> The head start you get from an elite school in the US, in things that have nothing to do with education per se, can not be overstated.
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.