The right network is worth its weight in gold. Stanford or Cal MBA gives you access to all the right people. A huge contingent of other Bay Area high achievers to mix and mingle and start companies with and take investments from.

MBA from the University of Alabama would probably not do much for you in the Bay, but could be 10x as valuable as Cal in Atlanta or Birmingham.

There's a certain career path that seems to start with a top-tier MBA, and by one's 30s has one running a VC backed company as CEO (you have 40 employees and one of them is your executive assistant—can't let your CEO job take up your entire work day like it's a real job, after all!), sitting on the board of a couple others, "advisor" positions with a startup or two or a fund, self-promoting on social media constantly, and apparently still having plenty of time for family & kids (and for posting about how tough it is a busy working executive/entrepreneur/investor like you to find time for the long afternoon weekday family picnic, as part of the self-promoting social media posts).

It's like a whole other world. A world where you can have five jobs and none of them take more than a couple hours a day and all of them pay fat checks. WTF.

Oh but better make sure you own anything your little peon workers do in their off time. Wouldn't want them giving your business anything but their all, 40+hrs a week.

(source: snooping on Linkedin, mostly, plus conversations here and there)

Life is a rich gradient landscape.

Some paths are lower energy to climb than others.

It teaches you the value of Harvard on a resume. It teaches you the value of having rich and well connected contacts in your phone.

Elite schools move much faster and cover more material than a regular school would. Obviously with the smarter kids at the elite school they can get more advanced.

Do you have any examples of this? I don't feel people I have met from elite schools actually know more material theory then from other schools. If I look at online courses the content of those from elite schools doesn't differ much from courses I have taken in a non-elite school.

Not macro, no I don't have examples. Just my personal observation based on classes I took at an "elite" college vs. the ones taken by a friend at the state school.

I'm not sure this is as true that the MBA level. The benefits over a "regular" school are usually in networking and "better" recruitment.