This may be true in some fields, but not others... My partner is in academia outside of STEM, and I've seen some of the 'winners' that come out of Stanford and

This may be true in some fields, but not others... My partner is in academia outside of STEM, and I've seen some of the 'winners' that come out of Stanford and Harvard whose only contribution is that they had a lot more funding available for their fieldwork. They didn't tend to be any more intelligent, and certainly were on average less hard working. They did have wealthier parents on average, however.