It's not a simple thing, figuring out what is "right" with respect to a college education. Or any other major life decision. This is only the first of them, really.
It's just that it is nothing more than ignorance to claim that:
a) Everything about HYPS is, well-- hype. No. It isn't. The prestige is there for a reason. It is a premium education. Of course, it also comes at an extremely premium cost, so there is that.
b) The system is bimodal, with elite institutions on one side, and all the rest on the other. Well, no, actually-- it is POSSIBLE to get an incredibly fine and life-changing education at-- for example, University of Wisconsin-Stout. It really is mostly about what students bring into the environment as much as anything else.
Can you get a "premium" education without paying for one? Well-- yes and no. No, your diploma from UW-Stout won't say Princeton. Will your education be as good? Maybe. There's no way to say, actually, because it is individual and largely unwritten until it's over, and because nobody can say what you'll value about your college education in retrospect-- not even YOU. It is true, however, that your education at UW-Stout will cost about 1/6th, on average, as much as it would at Princeton.
Yes. The problem is that it's not black-and-white, and it's hard to tell how things will work out just by looking at a college -- you really can't know until you get there. HYPS will get you a good, high quality education amongst a large quantity of intellectual peers. But so will, say, a small, private, liberal arts college, but (maybe? probably? not?) to a lesser extent.
That being said, there are plenty of people at prestigious universities with little student loan debt. And for them, assuming everything else is going well (which I guess is assuming a lot), that's a pretty good choice.
Furthermore, one could argue that a lot of it is the student, not the college, and that certain students flock to certain colleges.
One could argue a lot of things college related, for that matter, and never reach a clear conclusion.
However, I personally feel that loans of 200K (or 100K) plus are best reserved for things like houses, not college educations. To me, there are few things that could make Harvard -- or any school, for that matter -- worth that much more than our hypothetical, affordable universities. At some vague point the benefit to cost ratio is tipped too far, and I think many colleges of all types and ranks and tiers or what have you have reached that point. Honestly, I can't say I know what to do about it -- I don't think anyone knows what to do, but you can only try to know what's best.
