<p>I’m going to chime in on this as my first post. I went to a liberal arts school ranked in the 80s. Not community college, but not Yale. And I’m certainly not the smartest guy you’ve ever met, either. After graduation, both of my roommates went to ivy league grad schools, one md, one phd bio. After a while we met up and when they told me they TAd, the bio guy anyway, we had a discussion about the differences in curriculum and student body between their new institutions and our old one. I was shocked to find they said that the curriculum was just as rigorous for the undergrads as it was for us. They said the big difference was that 1) the students were a lot smarter 2) they were ALOT more motivated. At our crappy liberal arts school, the spread was just so wide. There were some smart kids, but there were also truly stupid ones. In fact, first semester senior year, at midterms 50% of freshmen were failing their intro science courses. I’m not sure, but, I doubt that happens at elite schools. </p>
<p>Now, they were comparing the hard sciences. I bet the humanities at my school were far less rigorous.</p>