Yes it can be, and you just did.

The people who routinely get the best jobs and keep them into their 30s and beyond are well connected people. It doesn’t matter whether they go to Ivies or other schools.

If connectedness could be controlled for, I think you would find that the most connected people at Ivies, Stanford, UMich, UTexas, NYU, etc. (let’s call it top 10%) are much more similar in terms of steep career trajectory than less connected top graduates (e.g., top 10% in gpa) even from the most prestigious schools. This is doubly true if you control for SES in addition to connectedness.

For folks who are not natively from these well-connected classes of people, it is possible to make a big jump in “opportunities”, but in practice that means socially integrating oneself into the elite class as an outsider (tough to do and rare) or finding work in a handful of places that facilitate social climbing (e.g., Goldman, also relatively rare).

Your median elite school grad will find it slightly easier to end up on the higher end of the SES class that they were already in, although even that is not a guarantee.

This is not nearly as life-changing as you make it out it be.

> All the people I know who went to Stanford got very nice, “cushy” jobs straight out of college. Most of the people I know who went to state schools had to bust their asses for years at much less pleasant work before they worked their way up to the nicer jobs.

I’m pretty sure that there are a large number of SJSU grads (a CSU school, of all things!) who would like to say hello. Plenty of them got and get “cushy” jobs straight out of school, with the folks who were already connected and/or worked on their connections taking the lead.

I have posted about this before on HN: One thing that is frequently overlooked, better schools (usually) have better/smarter students. My first uni was medium famous. My second uni was part of Cal[ifornia] State. The first was full of intelligent, highly engaging students. The second was... well, much less. The best parts of my uni education were working with other highly intelligent people on hard engineering problems. My second uni felt like an intellectual desert, but, hey, I got my degree.

More: Good schools act as a filter for employers. Why look for "diamonds in the rough" at a low quality school, when you can pay marginally more salary and get much better students at medium quality and above schools? I am on the hiring side now. I rarely find a diamond in the rough from a low quality school. The best candidates are mostly from the best unis. The same is true for former employer. If your CV has a bunch of low quality companies, you are also likely low quality. Again, rare exceptions exist. I won't name the employer: But one has had a 100% failure rate during interviewing. It is so bad, that I now regularly discard CVs with this current employer... unless the CV has something exceptional.

In closing, what if you are a diamond in the rough? My advice: Change employers as often as possible in your industry & country. Each change needs to be a step up the reputation ladder. If a sideways move, make sure you get title and/or money. In my last employer move, I move down one step in reputation. The quality of employees is much lower here than my other higher rep employers.

The US median income is still around $70k. An extra 40k - $3 grand a month - goes far.