You do not really appreciate the quality of universities in the USA. Even the university that you view as "second tier" is excellent by world standards.
Also - smaller universities that focus on undergraduate education often provide a better education than large research oriented universities.
But yeah, there are lots of very good, very cheap schools in this country. I have almost no student loan debt to speak of, and I got a great education. Not to mention that you can watch a lot of lectures on youtube and whatnot.
The main advantage of a prestigious school seems to be that you get to rub elbows with rich people's kids.
Another advantage is that you can casually mention it repeatedly on HN (casual university name dropping).
And the non-university people.
And all the people who ignored nicknames changing colour.
But I'm sure it'll impress everybody else :)
I went to Southern CT State University, which is basically a glorified community college. ("I went to college in New Haven." eyebrows "Oh, Yale, huh?" "No, the New Haven college you HAVENT heard of.") I left in 2002, so maybe things have changed, of course.
For a college that felt a lot like a high school with dorms, we had fantastic computer labs.
In two of the dorm buildings, there were labs full of Macs and PCs (20 of each in each lab). There were another 3 PC labs in the science building, and another PC lab and Mac lab in the library. In the CS department, there were 2 unix labs, one with about 20 BSD+KDE machines, and the other with 10 SunOS+OpenWindows. There was also the VAX/VMS system that anyone could use from anywhere via telnet, and provided access to all university services (including the ability to ssh into the Unix mainframe.)
Though I didn't really appreciate it at the time, the computer science education I got there was fantastic. I've talked to friends and coworkers of mine who have masters degrees from "good" schools and I'm aghast at the gaping holes in the curricula. Many of them never had to compile a program until they entered the work force, had never seen O() notation, and so on.
I think the moral of the story is that you should be wary of judging books by their covers: the campus might be beautiful, and the reputation might be sparkling, but take a look inside the buildings before choosing a school.