You did not flee for the woods after posting this thread (unlike the others). That’s noteworthy!
While I would like to find out why these “areas” are the “most obvious,” what “most obvious” means, and how one prevents the inquiry into the “most obvious” things from becoming a jeremiad and an irrelevancy, I’ll leave those questions alone.
“Start?” Such criticism is not new. It has lingered for long enough to become a parody of itself: those from “non-elite” schools say that they are freer, that they have more individuality, that they are more interesting than those from “elite” schools, reminiscent of the men who hasten to the highest point of a ship sinking in the ocean (c.f. Alberti–Dinner Pieces, “Fatum et Fortuna”), and instead of solving the problem, they become the monsters. Whether or not those Freethinkers are “correct” is trivial–they are chair à canon as much as anyone else, and Hobbes makes a clever argument in the Leviathan about the folly of similarly small distinctions among humans in strength and wit.
I have not seen anyone transgress the usual and trite “elite-bashing” threshold and say, “These ‘non-elite’ schools were founded by graduates of the ‘elite institutions,’ they run on money, they hire faculty and administrators who graduated from the ‘elites,’ they admit students who lived with the students that went on to attend the elites, they send students to the graduate schools of the elites, they use textbooks written by professors of the elites, their graduates breed with the sons and daughters of the elites… Perhaps the (intellectually honest) solution is to question the value of college itself.” College is a financial necessity, I have heard some say. What a farce! I trust that your school or your child’s school is the best compromise between financial necessity and institutional indoctrination.
The focus on the Ivy League reminds me of those non sequiturs and obsessions with odd details with which Gogol stuffed his stories.