Calling 99% of the world's universities irrelevant is certainly a take. And not a very intelligent one.
If Stanford was just filled with kids who got high test scores, that purpose would be gone. Plenty of startups have a story "we met in college" and one had brains and another had the social connections and family finances to make things happen.
Top schools are also entirely capable of attracting members of privileged elites to network at their events without shepherding them through the curriculum.
I went to an Ivy. That was not the point, and a lot of these comments have little in common with reality.
Let's be real, legacy admissions are about increasing donations to a school - everything else is just BS rationalization.
Society has managed to mess that pipeline up, first through massive student loans, and now through just general unemployment.
But the system worked for a long time.
The Ivy leagues are something different. Society can only have so many "elites", or else they stop being elite and just start being irritating rich people. There needs to be a path for new blood to enter the elites, so feeder lanes exist.
This all worked rather well for at least half the 20th century, but recently the elites have gone a bit too far into the "eat the poor" territory, and society is starting to crumble around the edges.
No, college started out as academic institutions of learning, not instruments of social mobility. It was never intended as a job training program, rather a place of academics to work together on a topic, and was heavily restricted to the aristocrats and elites from the start.
Alot of the problems here is stemming precisely from trying to use higher education for a purpose it was not originally designed to do.
People have completely forgotten why it mattered on resumes to begin with. Association with a university signaled an appreciation for philosophy, now it signals tolerance for administrative abuse.