Private schools all have the same nominal tuition.
They didn't used to. The prices have become more similar. When I attended Loyola, it cost half as much as an elite college. Now it costs about the same. This is very strange, and I wonder what allows non-elite private colleges to charge so much now.
Anyway, I see his point was sort-of valid, because Berkeley has a much lower nominal tuition. It seems somehow I missed that on my first reading? But this is not especially helpful, because most states don't have state colleges with elite standing. All I can think of off-hand is Berkeley and U of Michigan. People from out-of-state must pay much higher tuitions, which are (last I checked, years ago) scaled to the school's status.
[Added: Solipsist made good comments that partially account for the phenomenon, and Douglas_Knight pointed out that the figure of $200m+ below should be $30m+]
This article reports that Harvard has 2,964 alumni worth $200+ million, with a total wealth of $622 billion. These figures are staggering:
Note that Bill Gates "only" has ~$75 billion and that Mark Zuckerberg "only" has ~$30 billion, so that they don't account for Harvard's decisive advantage over other universities.
What is going on here? Why would Harvard come out ahead by such a large margin? Its acceptance rate is smaller than those of Stanford, Yale and Princeton, but by no more than 25%. Moreover, this has been true historically
One can ask a similar question of University of Pennsylvania, which is significantly less selective than Yale and Princeton, but has a decisive advantage over them.
Some possible explanations for the discrepancy:
Regardless of which of these explanations hold, there remains a question of why they would hold.
Is Harvard a better choice than other universities for students who aspire to be wealthy than other top schools?