I find myself wondering at your definition of "2nd tier school". If you mean community colleges or something, I'd understand. But there's plenty of "tier 1 schools" for learning computer science outside of the "same five schools" in question.
I don't see a list of the five schools in question from a quick skim, but is the University of Michigan "second tier"? University of Waterloo? Any of dozens or possibly hundreds of Division I schools with high quality programs?
Let's be honest... running a fairly good undergraduate computer science program is not rocket science. It's not that hard. For all the sound and fury of the industry, it has visibly not shifted all that much in curriculum in the 20 years since I took it. I know, I look over the intern's shoulders sometimes when they do homework here and I could almost hand them my own homework solutions from 1998 as a cheat sheet. [1]
The very elitism the article is deploring is on full display when people seem to assume it's these top five schools, then a country full of drooling morons. That is not in fact how it works. It's not even close to how it works. It is offensively wrong.
[1]: This is mostly a good thing, not a complaint. The curriculum should be stable. Bits of it need to be updated here and there, but the whole is solid. AI really needs an update, though; it was long in the tooth when I took it in 1999 or so and it hasn't gotten much better at the local schools. The whole "search the solution space" is certainly a bare minimum to understand the field but almost everything has gone in a very different direction since then.