This assumes the "top colleges" actually are better, and not just bigger good ole boy's clubs.
This does not mean that there are not hardworking talented people elsewhere. They will make it too. But the density of talent at a place like MIT, compared to most other places on Earth in general, is unprecedented, and if that rubs you the wrong way, so be it.
Is there any quantitative evidence supporting your argument from the last 10 years?
Go study CS for a semester at one of those places.
What evidence are you looking for? How would you even quantify “great”? Just go there and see for yourself and go somewhere else.
I think the same is true for 1-20 vs 21-40, but it wouldn't be quite as clear-cut.
Top universities being top is not some kind of mass hysteria.
Which is debatable, given the prevalence of legacy admissions.
Of course, universities with an established name would also attract the best and brightest. That doesn't mean they produce the best and brightest, though.
What’s legacy admissions got to do with it? If 30% of students are legacy and 60% are the best in the world, the 60% will carry the school. You can say the same about affirmative action.
Nobody believes colleges produce the best from nothing. They produce good results by starting on third base (great students) and letting them run as fast as they can. Some of those will become the best. That’s how it works.
Universities are not ranked like that, at all. Top universities don't necessarily have the best students, they have the best academics.
Harvard could take the dumbest students and still be ranked top 10.
> What’s legacy admissions got to do with it? If 30% of students are legacy and 60% are the best in the world, the 60% will carry the school.
You assume that there is a 60% of absolutely brilliant students, but there is no proof of that.
What on earth are you trying to say? We are talking about school rankings, not professional researcher rankings.
Have you met any brilliant people? Ask them for their opinion.
The proof is in their grades, test scores, competition scores, PhD theses and papers, and later work output.
That's how university rankings work. This is widely known stuff.
If you think that Stanford is up there because they have brilliant students, you are objectively wrong. In fact, there is no standardized way of comparing students of two different institutions other than research work and citations, which makes them, again, part of the academic body.
This paints a very different story.
Also, the fact that there is a percentage reserved for legacy admissions, invalidates your point completely.
Do you think that Stanford's legacy admission policy makes their student body indistinguishable from that of Pasadena City College? Or that no standardized scoring system would reveal any population-wide differences in academic ability between a school which admits 1 of 25 applicants from another that admits 25 of 25 applicants? Hell, admissions rate alone is probably enough to tell a pretty good part of the story.
We’re there great students at the non-top? Absolutely. At the top one though, every other student was just hard core. It was incredibly competitive and the talent was off the chart.
The population differences are real. They're like normal distributions where the mean of one is perhaps a whole SD higher than the mean of another. That said, if you pick the top 5 students at the State School and the top 5 at the Ivy, the students themselves are roughly equivalent, but the ones from the Ivy had a lot more access to higher quality facilities, funding, opportunity, faculty, and peers.