The death of Ivy League obsession (according to parents who can actually afford it)

Clara gets asked the same question at every Miami dinner party: "Where's your son applying to college?"

The answer always kills the conversation. While her fellow private school parents rattle off lists that sound like a country club membership roster—Harvard, Yale, Princeton—Clara just smiles and says: "He's thinking about the University of Georgia."

The silence is deafening. Someone usually changes the subject to safer territory, like real estate or restaurant recommendations.

Clara doesn't mind. Her family earns well over $500,000 a year, and she could easily write a check for Harvard's $334,152 four-year sticker price. But she won't. Not when her son could graduate debt-free from Georgia and land at the same consulting firm as his Ivy League peers.

A Bloomberg analysis of more than 1,500 nonprofit four-year colleges shows the return on investment at many elite private institutions outside the eight Ivies is no better than far-less selective public universities. In fact, the typical 10-year return on investment of the so-called "Hidden Ivies" — a list of 63 top private colleges — is about 49% less than the official Ivies and 9% less than states' most prominent universities.

Clara represents a growing tribe of wealthy families who've discovered what admissions consultants call "the ROI awakening." These parents aren't broke—they're choosing to be practical.

"The ROI of a BA is not what it was 25 years ago," explains one college counselor tracking this trend. "Where you get a master's may matter more."

The shift is happening at the highest income levels first. While middle-class families stretch to afford prestige, ultra-wealthy parents are suddenly asking harder questions about value.

Meanwhile, a small engineering school in California is quietly demolishing every elite institution on the metric that actually matters: graduate salaries.

Harvey Mudd College ranked No. 1 for early career pay and No. 4 for mid-career pay in PayScale's 2024 College Salary Report. According to PayScale's data, Harvey Mudd had the highest early career median salary at $115,000—beating MIT ($110,200), CalTech ($111,000), and every Ivy League school.

Harvey Mudd costs $68,613 per year. That's expensive, but not Harvard expensive. More importantly, Harvey Mudd also ranked No. 1 in PayScale's most recent College ROI Report, which measures 20-year net return on investment.

Here's the kicker: most parents at those Miami dinner parties have never heard of Harvey Mudd.

Eric Sherman, an admissions counselor at IvyWise, sees this disconnect daily. Wealthy families are "not electing to pay $80,000 a year to go to what they would consider to be… I would call them country club schools. They're pretty, there are other wealthy people there, they tend to be fairly homogenous. When you're coming out of prep school, this is a comfortable environment. But I think there's a reality that even if parents can afford it, they're looking at the cost-benefit analysis, and it may be too wide a gap between the name and the price."

Some schools are taking radical steps to attract families like Clara's. Cooper Union, the historically free Manhattan college that started charging tuition in 2014, just announced that seniors would receive free tuition this year. The school is working toward making college free for everyone by 2028.

MIT recently announced that students from families earning up to $200,000 a year will pay no tuition starting fall 2025. Penn is following suit.

These moves reflect a harsh reality: the cost of four years at a selective college is nearing $400,000, and even wealthy families are questioning whether the investment makes sense.

The irony is brutal. Students from families in the top 1%—those who make more than $630,000 a year—are 77 times more likely to be admitted to and attend an Ivy League school than students coming from families who make less than $30,000 a year.

But once these wealthy kids graduate, they're not necessarily better off than their state school peers. Opportunity Insights took students waitlisted by Ivy Leagues and compared the wages of those who got in versus those who instead went to a state school. They found that there was a statistically insignificant difference between both groups' wages.

Translation: The student matters more than the school.

Charles Zigliara learned this lesson early. Despite getting into prestigious schools, he chose the University of Georgia and graduated debt-free. He landed at Ernst & Young right after graduation—the same outcome he would have had at a "brand-name" institution. The average ROI before taxes at the University of Georgia is $170,000 10 years from enrollment.

"I knew that I was going to be working hard enough and having high enough aspirations to where that brand name was not going to make or break me," he said.

The cultural shift is undeniable. Just as the demographic priorities of universities are being rewritten, so too are those at law firms, investment banks, and media companies, which increasingly prize difference and grit over standard résumés, however impressive.

One Manhattan mother put it bluntly: "You can't play by the rules of 15 years ago. You're playing a different game. So you either adjust and play the game by the rules you're given now, or you're going to be constantly frustrated."

Smart wealthy families are adjusting. They're discovering schools like Harvey Mudd, embracing state flagships, and prioritizing outcomes over optics.

The ultimate irony? While everyone else fights for Ivy League admission, the families who can actually afford these schools are quietly walking away.

Clara's son will graduate from Georgia debt-free, probably land the same job as his Harvard classmates, and have money left over for graduate school. The parents still obsessing over college rankings? They'll be writing tuition checks until 2028.

Who's really winning this game?