Assuming that students at elite institutions are smarter going in then the curriculum can be designed assuming that the students will pick up complicated topics more quickly. So they have time to simply teach more stuff.
For example I am in the UK and studied computing at an FE college (probably equivalent to a US community college) and also at a "red brick" university.
Both courses contained introductory Java programming modules. At university the first few lectures were spent whizzing through the Java syntax and by about the fifth lecture we were being introduced to BST implementations.
The college course took about the same time to explain the difference between an object and a class and many students still struggled.
Of course if you are comparing "good college" to "really good college" the difference in intelligence might be much more minimal and admission comes down to whoever studied the hardest for their exams.
For example I am in the UK and studied computing at an FE college (probably equivalent to a US community college) and also at a "red brick" university.
Both courses contained introductory Java programming modules. At university the first few lectures were spent whizzing through the Java syntax and by about the fifth lecture we were being introduced to BST implementations.
The college course took about the same time to explain the difference between an object and a class and many students still struggled.
Of course if you are comparing "good college" to "really good college" the difference in intelligence might be much more minimal and admission comes down to whoever studied the hardest for their exams.