Well, actually... Let me provide a little insight. My daughter, a future engineer, has dropped MIT from her top choice to off the list. There are many schools that are nearly as good, and despite rankings, better than MIT.
Here's another cool little anecdote: I was in a meeting with director from NIST, along with another researcher and our director. He was in town to give a lecture as part of a regular lecture series we conduct through the school year, and I was meeting with him one-on-one to ask questions about the intersection of IT and power grid operations. He was relaying a story about some engineering project that they had asked MIT researchers for help on.
Suddenly our director burst out laughing. Said he couldn't contain it anymore. He says, "Yeah, we know about that project. We're the people MIT called when they couldn't figure it out."
The moral of the story: MIT is marketing machine. As a rule, they are over-ranked in nearly every category, and rely on a historical perspective rather than a current one.
It's hard to do, and it feels lousy. The alumni who feel closest to this case are probably people who spent a lot of time making stuff. When they donate, they're more likely to target their money at helping other people make stuff, by donating to things like the Edgerton Center [1], MITERS [2], or SIPB [3], or even just giving money directly to dorm governments (my hall had a PIC burner sitting next to the toaster on our kitchen counter and a couple of oscilloscopes you could check out from the front desk, courtesy of some slush fund somewhere).
When these alumni donate, they're not doing it to get their name on a plaque, or out of some kind of broad-based affinity for the school, they're doing it to help current students have the same kind of experiences they were able to enjoy. And if they stop donating, it's pretty easy to see the culture of creation suffering. People will keep making stuff, but it'll be a little more difficult, require a little more dedication, and it'll wind up being fewer people. That's a significant price to pay to stand on a principle.
[1] http://web.mit.edu/edgerton/ [2] http://miters.mit.edu/ [3] http://sipb.mit.edu/