NO KIDDING.

Minding the Campus contributor Liza Libes correctly diagnoses the Ivies' value proposition.  "Not a better education, but elite social formation."

No kidding.  "As long as the alternative to the 'you teach yourself, you have smart classmates, let me find a shorter proof of Fermat's Theorem' model of higher education (itself a mischaracterization of what goes on in the best universities) is a non-challenging degree program driven by an access-assessment-remediation-retention mindset, the oversubscribed Ivies, wannabes, and state flagships are going to have no reason to do things differently."  Not much has changed in going on nineteen years.

It's not that the Ivies are doing the education side of higher education that much better than the community colleges, regional comprehensives, mid-majors and the like.

I am forever indebted to my high school for enhancing my intellectual development, and I would argue that the private school price tag is worth it for that reason alone. You won’t find a single public school in America that encourages fifteen-year-olds to grapple with Hegel or think through the limitations of the Collatz conjecture. In fact, my high school was so rigorous that I assumed I would find a similarly thriving educational environment at the nation’s most elite hub of intellectual inquiry: the Ivy League.

But at Columbia University, where I completed both my undergraduate and graduate degrees in English, students and professors were not only disinterested in the spirit of classical academic inquiry but actively opposed to it. The search for objective truth was deemed racist and colonialist, and all heterodox or otherwise contrarian opinions were immediately stamped out by professors or administrators trained on Stasi playbooks.

But the issue cuts deeper than ideology.

Read on.  Her complaints are what we read in Prof Scam all those years ago.  My complaint about the institutions well on down the food chain having a deservedly bad reputation might still be valid.

It's likely that there are still families that, thanks to budget constraints and geographic location, are not obsessing over whether or not their spawn get that thick envelope from the Ivies.  It's also likely that there are families where the desperation over getting their spawn into the Ivies is out of recognition how far the regional comprehensives, land-grants, and state flagships have strayed from challenging their students, and the choice is between bundles offering woke indoctrination with better networking opportunities as opposed to woke indoctrination with game day.

It is the networking opportunities that matter.

I do not believe you will receive the same level of education from Columbia University as you would from, say, Weber State University. What I do believe, however, is that the difference between a Columbia education and a Rutgers education—at least in terms of the basic information students absorb over four years—is negligible. You might have a slightly deeper discussion of Hegel at Columbia than at Rutgers, depending on the professor, but if you enroll in a “Philosophy 101” course at either university, the syllabi will look more or less identical.

Nevertheless, when comparing salary outcomes between your typical Ivy League kid and your typical large state school kid, the narrative is clear: the Ivy League will set you up for much better financial success than your typical large state school, with Columbia students earning a median of $102,491 ten years out of college and Rutgers students earning almost $30,000 less ($74,479). Compare Columbia’s number to that of the University of Alabama ($59,221), and the value of an Ivy League education could not be clearer.

From an ROI perspective, then, the price tag of an Ivy League education is justified. What is less clear is why, if course content at four-year universities is broadly similar, large earnings discrepancies persist.

The simplest answer is the pipeline to top-tier firms. Columbia and other Ivy League schools benefit from extensive alumni networks, many of whose members are willing to offer referrals that help graduates secure jobs at prestigious firms. Similarly, many employers use the “Ivy League brand” as a heuristic for competence: the mere appearance of “Columbia” at the top of a résumé signals intellectual worth.

That's probably easier to carry off with Columbia graduates controlling the "top-tier" firms and Columbia social networks tied to eating clubs or however the on-the-make current students get to establish connections with their predecessors.  As she puts it, "The primary reason that it is still worth paying for the Ivy League today is to upgrade your social circles—and your social status—in a way that no amount of money can ever buy."  And, presumably that the Weber States cannot carry off, outside of Utah, or that the Marylands and Rutgerses cannot carry off, even affiliated with the Big Ten.