And this is from someone who did graduate work at BYU in science. BYU's research emphasis is not on research dollars, it's on publications. Many researchers are funded internally at BYU, and can even get tenure (life sciences here), w/o any external funding. Furthermore, many labs at BYU have one or very few (if any) grad students, and many of those are masters students looking for a GPA boost to get to a better school for their PhD or get into medical school. Many undergrads do research, and some of them are very skilled, but you're up in the night if you think undergrads who have a high class load and less experience, can write or research even remotely as well as grad students. However, undergrads, like yourself, who had your own project, own pub, get a great opportunity at BYU, better than almost anywhere else, but that is not the same as a place like Washington, Stanford, UCLA, or Utah where there are 100's of grad students working. It is, however, consistent with BYU's mission to train undergrads. Don't get me wrong, there are some very successful researchers at BYU, very well known in their fields (Keith Crandall, Greg Burton, Daniel Simmons, etc.), and many more "average" researchers who could compete at most schools. The difference is the focus at BYU, the sheer number of students/faculty, the difference in number of post docs and grad students, and the research money.

I wouldn't say that one is better than the other, but they have very different missions. Utah is graduate based, has a medical school (where faculty salaries are dependent on external dollars), and is very much a research institution. This hurts their undegrad education, but the don't care. BYU on the other hand cares most for it's undergrads, which is great, given what BYU's mission is. BYU is deliberately different than Utah, UCLA, etc.

I'm not sure why we didn't get an invite, but BYU is a different type of school than the other Pac12 school, whereas Utah is more similar. An invite would've been awesome, but Utah makes sense.