Consciously? No. But a lot of it is related to the concept of culture fit. If a company's CEO loves golfing, chances are they are going to find more kinship with someone else who also lived a life that allowed for recreational golfing, whether that manifests itself in the way that the CEO and employee can make easy small talk or even spend time out on the course together. To varying degrees, I think the same applies to other social rites and shared experiences, whether it's going to college, joining the Greek system, playing sports, etc. etc. Hell I admit that I have an instinctive affinity to people who come from my home state of Iowa, even though logically I know that it's not true that people from Iowa are just "better" than those who didn't happen to be born within its borders...but a huge proportion of my best friends in New York were strongly connected to Iowa, whether it was because we grew up together or because "Oh, you're from Iowa?" led to the kind of conversation that help to upgrade a normal big city acquaintanceship into a real friendship. In the same way, I don't think a college degree is necessarily a binary switch/litmus test...it just opens up a lot more possibilities of shared/common experiences. And as CEOs/managers tend to be reside in the higher classes of society, college experience highly correlates with the kinds of things they've lived through.