> the value a student gets from a school is largely self-directed and based on the people they meet there.
For this reason, rankings (unfortunately) have more value that OP suggests. The "best" students will cluster around the "best" institutions. Does the average student differ muchst between #1 and #5? Probably not much. But the difference between 10 and 100 does, by a lot, and the difference between "unranked LAC" and "top 50 CS" is difficult to overstate.
If you're measuring is "how good is my peer group", rankings are often a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not so much at fine granularity, but more so if you measure in terms of "20-50 position overlap equivalence classes". This is particularly true in fields like CS, where there are huge differences in curriculum between the top schools and the not-so-top schools.
At my high school the "target" schools for the top performers in the class were usually some kind of high ranked school or ivy for this reason. I don't remember any of my classmates (myself included) really factoring in specific details of the institution itself for whether we preferred one over the other, rather we just looked at the top 20 list and applied to the ones we liked. The logic being that if we landed somewhere we could basically be pretty successful in whatever field we ended up choosing. So, often that looked like apply to all ivies + a safety or two.
I was rank 8/432 and applied to: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Pomona, Rice, and UW. Got rejected from everywhere except UW so that's where I ended up going. I think only one other person in the top 10 went to UW with me, and he had plans to be a CS major. Funnily enough over 50% of my graduating class just went to UW because it was: good enough, close to home, and relatively affordable.
I'm not convinced on this - with a large enough student base (e.g. most state schools), I think it's possible to find peers that would have excelled even at top 5 universities. Similarly, at top tier colleges, you can find people who don't really perform to the expected level and coast along.
You stand out by being a top performer, and will attract other top performers as long as you search them out. Also, in those scenarios, professors will give you more attention, because you are a better student and more enthusiastic than most of your peers.
Perhaps if you are a true prodigy, you might need a top-tier program to reach your full potential... at that point your peers are the professors and high-performing graduate students, but for most students, I think there are pros and cons for being in a top 5 vs a top 50 program.
> I'm not convinced on this... I think there are pros and cons for being in a top 5 vs a top 50 program.
Yes. That's why I used the top 50 CS programs as an equivalence class in my post:
>> the difference between "unranked LAC" and "top 50 CS" is difficult to overstate.
The US has 5,000 colleges and universities. Not 500. 5,000.
You are absolutely not going to find more than one top performer every half decade or two at a small non-selective LAC or the branch campus of a university system. If ever. I spoke with on faculty member at a branch campus who said that he's never had a single student who is as good as the average undergrad he taught at <top 5 program>. He's been teaching for 20 years. Those types of institutions comprise the vast majority of US colleges and universities.
I think the "rankings are just noise" attitude is mostly held by people who don't even think about the existence of 90% of US colleges and universities. If you consider Stevens Institute of Technology a "backup" as opposed to a "reach", then I guess the attitude has merit. But if you're one of the 50% of college students who get rejected from Stevens -- or the even larger percentage who don't even apply because they know they can't get in -- then the world looks different.
Said teacher likely has a reason to further the myth that "top tier schools" have "top tier students." Academia is largely nothing but group think and elitism these days.
He's a professor who has spent his entire career at one low-ranked institution. If he has a reason for being down on his own employer, where he's tenured, I'm not sure what it could be...
(Also, he didn't state this as a negative or a positive. Just as a fact. "Different institutions serve different clientelle". You don't have to be a hotel snob to say that the Holiday Inn you manage isn't as nice as the Ritz, or a elitist that the youth swim team you coach has nothing on the US olympic program... some people -- particularly educators -- aren't obsessed with being "the best".)
I don't think this is completely true. Brand name universities might impress some people, just like brand name clothes does, but that doesn't mean the education is qualitatively better. Nowadays MIT puts its materials online so you can see for yourself what the fuzz is all about. And roughly the same material with the same "difficulty" was used by the professors at my university. Though, they are more "shy" (we in Europe are more modest) so they don't put their content online so I can't prove it. I think this whole "weak and strong universities" is mostly a US only thing.
There are institutions that compete on the basis of teaching quality. Often private, sometimes public. They emphasize small class sizes, do not stress research productivity in hiring or promotion, etc.
Some of those institutions also signal (e.g., Williams, Harvey-Mudd, etc.) but most of them are relatively unknown and really do just compete on educational quality.
For this reason, rankings (unfortunately) have more value that OP suggests. The "best" students will cluster around the "best" institutions. Does the average student differ muchst between #1 and #5? Probably not much. But the difference between 10 and 100 does, by a lot, and the difference between "unranked LAC" and "top 50 CS" is difficult to overstate.
If you're measuring is "how good is my peer group", rankings are often a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not so much at fine granularity, but more so if you measure in terms of "20-50 position overlap equivalence classes". This is particularly true in fields like CS, where there are huge differences in curriculum between the top schools and the not-so-top schools.