So, people picked the 'best' school they could get into. Not just for the 'experience', but to make sure they got the best education they could and opened as many doors as possible. Because you don't really get a do-over.
After having gone through it all, do you think if it matters how many doors open for a person based on the college they went? I suppose if someone went to a highly ranked school, it might matter.
But being able to get into a highly ranked school is probably because of what the person had (money, life experiences) or what they did (crushed some standardized test).
So, in the end, does it actually matter?
Interestingly, the renowned private universities don’t seem to have any better of a curriculum than the high-grade public research universities. So from an education point of view, there still exists a ‘good enough’, it’s just not the budget state college.
I did physics at a world top 10 university and the course work was basically day care. The vast majority of the 'difficulty' of the subject matter was because the majority of students were bad at algebra. The outcomes would have been better for everyone if we completely ignored first year and just taught people the Knuth Bendix algorithm instead.