<p>bernie12, All very true, I appreciate your thoughtful reflection. I would say two things. Being around outstanding people and in college that means your fellow students, is probably the single most important thing. Everything else adjusts to that; the caliber of teaching the range and depth of extracurriculars, seminars, invited guest speakers, etc. Secondly the intangibles you speak of aren’t measurable nor are they ranked per school on the interwebs in a convenient way. I’m just using the SAT, imperfect as it is, to differentiate. After all, SAT and school “rank” (whatever that means) do correlate in a coarse way. </p>