Exactly my point!
You need good cooks, i.e., a quality teaching faculty, to make it happen In the age of modern marketing, the packaging takes over from the talented cook. You will never replace talented teachers and they are not always defined as the faculty with the most research.
There was a math teacher when I was in college who was so well known that students from other universities would seek him out for his skills as a private tutor. A family member who was a student at the state university would study calculus with him over the summer. She graduated as Valedictorian from her University and went on to head the technical division for Region I of the EPA while producing some fine research. This talented “cook” came to us by way of Hamilton College. He did not have a string of significant publications but always had yet another way of explaining a concept, Another math faculty educated at Bowdion gave up a few hours on a Sunday afternoon to go over questions I had collected. Perhaps these small LA colleges have a point!
How do you account for these “cooks” when selecting an undergraduate institution? This is not reflected in the USNEWS rankings as they are based largely on graduate school research.