You're absolutely right, capital-intense programs may make a difference.

E.g. while during the cold war US excelled in multiple chemical fields like photonics or organic chemistry, the Soviets smartly focused on less capital intensive ones like electrochemical chemistry and they excelled there.

But I hope you understand my perspective: I've graduated at a university nobody has ever heard about and at no point in my chemistry career I was anywhere behind in preparation to people from top tier colleges.

And the fact that this gets repeated endlessly and taken at face value is a gigantic distortion of what makes an individual prepared, because there's way too many variants.

I can easily stand by "on average ivy leagues produce better graduates", but there's no chance in hell I will ever buy the "top educators" argument. It's plain and simply false, with 0 hard data to back it up.

On top of that, this is repeated by the people that attended those very institutions but had no experience of how it is elsewhere.

If you've graduated like me, you know very well that each program has a wide variety of different educators. Hell, even the same university from year to year may change who holds what, with dramatic differences in the quality of teaching or difficulty and requirements to pass an exam.

I had an easy time doing Organic Chemistry 2, but those who enrolled just an year prior had to scale the Everest just to pass the exam. The reverse was true in calculus. And this is the same all over the world.