That's not quite true. There is little evidence that if you go to Penn instead of Penn State you have different results, but there are caveats. First, you have to be able to get into both.

[edit]The studies control for selection, so the ones showing no increase in wages are studying the same cohort at Penn and Penn State, but there are more students at Penn State that are not members of that cohort than there are students at Penn.

Second, you need to go to a college with enough people and have access to a similar cohort of intelligent, hard-working and advantaged students.

>If you take Albert Einstein and you put him in a community college, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and you're still going to just be you at Harvard.

Maybe so - most people aren't Albert Einstein, though, and that Harvard degree gets you a look at places where the community college degree does not.