Sort of.
1. It’s a place where capital can make friends with capable people who will be willing to work for them later.
2. It gives the smart and ambitious “commoners” enough exposure to elite social circles such that they can learn and adapt some/most of the social standards (if they choose to do so, which most don’t). This is important, as all the brains in the world won’t do you much good if you don’t fit in, especially when it comes to the bigger money positions.
3. The social shibboleths between the two groups are very real, and it usually takes less than 5 minutes hanging around someone to know which group they are in. There can be some false signals about being higher status, but those are hard to sustain for very long.
Note that many “commoners” who go to elite schools end up hitting a glass ceiling in their 30s or so due to focusing on being smart and a skill person rather than being a socially savvy person. The social people will be able to make it rain later in life, and the skill people just get shifted around as needed.
Quite some time ago, I read the claim on HN that in the USA, elite universities rather serve the purpose that
- "rich/elite" kids, and
- highly smart and ambitious kids
get mixed together so that when they finish university, these groups become (mostly) indistinguishable. The reason why this a central purpose of elite universities is that these two groups need each other.