I want to believe that all of this is true, because logically it makes perfect sense, but I just don't. People often get rejected from highly ranked schools just because their ECs aren't anything special, even if their numbers are just as good if not better, suggesting that "talent" may not be all that different. Although program directors say that school prestige doesn't rank that highly when considering applicants, you have to remember, that's on a conscious level. Whenever someone hears that someone else went to a brand name med school, they think "oooh nice", or something along those lines, and that really is at a subconscious, reactionary level.
I'm not saying that $100k is worth whatever extra prestige you get from going to one school over another. What I am saying is that it's a little naive and possibly wishful thinking to think the name of your medical school doesn't factor into residency decisions, even if the people making those decisions tells you it doesn't.
Really I just wanted to point out doubt in this case given the variables we have. In my book, to pay 100K extra the p better be less than .05 on prestige mattering, and it better be by a clinically significant magnitude as well. There is way too much doubt in this case, to me, to meet that threshold.
Speaking more generally, I'm not one of those people with my head in the clouds that thinks "as long as you have an MD everybody is looked at the same!!" I'm aware that name can matter. Just look at the list of Rhodes Scholars - there is a reason each year the plurality of the ones from the US come from Harvard and Yale (and it's often not because those students are actually "better" than the kid from the University of Chicago).
I agree that places like Harvard, Hopkins, Stanford, etc, will open doors in medicine (academic med, certain residency positions, etc) as well as outside (consulting, policy gigs where the public recognition of a school's name will matter, etc). I would actually be willing to say they are worth some (debatable whether that's 100k, but that's for another talk) extra money assuming one's goals are something that the Harvard, Hopkin, Stanford, etc name provides marginal value in reaching (aka running for political office, going into academic med at a Harvard-affiliate, etc). I also think "better" schools can provide resources - whether financial or simply a culture - that can make "succeeding" (using getting a spot in a prestigious residency, etc as the definition for succeed) more feasible. In this way, there are mechanisms I can conceive of where "better," wealthier schools provide the average student at their respective institution, all else being equal and incoming individual characteristics similar, more opportunities for success than some other schools can offer their students.
However, I think, in this case, even if the aforementioned pathways were taken to be mechanisms that affected outcomes beyond that reasonable doubt I mentioned earlier it still isn't worth 100k because (referring to the former point) UCLA isn't Harvard, Hopkins, Stanford, etc and (referring to the latter point) I still think a talented individuals can equalize the playing field with individual characteristics if you're comparing schools like UCD and UCLA.
TL;DR I actually do agree with you that we live in a world where prestige matters for outcomes and not just feel goods in some cases. I do, however, doubt that many of the cases where we think prestige mattered isn't actually a confounding variable (individual characteristics, etc) creating the effect we see, and I don't think the mechanism by which UCLA's prestige would actually affect any future outcomes is clear at all in this case, and certainly beyond 100k worth of doubt.
