My experience is that the curriculum and what is taught is the same in many places but the assignments & exams are much more difficult at top schools. My bar fo

My experience is that the curriculum and what is taught is the same in many places but the assignments & exams are much more difficult at top schools. My bar for what "learning" something meant became much higher after constantly being beat down by insanely hard assignments/exams. Now I think testing is just as important as teaching in determining how much someone learns - hard tests expose sloppy learning very quickly and give you feedback on what you didn't learn as well as you thought. Not to say that non-elite universities can't be as rigorous - some certainly are, and some students will be better than others. The brand is definitely a part of it too.