"students, who were accepted into elite schools, but went to less selective institutions, earned salaries just as high as Ivy League grads."
http://www.usnews.com/education/blogs/the-college-solution/2...
So we could more accurately say that Ivies help students earn higher salaries, except for students from certain privileged backgrounds.
There is definitely quite a bit of overlap as minorities are more likely to be low-income, first-generation college students. When taking that into account it's not clear that those groups form a majority of the population.
While all very bright people, many of the physicians that attended middle-of-the-road medical schools and even one that went to a Caribbean medical school were much better than the couple Harvard trained docs we had.
The difference between a top-25 school and anything else is like day and night
With no citations or supporting evidence. Nor is a Top-25 school defined, is it a Top-25 school in the US overall, or is it in that specific field, etc? Cause there are programs at Ivy League schools that turn out below average civil engineers, which I have had the pleasure of interacting with. I would thus make an educated guess that this would apply to other schools as well, meaning you should do research on the ground to know what kind of education your going to be getting, since transferring colleges isn't quick or painless.