> Other posts here are suggesting the choice is either a commercial school like Lambda or Harvard

These are very much not the same. For profit schools have an incentive to get more students through while maintaining an acceptable level of quality because that way they make more money. Non-profits have much less motivation to make more money. If they get more applications than they want to fill their prestige goes up as does the quality of their student body. So you see the top US universities having more or less the same size student bodies as when there were 200m people living in the US.

Non-profits optimise for a pleasant work environment for faculty, for profits for maximum numbers students.