A much cheaper state school in a cornfield can get you a quality education. Harvard and Yale are more about getting invited to the right dinner-parties.
Getting invited to the right dinner parties can be worth orders of magnitudes more than a quality education. I should know, I’ve only ever been invited to the wrong dinner parties!
I’m assuming you mean startup founders (be sure to genuflect when you say that) but I can all but guarantee that the overwhelming majority of business founders in the US did not attend Ivy League schools.
Though these startup founders are both directly and indirectly funded by the power structures (investment firms, think tanks, the government) maintained by these Ivy League school graduates.
Think how all these startups are getting loads of "trickled-down" money from the Fed's money printer. Look at the list of chairs of the Federal Reserve and most of them are from prestigious Ivy League schools, you get what I mean.
The take that the economic elite are mostly from Ivy League schools feels markedly different than the take that most people who found startups are from Ivy League schools.
But not everybody can go and be slavemasters, so if you're going to pick arbitrarily who can do it, why not use race in the criteria?
Everybody can know how atoms work, and read Cicero, and figure out where on the shore a boat traveling diagonally will land if the wind is picking up at a given rate. Increasing the human knowledge pie in that way is what universities claim to do.
