>I don't think being good at engineering school is an 'achievement' or a sign of superiority, I just think it means you may be wired differently than some other people -- that's it. The school in question I'm referring to is ranked in the top 10 of US engineering programs

Bro, I went to a top 10 as well, and it's also not a private school. I'm telling you that it doesn't matter. Doing well in a school that has zero selectivity is not an achievement because you're competing with many people who don't even have the drive to succeed. Of course a huge number will be fodder for you to step on. Sure you're school is hard.. but that's a different kind of hard.

At a selective school, every student you're with has drive and has consistently placed number 1 at every previous school they've been at. The classes and challenge are normalized so that just being number one is now average or even below average. This is hard on another level.

>Many of the more 'highly selective' private programs are actually easier because they milk you dry in tuition and they want to keep the dollars flowing, so they will coddle you along.

Not true at all. Again, Selective programs normalize what is easy among top students. The curve becomes insanely steeper. Schools allow you to change majors to keep milking the dollars but they still fail you out of the class.

>Believe it or not there are public schools that will take essentially anyone with a pulse into engineering, and a handful of the more challenging and highly ranked engineering programs are included. These are not 'easy' programs, and attrition rates far exceed other programs at the same university. Personally I approve of this approach because it allows anyone to try their hand rather than depending on BS criteria like standardized testing or high school performance, or other dumb factors like whether your parents had the strings to pull in a non-profit to make you look like mother teresa. The kind of person who succeeds at engineering is often not the kind who has an impressive background coming out of highschool.

I never said it's easy. But it certainly is easier. Let's do a quantitative analysis then. Anyone with a pulse and let's say they fail out 75%. That's equivalent to a 25% pass rate. Then take a look at a selective school with a (in my case 20% failure rate and 10% acceptance). That's about 8% pass rate assuming anyone with a pulse applies (of course this is not the case, better performing students tend to apply).

By that number alone you know how much harder it is in a selective school. And the 20% failure rate is just a random guess, could be much higher than that as tons of kids switch majors after their first weeder class. Realistically I give it 50% failure rate if you count people who switch.

>The number of people who received, or would be able to receive, an ABET accredited engineering degree at the top of their class from any of say the top dozen engineering schools while simply 'studying for a test the night before' is a much rarer trait than you think. Either you're unaware of your exceptional aptitude or you were blind to your surroundings.

Let's caveat something here. I passed top of my class and studied the night before in a non-selective school. The other school I transferred to, (a top school) I could not do this. Also ABET is garbage, let's be clear about that. Many top engineering schools have certain programs that are ABET accredited, and many schools with ABET accredited programs are easy.