Lets say you have two people.
1 who went to an ivy league and gets a great job at an investment bank and another who went to a community college, but spent most of their free time self studying and building a startup that ends up being valued at, say, 10 million dollars.
Which of these two people is smarter, more successful, and/or a harder worker?
My answer is "I don't know". Both people have their strengths and weaknesses.
The school that you went to, no matter if it is an ivy league or a community college, is just a single aspect about you.
There are many paths to success and aspects about you as a person, and I would not say that what college degree someone got is even close to the most important or predictive factor about a person's life or how successful they are going to be.
Sure but then we're just replacing one form of hierarchy with another, where we replace company tiers with school tiers, and job titles with degrees.
> The problem is that the common, pro-fancy degree perspective comes from a very hierarchical perspective that just isn't true at all.
You don't think there's any truth in that an Ivy League school is more selective than a community college? I'm not saying that it makes sense to say that Harvard > Stanford, in all ways, or even that these schools have a fair selection system, but it seems to me that this has become a black-and-white affair (pro-degree vs. anti-degree, pro-hierarchy vs. anti-hierarchy) rather than a nuanced issue.