I don’t think it’s really debatable. Rutgers isn’t a bad school, but it doesn’t carry cache the way prestigious schools do. If a kid has really good grades and has a lot of options, he/she won’t have Rutgers near the top 5. You have Colombia, Princeton, Yale all within easy distance and Penn and Brown are also not too far. Cornell is a few hours upstate, but definitely a top choice in this area. Schools like Fordham and NYU come to mind well before Rutgers does. Heck many kids would look at Boston first with MIT, Harvard, Tufts, etc. first.