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I'm loathe to believe that the trustees of Harvard or wherever are conducting an admissions policy that's intended to be some sort of finishing school for elites. The more logical explanation is that rich kids get in because their parents were alums and they get legacy admissions because their parents are in a position to donate money to the school. The main advantage of going to an Ivy is that you'll automatically get consideration from any employer if you have mediocre grades, because the test is in getting in at all, not how well you do there. Finish near the top of your class at Michigan, or Texas, or Georgia Tech, or UCLA or any other reputable state school and you'll get the same effect. If that isn't enough for you then there's always grad school; graduate programs have higher admission rates than undergrad and are less reliant on the whims of the admissions board. Got a 4.0 and perfect SATs in high school? Who doesn't these days? Got stellar grades at even a lesser public school like Oregon State and a good GRE (or LSAT or whatever) score? Welcome aboard.
Additionally, while the Ivies may be overrepresented among whoever it is that you're calling "elites", this overrepresentation is ultimately a minor phenomenon. I did an inquiry into this a while back and you'd be surprised how few of them have Ivy League diplomas. Take corporate America for example. If anyone can be considered elite in this country it would be the CEOs of the largest companies in America. But when I looked at the CEOs of the companies that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average, only a few have elite degrees. This makes sense at an intuitive level. Remember what I said above; a Harvard diploma gets you instant consideration at most companies. But it ends there. IF you parlay your Harvard degree into an entry-level management position at, say, 3M, good for you. It may have got you the job, but now that you have it you're among a ton of people who have entry-level management positions at 3M, the vast majority of whom didn't go to Harvard. And if you want to move up in the company your superiors could give a fuck where you went to college; hell, a lot of them probably won't even know where you went to college. Once you're in the real world, it's all about results, and if you can't hang, you aren't going to go anywhere.
The claim that professional promotion requires concrete accomplishments in a role is wrong or vacuous.
Plenty of people get promoted for "bad" reasons. Often they're just in the right place at the right time. Or they market themselves and their mediocre achievements effectively. Sometimes they sequester special knowledge, which makes them seem useful, even if they're not useful in any kind of wins above replacement sense. Sometimes they get credit for others' achievements, either because they take credit unethically, or because they're just kinda near an achievement and it falls on them by osmosis. Sometimes they've been in a role for a long time, and they're butting-up against the top of the compensation window for that level, so it's easier to promote them than not. Sometimes the panel making the promotion decision is sympathetic to them for various reasons. And on and on.
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I think the Supreme Court would be more elite. Harvard, Yale, Yale, Yale, Harvard, Harvard, Yale, Notre Dame, Harvard.
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