What a strawman argument. You really believe faculty research is more important to a freshman or sophomore than teaching undergraduate students.
As you allude to, the top tier national universities and top liberal arts colleges obviously focus on better teaching, don’t load up freshmen courses with 500 students, feed a greater percentage of students into the top tier graduate schools, open more doors at the top corporations, and therefore have lower acceptance rates.
However, you want to move the goalposts to research and money for resources.
Ok, quite amazing, but let’s give it a go. We’ll take the first top tier university you mentioned and the flag ship state university you mention too.
Research and $$ resources:
Vanderbilt invests $51,500 in research per student. UW invests $25,900.
I guarantee you a greater percentage of undergraduates at Vanderbilt are doing research than at UW.
Secondly, Vanderbilt has a $3.8 Billion endowment for 12,600 students. UW has a $2.9 Billion endowment for 45,600 students. Vanderbilt is not starving to invest money in whatever they desire.
You tried to move the more important factors to judge to ones you thought UW would win.
The only thing you stated that makes sense is “research output” as in quantity, due to flag ship state universities having more people.
Global rankings are skewed to the # of research papers published, not quality or even the quality of the source they are published in. You know very well, that there is a global game to boost global rankings originally led by the Chinese (note the source of several global rankings are Chinese firms) by forcing grad students and professors to publish, publish, publish regardless of the quality. Surprise, the Chinese universities are making the biggest leaps in the global surveys. Of course, the British, Canadian, US flag ship universities and the like join in to pump out as many papers as possible to have something to brag about. How a freshman or senior for that matter benefits from this race to publish more research is beyond me.
Don’t mislead kids into thinking these global rankings mean anything, especially to an undergrad.