In April of my Junior year of High School, I decided to graduate a year early and attend college. This was way after admissions deadlines, but the University of Pittsburgh let me in, so I decided to spend my "senior" year there.
I then transferred to Carnegie Mellon to complete my degree.
There were many major differences between the two. Namely, at Pitt, the professors were much better at explaining course material. However, the course material was also much easier and much simpler to understand. Where at Pitt, the professor would teach you combinatorics, at Carnegie Mellon, the professor would ATTEMPT to teach you combinatorics, then force you to do a problem set filled with Putnam level combinatorics problems. The result was you learned much more at CMU because much more material was covered. In addition, you were forced to learn on your own or else you would fail.
At Pitt, few people drop out of their degree program because they can't handle the course load. There are a large number of people who drop out because they spend too much time partying, but if you put in the effort, you will receive a degree. Carnegie Mellon is the most difficult thing I have ever done in my life. In high school, I was top of my class, 1500's on my SATs, 5's on 6 AP exam's, made it to the USAMO. At Carnegie Mellon, I was just another above average student. Being well rounded meant absolutely nothing. The kid who failed English in high school but completely upset the curve in the class made you scramble the rest of the semester. Sure, I did well. But I was by far not the most intelligent student that professors fawn over. That person is a friend of mine. He placed in the top few at ICPC World Finals and can solve Putnam problems easily. He also doesn't know the definition of entertainment and, according to his housemate, hasn't been back to his room in 2 weeks for he's been sleeping in the library. When he was my TA, he gave me a word of advice. Go on amazon and buy yourself a shipment of the largest packet of Red Bull and Jolt you can find (he preferred Jolt). He was not wrong. The famously difficult 15-251 (that he TAed) forced you to spend 30-40 hours a week on the homework. I felt the absolute dumbest I have ever felt in my entire life. This was the first (and only) class I have ever taken where I've seen multiple students break down and cry during an exam. As a side note, the mathematics of CS was always much harder than programming. IMO programming is easy.
This all paid off when I went to apply for internships. At the Pitt career fair, there were many large companies. Google and Microsoft showed up, but besides these two, no scrappy startups or hot valley companies were present. CS students were expected to work for the tech departments of Alcoa, or Union Railroad. Google or Microsoft was a big deal.
At Carnegie Mellon, Google and Microsoft was the standard. Recruiters literally mob you to try to get your attention. A friend once joked after seeing the Spacex booth and their recruiters that Spacex was implementing the next level of recruiting for top level nerds: booth babes. If you had put any effort into your classes and actually had some coding ability, you were bound to land an internship. As I said, Google and Microsoft were prestigious but expected for those that were in the top 20% of their class. The most prestigious internships always came from Facebook and Palantir. Coincidentally, Palantir quickly gained fame throughout Carnegie Mellon for having the cockiest employees and the most killer interviews. They expected you to eat algorithms for breakfast and solve ACM ICPC World finals level problems in their interviews.
At my internship at Microsoft after my second year of college, I also noticed some very telling signs of benefits of a top tier University. The best developers and most intelligent students all came from MIT, CMU, and Waterloo (I met no Stanford people). Even those that came from good schools such as Georgia Tech or Cornell had a marked difference in ability. Every student from the top tier CS institutions could out-code, out-theory, and out-problem solve all their peers. Was this due to intelligence? Maybe. But I highly suspect that this was also due to schooling. People from other universities had just never been exposed to the same kick-ass curriculum that we had been. They learned Dijkstra's, Union-Find, and Red Black Trees in their senior year. We learned it our freshman year. They knew hash table's were and how they worked. We implemented hash tables with 3 different hashing scheme's and learned about the bleeding edge algorithms in hashing such as Cuckoo hashing. They were taught splay trees. We were taught splay trees then had to rederive them on our final because our professor had invented them. They learned lisp. We had SML beaten into our heads by the best programming languages department in the country. They learned about Operating Systems, "wrote" one in python or java, and did so by filling in the blanks like parts of the scheduler and maybe some parts of vm. We wrote one in C and asm, from scratch starting with a blank file. We implemented a pre-emptive kernel with the ability to load programs and run on bare hardware. There was literally no way the other students from other universities could compete. We'd just had hundreds of times more practice than they had. As a side note, I'm not sure who has the better deal because they partied/slept 8 hours a night on average. For us, sleep was a luxury.
What's the moral of this story? I don't really know. Top tier universities are hard--really hard. I've heard CMU and MIT are the two most difficult CS universities, so my opinion may be skewed. The most relaxing time of these 4 years has been during my internships. I got full nights of sleep and only worked up to 12 hours a day. I honestly feel that I've learned much more than my peers at other schools, but this is probably due to the fact that the material has been forcefully whipped into my brain, and I've spent many hundreds of hours more than my peers practicing and studying the material. The professors at CMU are more brilliant, but there appears to be an inverse correlation between brilliance and teaching ability.