Sure, Harvard still gets very smart kids (who may or may not be aspiring intellectuals). My point was simply that Harvard is less hegemonic than it once was (gone from being THE place to A place for kids whose center of gravity is academics), with Yale upping its game and UChicago becoming better known to more people. Personally, I think Princeton has also become significantly more hospitable to intellectually serious undergrads, but, AFAICT, applicants aren’t sensing that yet. The suburban UMC vibe is sufficiently alienating that it becomes self-perpetuating as kids who don’t like it don’t apply.
Interestingly, Harvard wasn’t really known for educating smart kids until well into the 20th century, probably around the time that they dropped some of their ethnicity-based (and later gender-based) admissions and faculty hiring practices. Don’t know much about Princeton or Yale specifically, but guessing they were pretty much the same. That’s not to say that these schools graduated dummies back in 1720 or 1820 or even 1920. But they were where the families of wealth and prestige would go to get a good education, and getting in wasn’t a function of your test scores or GPA but, rather, your family connections, your wealth, your importance to industry or so the social register and, oftentimes, your ethnic heritage. UChicago was actually ahead of them all in terms of attracting brainpower to campus for a good many years, till several factors (not the least of which was that those enormous Ivy-league endowments were re-directed toward acquiring “the best” of intellectual and academic power) intervened to put the HYP schools at the forefront of what became a competition for brains.
I’m oversimplifying and leaving out a lot of context and perspective, of course, but there definitely was a contrast, historically speaking. Nice to see UChicago back up towards its proper place, IMHO (though still very skeptical about the USNews ranking).