I just sat through commencement at Columbia University.  
The president of the university, Lee Bollinger, said Columbia was now the best university in the world.
The deans of each school within the university, whether it was engineering or architecture or business, law or medicine, each proclaimed its students to be extraordinary, peerless, scary smart. 

Among the audience was a richly diverse mix of parents, from white, Brooks Brothers elegant sixty something folks (who likely went to some Ivy League school themselves, ) who paid the full $60-70,000 yearly cost of sending their kid to Columbia out of their bank accounts, stock portfolio happily, to the Hispanic, or Black or newly immigrant Asian parents, whose children may have attended the same school at a cost to the parents closer to a third that, but incurring debt for the rest. 

The question which occurred to me was:  who is the greater fool--the parent who paid full fare or the parent from the underclass who hoped the debt turns out to be worth it?

Maybe neither are fools: Maybe the investment will pay off handsomely for most of those graduates. 

More likely, in financial terms, it will not.
But the experience of those four years, in retrospect, may have been worth it for the students--learning to work hard, having tried  hard to persist through adversity. The students might have had the same experience at their state universities, but they may have grown weary and given up at the state universities, where they had faith to persist at Columbia because they had been sold the fantasy that suffering at Columbia would be worth it.

Time will tell. But for now, these elite institutions can continue to sell their product, with a marketing push which would make Mad Men blush.