It's a mistake to think anything "elite" want's to "level the playing field".

Elite colleges, like anything "elite", (clubs, sports/ entertainment celebrities, gated communities, etc.), are a construct first designed to allocate scarce resources. As long as a degree from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, etc, are a scarce commodity, fairness will always give way to the institutional imperative to restrict supply in order to inflate perceived value. Those who have $$$ or power enough to leap over the masses who don't will do so because they feel they have "earned" the right.

The real variable at work now is that higher education as an industry has priced itself out of offering a reasonable return on investment while at the same time, technology now makes it possible for anyone to be "educated", albeit remotely, by a world-class lecturer rather than a disaffected grad student for little to no cost at all. The incremental cost of delivering a lecture from a Nobel Prize winning economist to a student thousands of miles away sitting at their laptop is close to zero.

One no longer has to go to an elite college to get an elite education. It's only those who work and attend elite schools that desperately want that to be true. They want it to be true, so they can justify and hold on to their tenured positions, bureaucrat's salary and guaranteed entry into the socioeconomic elite class.

It's all being blown away by the winds of change. Without scarcity, there can be no elitism.

It's time for education to enter the 21st Century and develop a new paradigm.