While not exactly small I absolutely consider places like UVA and Berkeley elite. Where did I ever say that I had a low opinion of public universities? I do feel justified in saying that the average classroom experience at a place like Montana State University, with SAT scores in the neighborhood of 150 lower points, is likely to be less intellectually charged than Harvard.
I do think if you wanted to test your intellectual diversity argument it would be useful to include a few of the elite LACs. It would be interesting to compare the top few elite private U’s, the top public U’s and the top LAC’s. Tiny Pitzer has more Fulbright awards than UVa even in absolute numbers.
I like the work you did on awards at various institutions but I don’t understand why you’ve excluded certain schools from your list. For instance, Harvard, Yale and Princeton each blow away every school on your list in the number of Rhodes Scholars they’ve produced. To list UVA and UNC first seems disingenuous to me when Harvard has more Rhodes Scholars than all of the schools on your list combined. It feels like you’ve cherry picked your schools to arrive at the numbers you were looking for.
http://www.rhodesscholar.org/assets/uploads/Rhodes%20Scholarships_Number%20of%20Winners%20by%20Institution_10_15_14.pdf
What I was looking at was the CC favorite debate about whether a student will get the same experience at University of Alabama, with its plethora of NMS winners in its honors college, as at Harvard. U of A probably has more top scorers in absolute numbers than Harvard, but at Harvard you’ll find them in much greater concentration.