Maybe it does help if your goal is to attend a top 3 medical or law school, and then go on to equally impressive practices after, or if you want to go into very very high level investment banking or something. It's shouldn't be a terribly controversial statement to say that if you want to be one of the top in the world in a given field you probably need to go to one of the top universities. Even then you'll find plenty of people from University of Whatever in those classes.

I worked with a guy who had a Bachelor's from Harvard and was a mid-level HR manager in a boring suburban part of a boring state for a company nobody has ever heard of. Not everyone from Harvard is killing it.

But it doesn't. The paper (https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/C...) is ultimately flawed because it doesn't (and cannot) evaluate the simplest thing:

look at people who are accepted to the top schools who do not attend. The problem with using waitlist and is that waitlist is ultimately as arbitrary as rejection and not some arbiter of a "marginal acceptance". The entire premise of their argument is flawed to begin with.

Furthermore it goes into jobs held after selection and are highly fixated on "social" jobs, e.g. politicians and supreme court justices, which are inherently scarce and highly likely to be stratified in such a way that is perpetuated by elitism, irrespective of "elite colleges".

In the end the authors (who are from the very schools they think are perpetuating issues ironically) miss the point. Definitionally elite colleges want elite results. Their call to diversify the background of their students and thus the future leaders is inherently at odds with this unless those diversity people already had a propensity to be elite, by definition.