I seriously doubt you've thought this comment through. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, among others, are renowned for producing important research. NCSA Mosaic and LLVM are just two noteworthy technologies coming from research done at UIUC. Alumni have come to form Netscape, AMD, Oracle, and YouTube.

UIUC is the most noteworthy of midwestern universities, but is hardly the only excellent education available to undergraduates and grad students.