As someone who attended UC campuses for both undergrad and grad, I do have a strong innate sympathy for large public research institutions. I think that the methodology used by the very influential US News rankings rewards keeping the undergraduate student body small, with relatively few low income students, and penalizes universities for doing the opposite. Almost everything about staying small with lots of money (and fewer low income students) bumps up your numbers. Lower admissions rate, higher SAT scores, better graduation rates. It's all a positive, and there's no penalty for being small and affluent, so why not?

So taking a step back and looking at it as a student, it's an easy call - especially when these elite schools are offering lots of financial aid. If you're high income, tuition doesn't matter. If you're low income, you'll get great financial aid, often better than you would have gotten at a state school.

You'll also get more support. You're much less likely to get kicked out of an "impacted" major (these things don't really exist at elite schools, but people sure do get kicked out of their preferred major at state schools). You're more likely to graduate. Professors and staff aren't trying to accommodate a student body 5 times (or more) the size of a private, so the access is better, less harried. As a grad student at Cal, I heard a bit about Stanford "coddling", and I don't buy it. Supporting a promising student in her quest to major in engineering rather than kicking her out because she got a B- in physics and calculus her first semester in college isn't coddling, it's doing right by your students and is perfectly compatible with high standards. The opposite is, in my opinion, an outrageous waste of talent. Hey, I said I'm sympathetic to UCs but I don't like everything about them.

The only real downside I can see here is that you might not quite understand what's happening out there to higher education. At UCSD, I met a young woman who had to give up on college because her father was claiming her as a dependent, it was messing up her financial aid, and she just needed to work a while. I knew a guy who was trying to major in computer science while paying the rent with a part time job at Nordstrom. And that's at UCSD, a relatively well off and "elite" public! I wouldn't want our future leaders to be too insulated from this kind of thing. I actually do think the best leaders for the future probably should be coming from top public research universities rather than elite privates.

The washington monthly college rankings (and explanation of methodology) were really eye-opening. They asked "what have you done for us lately" - the idea being that if universities are going to receive massive amounts of federal research support (privates get a ton of government support) and enjoy a tax-exempt status, we should be asking what they do for everyone, rather than only those who are able to attend them. I'd recommend reading it for yourself, but generally speaking, they looked at public service (including military service), research output especially in science and engineering, and contribution to social mobility (percentage of low income students). They didn't consider sheer scale, though I think they should - if you can do this for 25,000 undergrads rather than just 5,000 on the same budget, shouldn't that also be considered a positive quality?

By this standard, ivies (according to wash monthly) do appear to be overrated (though interestingly, Stanford still scores very high). They generally don't produce the same quantity and quality of research in science and engineering that you see out of elite publics, they don't enroll very many students, and they especially don't enroll very may low income students (though those they do enroll are treated very generously).

UCs and other elite state schools, on the other hand, rise dramatically to the top.

So are "ivies" overrated? Well, depends on whether you get to attend one. If you're outside the wall, asking what universities are contributing the most to the general welfare, UCLA is probably a lot more valuable than an ivy. But if you get in? Well, you might want to seriously consider going to that ivy.