A much cheaper state school in a cornfield can get you a quality education. Harvard and Yale are more about getting invited to the right dinner-parties.
It's no coincidence that most founders come from ivy-league schools.
Think how all these startups are getting loads of "trickled-down" money from the Fed's money printer. Look at the list of chairs of the Federal Reserve and most of them are from prestigious Ivy League schools, you get what I mean.
Everybody can know how atoms work, and read Cicero, and figure out where on the shore a boat traveling diagonally will land if the wind is picking up at a given rate. Increasing the human knowledge pie in that way is what universities claim to do.
We used to do that, wasn't it called Jim Crow?