Richard Feynman was a professor of physics at Caltech who won the Nobel Prize. He worked on the atomic bomb and was a member of the team that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Here’s a video of Feynman explaining why knowing the name of something isn’t the same as actually knowing it.
If you’re interested in any college just because it’s prestigious, then you don’t know the college. You only know the name.
I don’t think Feynman’s message here is that you should necessarily know everything with certainty (you won’t know for sure that a college is right for you until you actually enroll). Instead, he’s preaching curiosity. There’s value in wanting to know more and refusing to accept the surface explanation.
That’s a good way to approach your college search. Are Dartmouth and Williams and Rice great schools? Maybe for some people. Maybe even for you. But a curious college searcher will want to know more than just the name. And that searcher will probably have a more successful college process.