Well, since I posted these as a response to your post in another thread, I guess I'll post them here as well.
1. You claim that 95% of CEOs at top 500 companies did not go to an Ivy or top school. However, at least in 1990, this was not the case.
from _Fortune_ Magazine.
IF YOU WANT to become chief executive of a FORTUNE 500 company, where should you go to college? Judging by past performance, you'd better practice singing ''Boola Boola'' and tune up your Whiffenpoofs repertoire. Yale tops all schools in its share of alumni CEOs, with Princeton a strong second, followed by the 64 other colleges in the table at right. The big names near the top of the list are those you might expect. But when the schools' ability to graduate future CEOs is adjusted for class size (see the Power Factor column), a few lesser-known institutions outshine the giants. Relatively speaking, tiny Washington & Lee of Lexington, Virginia, has launched more alumni toward the corner office than mighty Harvard. Earlier this year we asked 1,891 present and former CEOs of FORTUNE 500 and Service 500 companies to tell us where they went to school and what they studied. (At 109 companies the original CEO was still in charge.) We also asked where they went for their graduate degrees. Nearly 1,500 top executives replied. The Ivy League racked up the most impressive numbers. A total of 156 CEOs graduated from these eight universities, which are considered some of the most prestigious in the nation. Among the 43 current CEOs who helped Yale earn the valedictory spot: Roberto Goizueta of Coca-Cola, Samuel Heyman of GAF, and John Akers of IBM. Princeton boasts 32 CEO alumni; Norman R. Augustine of Martin Marietta went there. Harvard is alma mater for 25, including Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems and Colman Mockler Jr. of Gillette. The other schools of the Ivy League each turned out more than ten of today's CEOs, with the exception of the University of Pennsylvania (eight) and Brown (four). The dominance of the Ivy League is, if anything, increasing: Whereas 14% of the former CEOs surveyed hold Ivy League degrees, nearly 19% of the current CEOs do. The Big Ten schools of the Midwest also stand out. They graduated 88 current corner-office occupants. Northwestern leads the group with 19, followed by the University of Michigan with 13 and the University of Illinois with 11.
EDIT: I did find this for more recent information:
USATODAY.com - Wanted: CEO, no Ivy required
"A study by executive search firm Spencer Stuart found that the percentage of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies who were educated at Ivy League schools declined from 16% in 1998 to 11% in 2004. Even the Harvard MBA shows signs of erosion. Among large-company CEOs who have MBAs, 28% received their degrees at Harvard, according to the 1998 study. By 2004, that had slipped to 23%."
2. You claim that "Studies ( check out study by Princeton professors) have shown that the lifetime earnings of ivy league graduates do NOT exceed that of graduates from state schools."
While true, there is an important exception: poor students
from the NYTimes
Recent research also suggests that lower-income students benefit more from an elite education than other students do. Two economists, Alan B. Krueger and Stacy Berg Dale, studied the earnings of college graduates and found that for most, the selectivity of their alma maters had little effect on their incomes once other factors, like SAT scores, were taken into account. To use a hypothetical example, a graduate of North Carolina State who scored a 1200 on the SAT makes as much, on average, as a Duke graduate with a 1200. But there was an exception: poor students. Even controlling for test scores, they made more money if they went to elite colleges. They evidently gained something like closer contact with professors, exposure to new kinds of jobs or connections that they couldn’t get elsewhere.