Academic

I'm certainly not saying it's such a great thing that we've got an Ivy League that disproportionately adds value, and it is certainly good that our educational system has a few more good options than does, say, France or Britain.  But as Steve Hsu says,

But this doesn't matter if the success of HYPS grads becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once soft elite firms and large parts of the rest of society (in particular, clients) have accepted the idea that elite universities should be trusted to do the filtering, these schools will automatically produce large numbers of successful alumni -- the imprimatur itself has value. The outsourcing of human capital filtering is more dangerous for hard elite firms, with their more objective criteria: if they find that Yale grads aren't actually any good at pricing derivatives, writing code or designing chips, then they'll have to adopt a different filter. Fortunately, since even the dumbed down SAT is still pretty g loaded, hard elite firms can be confident that the lion's share of top talent is at elite universities.

He summarizes Lauren Rivera's paper on the advantages of an elite education for jobs with banks and consultancies here; it is worth a read, and no, they won't recruit outside of any of five schools.

And here's Andrew Gelman at the Monkey Cage with a personal reflection on this:

I've long been glad that I went to MIT rather than Harvard, maybe not overall--I was miserable in most of college--but for my future career. Either place I would've taken hard classes and learned a lot, but one advantage of MIT was that we had no sense--no sense at all--that we could make big bucks. We had no sense of making moderately big bucks as lawyers, no sense of making big bucks working on Wall Street, and no sense of making really big bucks by starting a business. I mean, sure, we knew about lawyers (but we didn't know that a lawyer with technical skills would be a killer combination), we knew about Wall Street (but we had no idea what they did, other than shout pork belly prices across a big room), and we knew about tech startups (but we had no idea that they were anything to us beyond a source of jobs for engineers). What we were all looking for was a good solid job with cool benefits (like those companies in California that had gyms at the office)

I take this all to be an inconsistent with the Dale and Kreuger view.