I grew up in NYC and was lucky enough (or smart enough, I suppose) to get into one of the top public high schools in the city. Because of that (and doing well enough in that school), I was able to squeak into Cornell via its wait list.

But I don’t come from connections: my mother was a receptionist and my father was a sanitation worker. For a while after college, I managed to find work doing backend development for various local businesses, but nothing fancy. But even that has dried up due to various reasons (including a major health issue I developed after graduating).

For some reason, it seems people in authority positions are irked by me due to my humble beginnings & my insistence on continual learning, even after graduating from school. If I had a penny (or I guess now, nickel?) for every time an interviewer asked me, “How did you learn that when you majored in Industrial Engineering,” I’d be a very rich man.

Or at least able to afford all the books I want to read. :(

You don’t become one of the wealthy just by going to school with them. You’re still an outsider, lesser, just one of the little people, not their sort.

> I guarantee (as I have before and you’re well aware) every Yale 2017/2018 grad in CS (or likely any quantitative degree) out earns me and my public school undergrad from 2018 and likely has a multiple of my net worth if they decided to pursue private sector employment instead of academia

What "public school" did you attend?

I can assure you that if you did some form of STEM at a top/mid UC, UIUC, UWash, GT, UT Austin, UMich, UNC Chapel Hill, and other similar caliber public schools in 17-18 you would have had the exact same opportunities and earning potential as a Yalie or Harvard grad. Most CS/ECE departments offer salary data for you to look at, and at least for my HS peers who attended Cal and UCLA their outcomes were the exact same if not better than my HS classmates at Yale.

I understand layoffs can be traumatic, but I've noticed a persistent negative streak in your comments here on HN and this mindset isn't going to help you.

Your first point is true, but an entirely different topic than ivy vs no-name schools. And yeah the networking benefits of top schools is absolutely their single biggest strength. See Microsoft or Apple for obvious examples. Highly capable people making a few highly capable friends, dropping out, and profiting.

This is something people just do not understand and is absolutely critical for reforming education. Elite schools do not create elite students, they enroll them. Around the pandemic numerous top schools chose to do away with standardized tests as a requirement for DEI type reasons. They're rapidly bringing them back - I know at least MIT/Dartmouth/Yale already have. And the reason is simple, which I'll quote Yale on:

"Yale’s research from before and after the pandemic has consistently demonstrated that, among all application components, test scores are the single greatest predictor of a student’s future Yale grades. This is true even after controlling for family income and other demographic variables, and it is true for subject-based exams such as AP and IB, in addition to the ACT and SAT." [1]

[1] - https://admissions.yale.edu/test-flexible

Once again this is just playing into silly stereotypes. The sort of positions you're describing, at least in cases where it's remotely desirable, are stupidly competitive - substantially moreso than e.g. FAANG positions. And these positions, particularly in finance are absolutely brutal, and completely unfit for the overwhelming majority of people. It's not like you flash a degree and you're off to a life of luxury.

BCG consultants and traders at Five Rings are very much not financially constrained after undergrad (about $100-200k difference between them but either way)