I think there's more to it than social milieu as other commenters have suggested.<p>One way to look at it would be to think about a university as a series of (populations of students, professors, alumni networks, recruiters, athletes, extracurricular options, etc) that can be thought of in terms of their means not their maxima.<p>It is probably true that you can get as good (or nearly as good, or perhaps even better) an education from a good state school as from an ivy, but the "average" student, class, social outing, etc. is not going to be great. You will have to be in the top decile of students in terms of work and effort, identify and select the top decile of professors, etc. to get a top-notch education. From a social point of view, if you want to associate yourself with interesting, smart people and engage with interesting social activities, you will have to identify and seek those out from among everything else. (Whereas, the average social behavior might be frats and football culture.) These things are not always easy to do when there are sources of friction in the mix -- everything from popular classes that fill up to human nature are going to get in the way here.<p>At an ivy or comparable elite school, the average class you pick, the average dudes on the hall you clown around with, the average group of people in any given extracurricular population, these are all going to be strong, and i would assert as roughly equivalent to a top 5 or 10% orientation at more average schools.<p>And, of course, if you've got the brains/talent/work ethic to be top 5% at an elite university, you can have a world-class outcome.<p>I do think that non-ivy elites are absolutely equivalent to ivies though (e.g. Stanford), at least at a general level; it gets down to school-by-school comparisons on specific dimensions after that, e.g. if you want a world-class education in literature and the arts vs physics and math.<p>(edit: minor, for grammar)