Elite colleges are not selling education, except to the extent that they have to maintain standards to keep their position. They are selling networking cachet.
I attended Swarthmore College and got a totally bitching education. I would recommend Swarthomre to anybody with better than about 740's on her SATs. For a regular smart kid, Swarthmore educationally is probably a lot of work, and may be valuable but it is not the value proposition I got or that I understand. For me, the incredible quality of the student body and highly motivated and intelligent professors produced an education I do not think you could get no matter how good the profs are if the students were more regular.
My grad-school mate at Caltech, another place with incredible educational results that are not available at lesser institutions, attended Harvard undergrad. His education appeared to be similarly outstanding to the one I got at Swarthmore.
So elite universities may be selling networking cachet, and that may be what some of their customers intend to be buying. But for really smart kids, an elite school is a serious educational opportunity that non-elite schools cannot match.
I certainly do agree that getting a free ride through a good university is a great deal!
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.