[mathattack]

What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments.

This is actually true at any school. At large state schools, there are professors doing real research. The difference with the ivy leagues is very few students actually seek these experiences out. (I was one of four undergrads applying for a paid research position during my Big School CS undergrad. I got it as a sophomore because the competition was weak.) I still would have had a better experience at Stanford or MIT, but I think it's more a peer effect.

But instead that produced this arms race of people seeking lots of extra academic experiences purely for the sake of getting into college and then burning out and not wanting to continue once they got there.

This is very true. I was very surprised how many of my friends dropped their extracurriculars in college. The only friends who stayed in music were the ones (like me) who went to large state schools - in essence because we were doing it for it's own sake. Turning college admissions into an extracurricular quest (in addition to a "Don't dare get a B" risk aversion) seems very wrong.

My sense is that this gets sorted out in the end. After a few years of work, all the nonsense about school admissions is gone.

[aardvarks]

What ivy league and other private research universities excel at academically is scholarly opportunities outside class assignments.

This is actually true at any school. At large state schools, there are professors doing real research. The difference with the ivy leagues is very few students actually seek these experiences out.

I completely agree (having been at a large state school) that there are many professors doing high quality research at state schools. I think the difference is (as you suggest) the funding and competition. Funding and even for-credit programs for undergraduate research were (I found) much more limited at state schools. You'd have 10 students, all with straight A's, applying for a single one-semester research assistantship that'd grant 1 course credit. At the same time I know of ivy school subject-specific fellowships of thousands of dollars for summer travel/study for which perhaps only 2 or 3 people would apply simply because there were so many other opportunities available. The net result is that if you're at an ivy, that kind of experience is much much easier to get.