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Ivy league is a sports league that includes some of the most prestigious and oldest universities in the northeastern United States. Ivy League includes some of the finest universities in the world. At the same time I'd like to point out that neither all of the top universities are Ivy League members nor some of the Ivy League schools are exactly completely dominating non-Ivy league universities in most dimensions (Brown, Cornell come to mind).
For example, private universities like MIT, Caltech, CMU, Nothwestern, University of Chicago, Stanford, Duke, Rice as well as some great public universities such as UC Berkeley, UCLA, or Michigan are not Ivy League schools, while they're certainly just as good in many if not most dimensions as the Ivy League schools.
Now, if you compare the fees of the Ivy League schools to comprable non-Ivy league universities, the fees are about the same for private universities, but lower at public schools. Ivy league, as well as most of other universities I mentioned, have very good financial aid packages for undergraduate and graduate students. Regarding the prestige factor vs departmental ranking, I can see the former being more important at undergraduate level, but departmental ranking, and more importantly the faculty interests, becomes far more important at the graduate level.
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