In CS, at least, I haven't seen that. The Yale CS department, for example, has some very smart people, but is not that large, and the specialties concentrate in certain areas. As far as I can tell, the undergraduate education there is roughly on par with the quite small and non-Ivy school I attended (http://www.hmc.edu). Possibly even somewhat lower standards due to undergraduate education there being a lower-priority focus for their faculty (their tenure cases are evaluated based primarily on graduate supervision and research, not teaching), and more grade inflation meaning that it's virtually impossible to fail.
edit: Though to be clear I'm not really claiming "Yale is worse than [X]", just that past a certain level it depends more on what you care about. Do you care about small class sizes? About the opportunity to engage in undergraduate research? About big projects happening in your department? Do you care about AI, compilers, graphics, or theory? About practice-oriented programming or software engineering? Depending on your preferences there are more like 50 schools that will provide a top-notch education, not 8.
Harvey Mudd will give you a first-rate CS education, so I'm not surprised by your experience. It shouldn't be surprising that its on par with Ivy schools. I bet you'd get something similar from CMU or MIT too.
(Disclaimer: Not an alumni of any of these schools, but know and have worked with many people who attended them)
edit: Though to be clear I'm not really claiming "Yale is worse than [X]", just that past a certain level it depends more on what you care about. Do you care about small class sizes? About the opportunity to engage in undergraduate research? About big projects happening in your department? Do you care about AI, compilers, graphics, or theory? About practice-oriented programming or software engineering? Depending on your preferences there are more like 50 schools that will provide a top-notch education, not 8.