I will say though, that pretending there isn't a difference in education is just untrue sadly. I've had to come to terms with this, going from a very small state college to a more prestigious private school for graduate studies. Nearly everyone around me is from a large, more expensive school, literally everyone else in my program is significantly better educated than me. Of course you can find good programs at small schools, they try very hard. But there's just a difference between a school that can afford to run classical mechanics 2 and one that cannot, a school that can afford to pick and choose a good professor for their classes and one that cannot. And that gap is vastly wider than i had imagined