Let's look at one US University, UC Berkeley. 26 faculty Nobel Prize winners and 35 alumni winners. The current faculty includes 262 American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows, three Fields Medalists, 77 Fulbright Scholars, 139 Guggenheim Fellows, 90 members of the National Academy of Engineering, 144 members of the National Academy of Sciences,[81] ten Nobel Prize winners, four Pulitzer Prize winners, 125 Sloan Fellows, 8 Wolf Prize winners and 1 Pritzker Prize winner.

Or, lets take CalTech with a similar size enrollment (in the thousands): As of October 2022, Caltech has 46 Nobel laureates to its name awarded to 30 alumni (26 graduates and 4 postdocs), including 5 Caltech professors who are also alumni.

> IITs are prestigious institutions. They’re not OKish institutions in the slightest.

They aren't. They are a filter for a few thousand out of 1.4 billion people. Yet, all the IITs put together produce nothing compared to the output of one US University. > 99% end up writing Java code for Wall Street or work for ad-tech. I doubt they are pushing the boundaries of science.

The are not even top 100 in the world. They are OKish.