It was obvious from your first post that you were from NYC, or perhaps Boston. I'm all too familiar with the mindset.
Your parents paid a lot to put you through private school, where the best students headed off to the ivy league and those not so great went to Wesleyan or some similar institution.
Students like you headed off to what all your peers thought were crappy schools, because they weren't the ones their parents and their friends looked up to. You accepted your fate without complaint and when you returned to Manhattan and went out with your high school friends you didn't argue with them that they were receiving a superior education, you just raved about the skiing.
Even today you can't see beyond the Hudson. You still accept the conventional wisdom held by the culture in which you were raised--that there's such a thing as an objective ranking of universities, that you know which are better. That's how it's possible for you to post something as ridiculous as UW is "a better overall school" and "that's not debatable." Really? Really? It's not debatable? What's your standard? Because a for profit magazine tells you so? Because the college counselor at Riverdale or Horace Mann said so? Was your American Literature class inferior to the ones in Madison, what about the ones in New Haven?
Please, spare us your Manhattan world view, which is just as cramped as the world view of the kid from La Junta.