<p>Even if what you’ve said about Yale is true, you’ve misrepresented many other schools in the process. Harvard’s house system was set up at the exact same time as Yale’s and certainly has comparable funding. Students at most universities, especially compact urban ones, are bound to run into their friends on a frequent basis. Faculty at Chicago and Columbia mostly live in the same neighborhoods as those universities. There isn’t a complete flight of social life from Columbia’s campus at night, and this is certainly not true regarding Harvard in Boston. And while New Haven has improved substantially, it would be a mistake to compare it to New York, considering whatever the definition of “seemingly endless immigrant areas” etc. is, these cannot hold a candle to anything in Queens or Brooklyn. Nor is New Haven a bastion of the superrich.</p>