I guess my point is that people will always find something to shit on you for, and the bias against lower ranked schools comes from above. The state schools like Penn State, OSU, Pitt, Michigan, Florida, Illinois etc. are enormous institutions that have a good amount of research going on and are definitely accessible to a motivated high school student. So if you don't get in to an Ivy League school, your opportunities aren't going to be limited as much as you think, and rejection is a great motivator.

CMU offers an undergraduate PL concentration where you learn FP and constructive math: https://csd.cs.cmu.edu/academics/undergraduate/principles_of... I believe I really would have benefitted from this.

The fact is that being a prestigious or elite school often goes hand-in-hand with having good professors and research. There is a certain unfairness, but it seems inherent that a "better" university would naturally have more resources and more professors would come there. But, we should have more top-level universities to accommodate more people. After all, top colleges are always claiming that they have to turn down qualified applicants every year.

I'm just saying that that's in itself something of a problem. Like, I'm angry about the concentration of academic "worthiness" in a select number of institutions. I'd like us to work on reversing that trend, making education more meritocratic, decentralized and accommodating.

For example: it's expensive as hell to house students on a campus like Harvard, Yale, etc. The benefits of doing so are furthermore unclear. In much of the world, you live at home during your university years. Or with roommates in a city. Re-centering university life from these inaccessible campuses and into cities would do a lot to lower the barrier and cost of entry, IMO.

Colleges spend a lot of time and money on selecting the smartest students, so companies don't have to. Screening is quite expensive, and anecdotally, people from prestigious universities generally pass interviews at a much higher rate.

Being around smarter and more ambitious people makes you smarter as well. I feel that has a lot more impact than faculty. My top CS school had some senile tenured professors who were barely comprehensible, so we had to learn a lot from each other.

But yeah, not saying that there aren't major advantages to going to a school like Cornell or CMU. Just that these schools are outrageously expensive, inequitable and we have some power to relax their grip on our higher education system by asserting that yes, we can be smart, educated and worthy people (and engineers!) even if we go to more "low-brow" schools.