<p>Funny you should ask. For about the last century, we’ve been running some interesting experiments with that. We have the University of Chicago, which is remarkably similar to Harvard in structure and faculty quality, but has a smaller endowment and less pop-media prestige. We have Stanford, also quite similar to Harvard except for being in a suburb, and in one generation it has gone from, roughly, Dartmouth-equivalence to Harvard-equivalence. We have Berkeley and Michigan, which have the faculty but not the elitism. All of them are reasonably popular, but only Stanford takes more than a handful of students away from Harvard, and California has a lot to do with that.</p>