Anonymous wrote:I'm most impressed with MIT. They don't do legacy. They don't do athletic recruits. They don't care if you're rich or famous. You'll notice that none of the offspring of the American elite go to MIT. They require test scores. They don't care much about race. They do strive to have gender balance, but that's a good thing. Anyone going to MIT has earned their spot. It's obviously a STEM school, but they have an outstanding creative writing department. Also great at economics.
As for a more humanities oriented school, that's a tough one. Humanities have been really decimated over the past thirty years. Lack of student interest and faculties that are lost in stupid ideological battles that no one outside academia cares about. Thirty years ago Yale was probably the place to go. But back then the Ivies were generally meritocracies. That's no longer the case. And Yale in particular is very heavy into the DEI stuff. You need to watch what you say at that school. I think these days, Chicago is probably the best for humanities majors.
I agree with all of this. Having worked for years with many certified geniuses (I’m not one, I just happened to work in an area that allowed me to interact with brilliant people (e.g., from the National Labs — Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, etc), and hired lots of college grads, including many from the Ivies, MIT grads stand out to me as the most consistently impressive on the STEM side. Chicago would be my pick for non-STEM. Other than that, the very smartest people I know went to a random assortment of colleges that were usually their in-state public universities or small local private colleges.