<p>To me, the HYPSM metric is ridiculous. Many top students attend small liberal arts schools, and other “non-Ivy schools” such as Caltech, WUSTL, Chicago, and Northwestern are of equal or higher caliber than, for example, a Cornell or Brown (at least from the USNWR rankings, which are questionable at best.) Hotchkiss, for example, sends quite a number of students to Williams/Carleton/Amherst/Bowdoin/Colby. I have a friend who turned down MIT to return to the Midwest and go to Rose-Hulman, and was accepted into Princeton’s graduate program this year after spending four years fulfilled at a school he enjoyed.</p>