You're incorrect about better professors, but the extra money does allow for ease of research. The only reason research is perceived to be better at certain in

You're incorrect about better professors, but the extra money does allow for ease of research. The only reason research is perceived to be better at certain institutions is due to the extra money, which allows ease of research. Most researchers at any university can have the same ideas, and be equally intellectually qualified (if not more intellectually qualified at non-ivy league universities, explained in a bit) to do the research. The difference comes in the availability of specific labs, with extremely expensive equipment, to perform tasks for collaborators. At ivy league universities, the graduate students effectively get to treat their work as if they were a manager who contracts out every price of work needed. Need cryo TEM of some samples? Send it down the hall, don't worry about it for a week, and then get nicely formatted results done for you by staff scientists that perform this service for the university daily. Need statistics to be done? Send it by email to the team, they'll let you know when it's done, etc. Other universities don't have this luxury, but I would say it improves their capabilities as a scientist; hence my argument that non ivy league universities have more intellectually capable scientists. For example, instead of sending that sample for TEM, they learn how to do TEM, but not on a fancy new system; rather, the one that uses a car battery and a circuit board that you have to understand well enough to add some extra solder when needed. I've worked in several different universities, and it's definitely still surprising to me, but the level of incompetence from grads coming out of ivy league institutions is astounding sometimes.