[danaris]

Outside the US, I don't know much about top universities beyond Oxford, Cambridge, and the Sorbonne, but my point really was pretty specific to the schools in the US that have big names—not big-name professors, but the schools themselves have names which, for whatever reasons, are well-known and confer prestige.

A university having a prestigious name is not synonymous with having Nobel Prize winners and influential professors. Hell, one of the professors at the small liberal arts college I work at is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet.