Historically places like Yale, MIT, Princeton, etc. had what are called Gentleman Cs.  George W. Bush is a famous recipient of this.  One can absolutely work hard and excel at MIT, Yale, etc. But also can get (or used to?) Gentleman Cs and still have access to great opportunities after school.  Those places have much higher networking effects than Mid Tier State U.<p>I don&#x27;t know that this is bad as such but the high end schools aren&#x27;t exactly very good about educating large numbers of people.  That is, very large endowments per student.  Large state universities do much better in this area.  Also large state universities do a better job of recruiting students outside of the top 0.1% of society.