"Networking" makes it sound more active than it really is. It's just who they are meeting over those four years. The friends they make, the professors they meet and perhaps work with, the guest lecturers they're able to talk to, the parents of friends that they meet on the holidays who make calls to help land internships. The companies that show up to the career fair.

Over four years, there's a big difference in your future prospects if you were meeting people with ties to Google, Berkshire, Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Meta, et al., vs meeting people from Garmin (<$100k/year for fresh CS grads, when I graduated) and small local midwestern companies. Even if you don't get direct referrals to those big-name places, you're talking to people who know what a resume that can get in there looks like, rather than having to blindly follow whatever advice you can find online.

Harvard has a page about it: https://careerservices.fas.harvard.edu/blog/2025/04/04/how-t...

There's a saying I like. "The harder I work, the luckier I get." I interpret it as working hard allows you to take advantage of more opportunities. The opportunities are luck based, but your ability to capitalize on them are not.

So I'm saying I agree with your point. A lot of networking is opportunities. The elite universities' edge isn't in making people better, it is in presenting more opportunities. They say meritocracy but the service they provide is connecting rich kids with smart kids. If the opportunities are coming through the rich kids then they can't get rid of legacy admissions. At least not as long as we live in a society where you need things like investments to fund ideas or where money is an opportunity vehicle. Personally, I just don't like that we play this game of calling one thing another.