<p>drummer, the pitt yale comparison is no more bogus than your post.</p>
<p>What you forget is that the average student at yale is no more competitive for a G/T/U scholarship than an average Pitt student. So the scholarships measure the quality at the very top, which seems to compare well.</p>
<p>Regarding differences among schools it is easy to forget that some of your “inferior” schools are only inferior in such weighty matters as USNWR ranking, SAT scores within the standard deviation of the SAT and so forth.</p>
<p>The ironic thing is that the one factor that really can make a difference is expenditure per student. Few folks look at that, and the data is tough to get.</p>
<p>At any rate, if you really knew about elite universities, you’d know that many of them, including H, have a lot of slacker students who know they will get their B without working (sound like SIU?). Yea, they have some outstanding students. So does U of I. They also have some pretty ordinary ones. We just don’t hear about those.</p>