MIT, UChicago, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, WashU, Middlebury, Berkeley, etc. Students who are primarily interested in prestige have better options. What's

MIT, UChicago, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, WashU, Middlebury, Berkeley, etc. Students who are primarily interested in prestige have better options. What's left at schools like these are the masochists who actually want to be challenged academically and surrounded by peers at or above their intellectual level. I'd say Chicago is the paradigm case, but I'm biased :). One of its best features is an extraordinarily large and rigorous general ed requirement ("the Core") which means even a computer science student gets a substantial liberal arts education. There are paths through the Core with a higher tolerance for bullshit, but they're frowned upon. I took the more philosophy-leaning sequences and loved them. Lots of emphasis on close reading, lucid discussion, critical analysis, and clear argumentative writing. It has also been my experience that students merely looking to check the "college" box with minimal effort are not mainstream and don't tend to succeed.