TL;DR It's not what you know but who you know.<p>I've been slowly coming to a very different conclusion. Either go to community college for a decent education or pay up to get into an ivy league college to build your network.<p>For the vast majority of people I have worked with there doesn't seem to be any major differentiators with regard to intelligence, smartness, work ethic, etc. between those that graduated from MIT/Stanford/etc or some other school.<p>What I do see are the connections that these folks have to other fellow alumni. MIT folks somehow know a lot of other MIT folks. I'm not sure if it's because they share a common thread, knew each other while in college or some other reason.<p>If you look at college as a financial investment into your future then my hunch is that connections can be as valuable (if not much more valuable) than what you learn. For that reason I'm starting to think you simply want to surround yourself with others who are most likely to overachieve. I imagine Ivy league schools house a disproportionate amount of overachievers.
For those that haven't read it, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education is a great essay by this author.<p><a href="http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/#.U9AivIBdXEI" rel="nofollow">http://theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-...</a>
Scoring systems are useful, but adding some random chance to the idea would make the system more humane and useful. Say, rank the applicants by quantiles, take some random distribution of applicants from people above some minimum level. Otherwise, you'll get exactly the situation described.
Many of the "elites" generated by the present system are worse than useless.
The Athenians actually used to select some of their officials by random chance. That worked out OK.