Here's my 1987 Sedra and Smith 2nd ed. which I bought new for the course also in 1987. There's no price tag on it, but I'm sure it was well over $50.
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I got my BS and MS at a small state university that was founded as a land grant A&M school in the late 19th century. It became a full University some decades later. It was, and still is, the best engineering school in the state. Tuition my freshman year in engineering was $780 per semester. I lived on campus in the cheapest (shabbiest) dorm for about $500 per semester. I had a five day meal plan (three buffet style meals per day in two campus cafeterias) for another $500 per semester. Books were $200-350 per semester depending on what I could find used. Add in some weekend expenses and I was still under $5k per year. I worked part time and summers in high school to help pay for it and also had summer jobs through my MS.
Grad school was cheaper because I applied for and was accepted for a lab TA position every semester except my first. Tuition was reduced rate for TAs, so my main expenses were food, board, and books.
The same BS degree course at the same school with similar room and board is now well over $30k per year. The cheap dorms were demolished and replaced with relatively luxurious housing (and fewer rooms). As a result most undergrads now live off-campus. The school allowed the undergrad population to expand from about 12k in the mid 80s to around 20k currently. Administrative growth has far outpaced core academic growth in personnel and expenses. On-campus facilities are more like club med than an academically focused campus.
I was fortunate that my parents had saved for my education (and my younger brothers) on their modest salaries. I did my best to help as well. Even if I had taken out a 20k loan for my BS I could have paid it off in 2-4 years with ease. Starting salaries now are 3-4x higher than in the late 80s when I graduated, but the degree cost ratio is significantly more than that.
As for Ivy League or other elite schools...I worked in Silicon Valley for most of my career. Many hiring managers view degrees from Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, and the like as critical to success. Of course many of them graduated from those schools, so there's an elitist bias at work as well.
I have been involved in interviewing and hiring for perhaps 100 engineering positions over that time. I worked at a dozen different companies. I worked with a lot of different people from all races, creeds, and backgrounds. Some of the best engineers I know came from smaller and "less prestigious" schools and modest means. Some of the worst came from the big name schools. Overall it was a wash. What's important is the individual, their drive, their attitude, their curiosity, and their ability to work on a team, not what name is at the top of their degree.
