“Elite colleges provide lots of luxury goodies. Some of them may be things like fancy dorms or amenities, but more important (to me, anyway) are things like lots of famous people coming to campus to give speeches…”
In D1’s freshman year at Harvard she lived in the dorm that also houses the University President’s office on the ground floor of the same building. And pretty much all of the famous people who come to campus (and they are legion) first call on the president to be formally welcomed to the campus. So kids in D’s dorm would sometimes watch out the windows to see the famous person in question being escorted to the building and then rush down the stairs and outside in time to “bump into” and greet the celebrity out on the sidewalk, maybe get to shake his/her hand. They could get to meet everyone from Paris Hilton to former US presidents that way.
But I never saw very much of what be called luxury goodies or fancy dorms. The dorms there were much more old and traditional than fancy or luxurious.