There are plenty of extraordinarily capable people outside of elite colleges. In The Bell Curve they mention SAT statistics for top verbal scores. Although the

There are plenty of extraordinarily capable people outside of elite colleges. In The Bell Curve they mention SAT statistics for top verbal scores. Although their point was to show extreme concentration of talented people at the elite schools, it also shows how many are outside of them: 90% of the top scorers were not in Harvard/Yale 69% were outside of the top ten universities 40% were outside of the top fifty universities