All of the schools that you listed there are in the top 1% of American universities. As for "a rite of passage into the economic elite", any of those will do. And there I don't mean "the Harvard elite" – I'm just talking about the upper middle class and above that most tech entrepreneurs, and presumably most of the people reading this site, come from.

Here's what I'm getting at: As per the article, parents who send their kids to an elite university to get a degree in creative writing aren't doing it because they're under the impression that they're getting vocational training, and nevertheless, it's probably a smart investment. Class cohesion is a pretty powerful force.

(Note: With all of this I'm not saying this is a good thing; just that social factors are as powerful as skills in determining at where someone falls in the economic ladder.)