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Vaniver comments on High School, Human Capital, Signaling and College Admissions - Less Wrong
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Mostly Caplan, other papers (here's two studies with commentary), and a prior determined mostly by a broader version of hereditarianism (seeing most of a person's 'quality' as fixed by reaching adulthood, so a combination of biological and early environmental effects). Just IQ is apparently 40%, add in Conscientiousness and it's likely to cross 50%, and now we're in the territory where it's mostly ability bias.
Now, so long as the treatment effect is positive there's an argument for going to an elite school, but since elite schools are expensive (both in cash and in signalling to get there) the treatment effect needs to be above some threshold to be worthwhile, and I haven't run the numbers to figure out where I think that threshold is.
Perhaps this is implicit in what you say, but signaling and social networking benefits from going to an Ivy League may play major roles independently of human capital.
I try to use the phrase "treatment effect" to encompass both capital improvements and social networking, "sheepskin effect" to encompass signalling, and "selection effect" to encompass ability bias. It seems to me that social capital (i.e. knowing other people and them knowing you) could be wrapped into human capital directly without much loss.