I did read to the end, but I didn't really see anything in there indicating that there is still a benefit to going to an elite school. I just read it again, and still didn't see anything.

My interpretation of this essay is that one's success won't be predicated on which school you go to, and that is the point that I am disagreeing with. Did I misinterpret the point of the essay?

[4] At the best colleges you learn more from other students than from your professors. You should be able to reproduce this at almost any college by making a conscious effort to find smart friends, instead of leaving it to chance.

I.e. the benefit of going to an elite college is that you get almost for free something you have to work at otherwise: knowing lots of smart people.

Ah. I guess being in the footnote made me think it was more of an offhanded comment than a major counterpoint to the premise of the essay. Perhaps in an edited version, this should get its own paragraph.

Ok, a lot of people seemed to be commenting about this, so I pulled that point out of the footnote and up into the body of the essay.

I think I see what happened. When you read, "Colleges differ," you took "you wouldn't be missing much" as the context. This is largely due to "So it is with colleges."

Earlier, in "Colleges are a bit like exclusive clubs" I think pg intended "a bit" to communicate that what he's saying about exclusive clubs is less true for colleges. Humans read differently from computers, and those two tiny words are easily lost. "So it is with colleges" dominates.