Are equivalent classes more difficult at high-end colleges compared to StateU?

[cobrat]

Most students learn how to NOT read everything assigned, and at the Ivy I know about, students organized their own study groups, and so on.

Depends on the class and individual students. There were many students at my LAC and the Ivy grad classes I took who managed to read EVERYTHING assigned without skipping a beat.

Even in an undergrad semester when I had ~1400 pages of reading a week along with a 5 credit foreign language class, I managed to complete them all without issues while holding a part-time job and having much more free time for ECs/hanging out with friends than I did as a public magnet HS student.

The top schools give 4 credits for each course, making 4 courses the norm for full-time. Publics I know give 3 credits for each course so 5 classes is the full-time norm. I was told that this is because the public school classes are less intense and burdensome, or cover less, or whatever, but the rigor of the education is certainly there with 5 classes per term.

Not necessarily. For instance, a regular course at Columbia University’s is 3 credit hours and the typical courseload is 4-5 classes(there are some semesters when one will need to take 5 to finish undergrad in 4 years).