There are downsides if you end up a small fish in a big pond.
Longer answer - in the other reply to your doubtfulness.
This is true across the entire US system, some state flagship universities curricula are so deficient that graduate level at better schools wont even consider the bachelor level diplomas from those schools as eligible unless the applicant is top n% of the graduating class, where n is a low single digit.
The admissions committee may never publish or say it directly, but for MANY state flagship universities the B.S. level maths and science courses are simply insufficient fo higher level studies at leading schools.
Thus, companies with hiring and leadership that is aware of these conditions will also simply pass over applicants with degrees from flagship state universities, much the same as they do with online diploma mill "Graduates."
My take on this situation is that as primary education outcomes worsened in the US, state universities modulated the coursework to match the readiness of incoming students in order to keep enrollment 'available' to everyone and extract revenue from the student loans system.
The "Princeton and Harvard(s)" were differently motivated, in that they never had a goal of admitting the majority of High School graduates, and thus were not required to lower levels of educational rigour to meet eroding conditions in primary education.
It truly is a sad "state" of affairs.
It's easy to find recent reporting on claimed grade inflation, reductions in rigor, and students who seem unprepared or unwilling to do the work at Harvard and Princeton too.
Thus the past-tense in the quoted section.
They "were" differently motivated and the slide that began much longer ago in the other schools (and was always present for the 'legacy' students at Ivy-Leagues) has now reached the general student body.
Hopefully this trend will become more visible in hiring practices, will lead to an erosion of the preference for named schools, and employers will adopt a more disciplined path from internship-to-mentorship-to-full_team_membership to compensate for the general loss of capability and readiness from graduates everywhere.
I say, hopefully. I don't see any inclination toward that path from any of the major employment sectors.
Maybe the Ivy-Leagues and top ranked schools will collectively reinforce student performance requirements, encourage educational rigour, accept lower admission numbers for only high performing applicants, use their endowment funds to establish bridge institutions which remediate the shortfalls of public school education and offer trade-school training programs for the masses of students not capable of the high standards.
But, as Mal says, "I'd like to be the king of all Londinium and wear a shiny hat."
So, we're both right. The Ivy League did mean better education, AND it may not be better for much longer due to the incoming student body.
The SAT is a very imperfect measure but it turns out a lot of the others are even worse.
Putting a body every a seat for those profitable 500-person lectures taught by an adjunct and graded by TAs who are all paid peanuts and then having them wash out before those expensive 50-person high level classes and esoteric electives taught by tenured profs and accompanied by lots of expensive lab time is great for the university's bottom line though.
There are still some online courses that try to do this sort of thing, with a particular example being the University of Helsinky's Full Stack Open [0] which offers post-hoc university credits for those who complete the course, but it seems that the dream didn't quite materialize.
I remember practically every single instructor/professor on the first day of class during my freshman year of my undergraduate study said something along the lines of "I have no curves. Your grades depend on you and nobody else. If the whole class does well, everyone can get an A. If nobody does well, everybody can fail."
So I guess this was more motivational to get us to study rather than stating facts?
* If 1/3 of calculus physics for engineers fail, they take it next semester.
* If 1/3 of gen-ed physics for poets fail, the professor better have a good explanation for the provost.
* If 1/3 of physics for pre-meds fail, the professor better have a pretty good home security system and might want to think about having the family stay in a hotel for a few weeks.
In the US, this would be a huge outlier.
Unless, somehow this is part of an advanced certification process? I really can’t imagine professionals not knowing how to study for an exam like this. Medical school shows what motivated people can do.
But then it raises questions like "are they really unqualified or is the testing methodology inadequate?" and "why was the system unable to provide the necessary growth to such a high slice of the class?". And then the easy way out is to just cherry-pick which students enter the system at all.
This has enormous costs to the institution, the teachers/mentors, and of course to the person failing out.
And that's not even factoring in the social and psychological costs.
IMO failing to get the opportunity is worse than getting the opportunity and failing at it.