<p>I hope that what you seem to be saying (that you are horrified that you will have to share a degree from your “top 20” school with all of those nitwits at the bottom) is not what you are saying. Yes, there are some rock-bottom schools, the kinds talked about in Brandon’s book “The Five Year Party” in which there is no critical mass of curiosity, learning, or research among the student body, just drinking and a useless degree at the end. But there are a few hundred schools, maybe more, all of which have excellent faculty, at which one can get just as good of an education as almost anywhere else. Maybe the entering SAT scores aren’t as high as those at the “top 20,” perhaps because not all of the students paid to take courses to juice their scores. Not every graduate from Bryan College, Alma College, or Messiah College, will be “extremely interesting, motivated, and intelligent” but many will be, and many will go on to the big names in graduate school because of their personal qualities and intellectual uniqueness.</p>