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.

> but, in engineering, your peers aren't going to be incompetent.

True - they were not incompetent where I went. But they also didn't dream big, the way you'd see students at top universities do.