Can an Ivy League education possibly be worth the money on intell

In my opinion most Ivy League schools and Stanford have lacked superior qualitative analytical training for some time.  Without this, what could possibly justify their reputation? Probably nothing.  My opinion is based on 4 years of Exeter, 4 years of Stanford, and 8 years at Yale where I served as head TA for two of the largest classes in both the History of Art and the Anthropology departments.  This experience hardly makes me an expert but it does give me  real first hand experience.
As the requirements for tenure have intensified, teaching has taken a backseat to publishing.   In the minds of most young professors it is publish or perish.  While teaching evaluations are important, it is easy enough to get high evaluations by simply giving more As.
To compensate for this lack of student attention students' egos rather than their minds are being augmented.  This, I guess, saves money.  The “You are the best and the brightest”speeches are given in regular intervals, famous speakers are invited, great buildings are built, but the 18 to 21 year minds remain somewhat neglected.  Big building make for better photo ops. 
Analytical thinking, in my opinion, is best taught through rigorous debate and argument driven writing.  Students must develop their own ideas and they must have these ideas challenged again and again.    This requires significant personalized attention, serious intellectual energy, and cannot be done in conveyor belt  lecture halls. Most big Ivys, at least from what I could see, offer very little of this.
In addition, in an age of intellectual polishers and regurgitators, most teachers do not have the intellectual fundamentals to make very good trainers.  Most of us had very narrow intellectual backgrounds based on transient intellectual fads.  Success in academia is built more on big political networks than big ideas.  It is the age of the “committee commando”.  To make matters worse, in this age of political correctness, debate is almost forbidden.
Our admission system selects for  students who will study for meaningless test without complaint, who will submit to authority, tolerate boredom , and who will choose very high quality, nuanced  imitation over the dangers and pitfall of originality whenever possible.
Yet this triumph of careerism over intellectualism can not be blamed entirely on the students or the professors.  The civilization is simply exhausted.  Besides a few hot fields like Biotech most intellectual disciplines, especially in the humanities or social sciences, have run their course.  Any new ideas are generally trivial.  There are few protean leaps (Jarrod Diamond possibly being the first in quite a few decades).  I used to joke that my only authentically intellectual conversations were with Taxi cab drivers.  Untrained as they were they still retained some intellectual curiosity and some enjoyment of ideas.  
If what I am saying is at least partially correct, then what do big brand schools really offer? Entree into big brand companies like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Citibank.  Student pride in subtle but effective sycophancy, nuanced hyper conformity, and  petty pragmatism seem to be well rewarded in these institutions
While Big schools always fed big companies the spirit of intellectualism was probably once  a bit more vigorous.  Few students today could get through the textbooks written in the 1960s.  Many disciplines from physics to anthropology have been “dumbed down”.  Teachers also could devote more energy to actually teaching.  In addition, students were still students and not “customers”” like the are today.  As such, they could be flunked when they under performed and grade inflation was not mandatory as it is so often today. Probably the only dramatically improved academic skill today is ETS test taking.  
In the age in which the Big Company is so clearly in decline would not the same be true of the Big School?  I would think so..  Brand name schools, brand name hand bags, and brand name goods in general speak to a cultural exhaustion where consumers no longer want the burden of personal taste or choice. They would rather outsource these  decisions to the big brands for the pleasure of instant two dimensional approval.  Some might argue the primary value of the Big Brand School is fetishistic, it is  a highly expensive talisman we can hold onto in our increasingly desperate age.