How many people do genuinely care about this? People go to top schools in order to improve their life prospects, not necessarily to get the best education (but they get that too anyway).
(I’ll see if I can dig up the research later when I have more time and link to it).
Edit:
"we find that students who attended more selective colleges earned about the same as students of seemingly comparable ability who attended less selective schools. Children from low-income families, however, earned more if they attended selective colleges."
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/117/4/1491/187...
> But it turns out that the proportional increase for those who grew up poor is much less than for those who did not. College graduates from families with an income below 185 percent of the federal poverty level (the eligibility threshold for the federal assisted lunch program) earn 91 percent more over their careers than high school graduates from the same income group. By comparison, college graduates from families with incomes above 185 percent of the FPL earned 162 percent more over their careers (between the ages of 25 and 62) than those with just a high school diploma:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/02...
This also appears to lack any kind of control, whereas the other study tried to control for the student's abilities.
Apparently college is almost useless for rich white guys but it's progressively more useful if you're not rich, white, or a guy.
However as a civilization it's important that a school like the one I'm hypothesizing exists because selection bias is not really sustainable, nor does it help those who genuinely want to improve but are otherwise not particularly able.
I also imagine if a "performance school" actually existed its influence would extend far beyond traditional education. It would prove that there's some means in which people can learn optimally. Presumably that mechanism would spread to all industries and we all would be better for it.
You can measure it in terms of career success, but even there it's very hard to deal with the selection bias. Those who succeed are those who succeed.
I'm a big fan of Signum University, which is an online-only university dedicated to the soft skills that have to be taught personally, rather than a MOOC. It can't develop connections like Harvard and Stanford but it can develop those skills that make the hard-to-measure differences between those who succeed and those who are merely very good at taking tests. It remains, however, impossible to factor out those connections, which seem to make the biggest difference.
You can measure wealth, but I'm suggesting that wealth outcomes has more to do with your life circumstances than with how much knowledge you acquire in school (by whatever mechanism you would measure that).