I can only speak for healthcare and engineering. In these fields, first jobs are pretty egalitarian, and advancement is meritocratic. There’s no correlation between undergraduate institution and medium or long term outcomes.
I’m not picking on MIT, but every year students with great in state engineering programs, faced with the good deal option or MIT, chose MIT because they’re afraid not to.
Using Michigan as an example, that’s a $176,000 difference over 4 years assuming no aid at either institution. Invested over a 40 year career at historical market rates, that’s over $2,500,000 after inflation. That’s the opportunity cost of choosing MIT. A student would need to make that much more to break even.
Will they? Very unlikely. The average salary for Mechanical Engineers 2 years out of MIT is $79,000. It’s $74,000 for Michigan.
There is only one NASA facility director who didn’t go to a state school for undergrad, and he went to RPI.
Again, I’m not saying that the cheapest option is the best. Not every cheap option is as good as Michigan (or Berkeley, Illinois, Purdue, Cal Poly, Wisconsin, etc.). There are a lot of fear based inaccurate assumptions in choosing a school though.
We have a good in state flagship for engineering that my son did not choose. He went to a state school in an adjacent state that fit his wants list better and cost about $50k more.