Schools worth paying drastically more money for:
Stanford
Berkeley
CalTech
Harvard
Yale
Princeton
Columbia
MIT
Duke
WashU
Any of the Jesuit schools
Northwestern
NYU?
Anything else?
I'm not sure I'd put any of the Ivies or the Jesuit schools on there. Probably not Wash U either unless you are referring to the medical school. The first one that immediately comes to mind are Juilliard and Harvey Mudd, places like that. I'd certainly agree with MIT and CalTech. I don't think much of the larger schools, yeah they're prestigious and have lots of applicants, but they also have lots of graduates, graduates doing the same crap we do. I think more of the schools that have limited graduates and a diploma means immediately getting a great career, not a good first job. Schools where the career day isn't filled with school districts, and businesses like PepsiCo, where the career fair is the students selecting where they're going to work and not vice versa.
This brings me to another baffling aspect of this, degrees from schools like UT, Stanford, UCLA, USC, and even Yale, and Harvard, to a certain extent, have a higher value to people like us than they do to the very rich. This is simply a status symbol for the parents, their kids are likely to get jobs either working for their parents or in jobs that their parent's connections helped them get. I work with this class of parents in my career, granted a lot more when I worked on the east coast. I've been doing this long enough that my first kids are now in their mid 30's and most of these kids went to very good schools like Lehigh, Colgate, Denver, Elon, Boston University then got very good jobs. Hell the richest former camper I have didn't even finish college, he smoked too much weed now he runs his parents commercial real estate business in lower Manhattan. How is this not enough? I don't think these scams are a big deal, but these people are some insecure crap birds.