook available, then read the latest research papers from EBSCO, Proquest, or JSTOR. If only a few schools in the world offer an advanced graduate course on a particular subject, and you don't happen to go to that school, then you can kindly ask that prof at that school for the syllabus for his course (rarely will you get turned down), and then do all the readings on that syllabus. Sure, you might not learn as much as you would within a formal class, but you can still pick up quite a lot if you're diligent.
What I would say is this. If you are really so good that you can exhaust all of the offerings at any top 50-100 ranked school, and you still have the thirst to learn more, you're probably well suited to get your PhD. And the PhD process requires
extensive self-study. There's not always going to be a formal class available that will teach you the things you need to learn to advance your particular research. In fact, your research is supposed to be original, which by definition means working on topics that others cannot teach you anything about (if they could teach you that topic, then by definition, it isn't original). You're going to have to learn how to teach yourself.
Heck, sometimes teaching yourself is often times actually
better than taking the formal course, simply because, frankly speaking, a lot of profs are poor teachers. Many times in my life have I found myself in courses in which the prof really didn't add any value over and above what I could have taught myself. Heck, in some cases, they arguably actually
subtracted value, in that the teaching was so poor that it actually served to confuse you.