There is one thing that I left out in my earlier response, which I think is worth mentioning.
I think that it is wrong to think of the highest ranked universities as “better”. Hundreds of colleges and universities are very good. Hundreds of colleges and universities have excellent professors and a lot of very strong students. Hundreds of colleges and universities have all kinds of opportunities, such as research projects and internship opportunities and study abroad opportunities. Every university, even the top ranked ones, will have a very small number of bad professors.
This will depend upon which highly ranked universities you are considering, however, in general you should think of the higher ranked universities as academically more challenging. Classes will go faster. Exams will be tougher. Competition for grades will be tougher.
A highly ranked university such as MIT or Stanford is not a good fit for all academically very strong students. They might be a fit for an academically very strong student who wants to work very hard for a full 4 years with no let up.
I can give you two examples. I took an introductory course to Probability and Statistics at MIT. One of the homework assignments was an unsolved research problem. There was no one in the entire world who knew how to solve it. The professor did not know how to solve it. This was a homework assignment in an introductory course for undergraduate students. In this same course the professor had said on the first day that the top 1/3 of the class will get an A, regardless of how many points on exams or homework problems is required to get into the top 1/3 of the class. Competing with MIT students to try to get into the top 1/3 of the class is not easy (and this particular class was definitely not easy, but was the class that taught me that I just happen to like probability theory).
A second example. As a graduate student at Stanford I was taking five classes. One class had a homework assignment with five problems. One problem took me six hours on a Saturday (from late morning through about 5pm). Let’s suppose that you spent six hours on a Saturday doing one homework problem out of 5 on an assignment. Would you be thrilled that you solved it, or would you think that you had just wasted 6 hours out of what could have been a Saturday doing homework, and you still weren’t done?
“Prestige” matters to high school students. If you ignore management consulting and investment banking, it mostly does not matter to hiring managers, graduate school admissions, or normal adults who have a job to do.
And this is exactly right. There are hundreds of very good colleges and universities. The ranking of the university where you got your degree will not buy groceries and will not get you a date for Saturday night. Finding a university that is a good fit for you will however help you to get a good education and to enjoy your four years of university.