> Down side: Your peers aren't as smart, and your peers are really what push you to work on interesting projects.

This outweighs pretty much everything else for me.

Your ego either inflates to infinity because you're a big fish in a small pond, or you get depressed being around really incompetent people.

Every lecture I have is booked for 300 people but only 20-40 people ever show up. And yet everyone complains that the courses are too hard.

Is it easy and low stress? Probably. But I feel like I'm being driven into mediocrity.

> Your ego either inflates to infinity because you're a big fish in a small pond, or you get depressed being around really incompetent people.

Neither was the case with me. If you want intellectual stimulation, just go talk to the professors!

> Is it easy and low stress? Probably. But I feel like I'm being driven into mediocrity.

Quoting another comment of mine:

"Yes, you need the motivation to do well. In my experience, and of those I've asked who were in a similar situation: If you are aiming high and go to such a school, you believe you're getting an inferior education (mostly false), and you compensate by studying more than what is assigned. Then you go to a top grad school and find you know more than your peers who went to a top university."

I can't talk about liberal arts, but, in engineering, your peers aren't going to be incompetent.

And, in my case, I found that the increased access to grad students and professors more than made up for any possible "weakness" in my peer group.

The Westinghouse engineers used to have a friendly rivalry because so many of them came from both CMU and Pitt. However, if you got both groups drunk, the CMU engineers would grudgingly admit that the primary difference between the two was an extra 10+ years to pay off their student loans.