There are many state schools that don’t require an insane ivy league resume to get into that have just as good or better paths to work in tech.
I used to believe that, since I knew so many self taught coders become pretty successful 10-15 years ago. But the typical Stanford grad to FAANG route has become a total laughable mockery of its former 'build shit to gain a reputation' ethos but explains why their is so much corruption in University admissions.
You can still be pretty successful without a university degree with the right connections, but now with so much unemployment and significant applicant noise to signal ratio I think we will continue to see this as the norm. Which is how so many founders get their start anyhow; Elon's story of being a shy nerd waiting in the lobby of a tech company hoping to talk to someone to no avail comes to mind being perhaps the most famous of this phenomenon.
With that said, I think this how the toxic Ivy league mentality of entitlement happens; they often justify their entitlement as something they deserve after years/decades of not 'living life enough.'
> they often justify their entitlement as something they deserve after years/decades of not 'living life enough.'
Possibly, although I suspect it's more an ego phenomenon. Where they're all aware they've hit the jackpot in global relative terms, but they see this as some type of weird manifest destiny and duty where they're now tasked with using their privilege to be elite agents of good in the world.
I'm not saying it true, simply a rationalization they use to justify it which you can see and feel in their behaviour; the only person I ever knew from Princeton was an engineer ( afirst generation immigrant?) Indian or Arab family (I forget but recall his community pics) and he was always super helpful but also very reluctant to talk about 'campus life' and preferred to help us understand the math and engineering aspects behind certain things in a car forum.
Not sure what happened to him, but this may explain why most like myself in University were completely over it by our sophomore year and openly bitched about it hindering our 'real lives' he, a PhD student at the time, was spending the majority of his time answering questions about things like unsprung mass, and analyzing home-brew ECU Turbo maps and hanging out with us at meetups eating BBQ with dirty, oily fingers than being amongst 'his own.'
Bill Gates: Harvard
Mark Zuckerberg: Harvard
Jeff Bezos: Princeton
Eric Schmidt: Princeton
Sundar Pichai: University of Pennsylvania (MBA)
Elon Musk: University of Pennsylvania
I don't think Ivy League kids are looking to just get their foot in the door; they're looking to be at the top.
I'm glad I took graduate coursework in advanced algorithms, signal processing, control systems, AI, etc. which followed on a course of differential equations, advanced linear algebra, probability, and so on.
There is a difference in computer science curricula, with more than a little bit of correlation with which tier school you go to. Without a solid theoretical background, you can become a decent engineer building a database-backed web application, but there's a world of possibilities closed off to you.
And those aren't skills you'll pick up on the job. If you're super-self-motivated, MOOCs and similar can do it, but I've found few adults able to invest the time to learn skills which don't have a pay-off for years. Differential equations or linear algebra aren't very helpful in isolation; it's the application which build on top of them which add value. That's a few semesters of study.