The title has the assumption students should be applying to 'elite schools'. First, Stanford/MIT/... cannot get as many smart students as needed. If the top 10

The title has the assumption students should be applying to 'elite schools'. First, Stanford/MIT/... cannot get as many smart students as needed. If the top 10% of US students deserved an elite school, that'd be nearly 0.5M students/year: an impossible number for these institutions. Secondly, for many students, such education might not be the wisest choice. Fortunately, I went to a local college and had more time to learn things on my own. Instead of going to Psychology classes and studying for finals, I contributed to open source projects and went to hackathons. At Harvard, I would never do these things on my own.