How much do undergrads see of these great academics? For getting your PhD, yes. Particularly since if an employer sees an MIT PhD, he won't even ask where you got your BS.
“How much do undergrads see of these great academics? For getting your PhD, yes. Particularly since if an employer sees an MIT PhD, he won’t even ask where you got your BS.”
For better or worse, going to an Ivy undergrad increases the chances of getting into a top doctoral program as well.
Undergrads at the Ivy’s usually receive instruction from the eminent faculty once they are in courses populated by majors.
For distribution requirement courses and service courses, they typically get a junior (or visiting) professor as a lecturer and grad students as TA’s. Though sometimes they’ll get a senior faculty member as the lecturer. When I was on sabbatical back at my grad alma mater, U. Penn, I taught a section of Calc II to help finance the visit—I was having to maintain three residences (don’t ask)—one of the other lecturers for the course was a Dean who was also an eminent scholar in partial differential equations and just liked teaching the particular course.