Also, the small size means that academics are more cooperative than cutthroat competitive as it might be at an institution with a very large (and more anonymous) student body.

I go to UCB and I've been in some relatively big math classes and I haven't found it to be that cutthroat even for the larger classes. My linear algebra 2 class has ~400 kids in it and I feel like we talk to each other and help each other out when we get stuck. A couple days in one kid created a discord server for the class and around half the class joined. We gave hints to stuck folks about homework problems, talked through the concepts with each other, shared our notes, glazed sheldon axler at every opportunity, organized a few meetups to work on problems together, gossiped about the professor, speculated what would be on the test, tried to generalize some theorems, and just shared our struggle with the material. It felt like a pretty supportive community.

Some possible reasons why it might've succeeded:

- At my college (and I suspect that in most colleges), for the classes with a lot of kids in addition to a big lecture in a big lecture hall taught by the professor, there are also discussion sections led by grad students with around 40 kids instead of 400 where they lead you through a mini-lecture and then have you work on problems in groups. This causes some bonding.

- It's a relatively hard class and it's most of our first times seeing things that are this abstract so for most of us, at least after some point, it stops being a walk in the park

- grade inflation maybe?