I wish students would stop over-emphasizing “balanced life”(the definition of it varies from person to person, but seems to have manifested itself as code for something else at elite schools). This is true at most elite privates or publics except for perhaps the most rigorous of them and perhaps among the students in the most rigorous programs at those schools. If they want to make a comparison with such a claim, they should just be honest and say that whatever competitor schools are known to be more competitive or intense (and thus less “traditional”)and thus maybe have more of a bias toward students engaging with opps and orgs related to their academic interests which is not the pattern preferred by those attending the “more balanced” school. It often has little to do with EC offerings and opps (clubs and stuff). They all have a number of clubs comparable to some public schools. The differences in atmosphere are arise from which types students tend to join.