<p>The fact that someone attended UT and not those schools does not equate to “they could not get into the other schools.” In math terms, it is not “if and only if.”</p>
<p>In fact, I will argue that being the top in a strong state school like UVA, UT, Georgia Tech, etc is just as hard as being the top in any other top 20 school. How should I know this? I don’t, but I know plenty of hard working and capable people who turned down Ivy League schools for better engineering schools like CMU or because of money.</p>