Maybe I am being naive, but I don't think that the ivies are completely biased toward selecting students who will only go into finance and other business professions. Many, many students are selected without those interests, and many do NOT go into those fields.

And there are pre-professional fields at many of the ivies - Penn, Princeton, Brown and Cornell have engineering, Penn has nursing, etc.

Not trying to completely defend them, since I think the prestige factor is way out of proportion, but I do think they offer an amazing education for those who can get in.