If they have a magic recipe for creating success, why can't other universities copy it? Does it depend on scarce elite professors? In that case, they probably can't scale themselves up either.
Excerpt from article*: In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper** by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.
* - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...
That kind of misses the point. You want to train as many effective engineers and researchers as you can. The point of the article is that most Ivies can comfortably train more people, but doing so would reduce some of the scarcity "value" of an Ivy League degree. Who cares? The goal is building.
Claude Shannon and Kelly Johnson both got their start at Michigan. The Michigan model of "train as many engineers as you can without compromising substance" is a great. If the Ivies want to create artificial scarcity to avoid "diluting brand value", then their ability to access public subsidies should be curtailed. Give it to Michigan instead.