Part of the ranking the student experience is separating the teaching quality of undergrads vs grads, and the quality of your peer group. A number of rankings list teaching quality as a separate factor. Peer quality can be inferred from the CDS (look at GPA distribution), if you are a bright student you’ll want to be around a similar set of students. This is where schools like Alabama can be quite surprising ; a very large percentage of students are on merit scholarships, many are in their engineering school, and Alabama is known for very good undergraduate teaching (look at the undergrad/grad ratio). So as @Mom2aphysicsgeek says, her kid(s) have had a great experience there. You might even say that the kids on merit scholarships are more serious students - because they need to maintain their scholarship.
Likewise, an elite school with ACT of 31/35 with a class of 1000 freshman is mostly indistinguishable from a slightly less elite school of 4000 with ACT of 29/33. In the first case you have 500 kids with ACT>33, the second 1000.
These name distinctions start to matter a lot more in grad school. That is where you will network the most.