I'm glad someone has brought up this topic.
In a word: prestige. But this is far more the case with undergraduate than with graduate school. For computer science, for example, a non-Ivey like CMU has more prestige than Princeton, Cornell, or Harvard for employers like Google or Microsoft.
I would think so. One exception is that Cornell has gone down in price recently:
http://www.urch.com/forums/phd-econo...tion-plan.html (The Dean Power Partial Scholarship: Cornell Tuition Reduction Plan)
(Another exception is that Harvard's Extension School is actually cheaper than many state schools for out-of-state students. However, the Harvard Extension School doesn't have the prestige of the other Harvard colleges.)
Good question. For academic jobs, the department rank is definitely most important. For industry, even location can be an issue. For example, Intel hires more people from ASU than any other college, including top-ranked departments like UIUC and UT-Austin and the Iveys like Cornell or Duke:
Jobs at Intel - United States, Student Center, Campus Page
Of course, for small employers that don't engage in college recruiting and don't know anything about USNews department rankings, Ivey schools may seem the best.
In any case, I think the Iveys are overrated as far as the amount of learning that is supposed to go on and the salaries that are earned later in life. For example: