<p>My experience has told me that there is a night and day difference in the average level of intelligence for students at top tier schools compared to other schools, and have found that you do nearly as much learning from your peers at a school as you do from your professors. To me, the teaching argument is a moot point because an intro course is going to be a joke to any prof that holds a PhD in the subject. Then it comes down to personality and teaching abilities which can be hit or miss at all schools. But the big difference to me isn’t the curriculum or the professors teaching abilities, it comes down to your peers. The ones you are “competing” against in the tests (I put competing in quotes because some dont really view it as a competition, but its who you are going to be compared to in the end). So to succeed at a top school requires you to be an extremely intelligent student. The curriculums are set to be nearly identical for engineering schools by ABET, so you may find that a “bad” school is testing the same subject matter as a “good” school, but put an average student in the lesser schools into the top schools and they are going to be a fish out of water simply because of who the are being compared to.</p>
<p>This all ties back to networking when you really think about it. It ties back to the example of the Lincoln Labs and getting job offers from top firms all over the country. Learning the same thing at one school vs another is not the same when the intellectual abilities of the students differs, and when you have to consider that the average engineering test score is around a 50, far from perfect. Im not even sure this make sense, but to succeed at MIT/Stanford you are going to have to fundamentally understand the material better than a student taking the exact same test at some random school. Which in turn makes you a more desired job applicant, which in turn builds the elite schools networks. Its all about the networking.</p>