I found little practical difference in the top ten percent between an Ivy and a decent state school. In fact, once someone is in the top half, other factors such as organization, drive, and the ability to get along others will dominate. As such, I save money and no longer hire from Ivy’s.
When you're good, you're good.
The fact that Waterloo maintains a monopoly on its internship/coop model blows my mind every year we do recruiting.
OTOH, after successfully recruiting from Waterloo for over a decade, my company's recruiters suddenly decided to stop because it was more work for them even though it has consistently given great results.
It's a decision we've been fighting but our recruiting org won't budge.
Also, state research universities didn't/don't have as much grade inflation because they're intent on "competing" in the ranks without having the legacy, endowment, or name branding that Ivy's and Pac-NN's, so typically all they have (outside of NCAA sports $$$). University academic department staff are worried about bolstering their public image and of winning the approval of accreditation organizations.
Frame of reference: Most all of my college-prep public high school friends went to Harvard, MIT, Stanford, or CalTech while fewer, like me, went to University of California universities (UCs) like Berkeley or UC{LA,SD,SB,D}. I'm only certain of a few certain universities of that era were more or less more rigorous by comparing notes on specific courses and how team participation was regulated fairly or not. In 2001, we had a intro networking course requiring creating a forked caching HTTP/0.9-1.0 network web proxy server as one project of many.
There’s a reason legacy admissions need a thumb on the scale.