When I spoke of 10-15 % A's I did not mean to exclude giving all C's if the class truly is not performing at all or giving more than 15 % A's if it truly is outstanding. My experience is that this can occur (at either end of the spectrum) in specialized classes and certainly in graduate classes but rarely does it happen in general education or core curriculum, bread-and-butter courses (the ones where TAs are employed). But I take your word that it happened in cases you experienced. In such circumstances sticking to a curve would be wrong.
I do not agree that prestige schools are valuable because the overall quality of students is higher than at the start-ups. It's just the opposite. PC crap has so infected the prep schools and elite high schools from which the IVLs and IVL-Wannabees draw that the overall intellectual quality of students at some of the prestigious schools is no better than and may be inferior to the quality at, say, Thomas Aquinas College in California or even Christendom College in Front Royal,Va. Ave Maria Law school had quality of students comparable to the best law schools almost from start-up.
I don't have time to get into specifics, but the Northwestern English lecturer that Michael Savage interviewed a few days ago, who wrote a piece called "Lessons Learned" in a leftist Seattle paper that he thought us Red-Staters would hear about, when pressed by Medved to explain exactly how he goes about broadening the minds of his red-state students, cited such lame examples that I was embarrassed for him. He has no clue how narrow his perspective is and how much more broad-minded we red-state hicks are but he trumpted his superiority incessantly. Now, he's only a lecturer but I would be embarrased to call my department a prestigious university humanities department and have this idiot even as a part-time lecturer. Yet I suspect his intellectual abilities have never seriously been questioned because English is now such a politicized discipline and he represents an approved post-colonial approach. But even intellectually gifted students from good high schools, if saddled with this guy's pedagogy would, presuming they believe they are attending a prestigue school of high intellectual caliber, would be intellectually corrupted by the time they passed his course.
I really do believe that much more serious, high level intellectual work is already going in at places like Thomas Aquinas College, Christendom College, Patrick Henry College, Hillsdale College, Grove-City College (I've left a number out, my apologies to them) etc. than at many of the elite schools. It is not recognized as such by the prestige university world and will not be, so the gradutes of the start-ups have to prove themselves by their own merits in the workplace. But TAC graduates are highly sought-after in business and elsewhere--where it really matters because previous graduates have proved themselves on the job. Patrick Henry College graduates are already starting to do this after only a few years of the school's existence. This trend can only increase in momentum. Hence, I am not convinced that a reason to attend a prestige college is that the intellectual level of the students will be higher. It's just not true.
I'm not convinced based on anecdotal evidence. There was certainly a difference when I was an undergraduate in the 1960s. Today, my sample is the kids that my own children have gone to high school with, in Greenwich, Connecticut, over the past 6 years, whom we have known -- in many cases all their lives. In our experience, except for some athletic recruits and some legacies (but often legacies are shut out if not qualified), the colleges kids have gone to have pretty much reflected their position on the bell curve: the most talented to the ivies, near ivies (Duke, Northwestern, Rice, Chicago) public ivies (e.g Virginia, California at Berkeley), the top liberal arts colleges (and a few specialized schools and the academies), the slightly less talented, but still very strong, to the second tier private universities and liberal arts colleges, and the better state universities (e.g. Michigan, North Carolina, Texas), and the bulk of the solid, but not outstanding kids to respectable state universities (Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, Delaware) and respectable private colleges and universities (but not worth the bucks IMO). Very different from my youth in California where few kids (a dozen in my class) went out of state or to Stanford, the bright went to the various University of California campuses, most of the middle went to the state colleges, and the able-but-poor went to the community (junior) colleges without a stigma because they took "UC transferable" courses taught to UC standards.
We looked at Grove City and Hillsdale a bit -- we had friends who looked very closely at them -- and were not really that impressed. Of course, with our older daughter we wanted a moral Christian but not fundamentalist environment -- putting St. Olaf high on the list -- and the younger daughter's choices were dictated by her musical considerations. Music admissions is a whole different game, given that junior year you take the kid around to take lessons from all the teachers you're interested in (auditioning them, as it were) and senior year you have to audition. Conservatory/top university music school performance major auditions are highly competititve: usually only 2-3 are admitted out of pools that range from 30 (smallest we saw this year) to 105. Most of the serious candidates already know each other from their summer festivals/youth symphonies. We'll see how it works out, but I think the process does a pretty good job of matching the students to the teachers. (There were places my daughter did not apply to, or did not audition, based on interaction with the teachers.) Freepmail me the info on the English clown and NU, if you would please, so I can make sure my daughter avoids him.