A common path is:
Graduate Stanford => Work at Mckinsey => Get hired into VC.
Graduate Stanford => Raise 15 Million dollar series A with your buddy => Doesn't matter what happens you will end up rich.
It's not a cynical opinion, I have seen it myself and I am doing very well for myself. I worked under an Economics PhD who was the number one in his class (top 5 phd program) and graduated top of his undergrad at UPenn. His incompetence relative to his credentials shattered my respect for the way that we allocate positions of power
Maybe the west coast is different but everyone I know (including a fair number of people who went to Harvard) who's in any position of power didn't have "tool around doing whatever and don't F up" as their career summary until that point. They had success upon success. While some of them didn't necessarily choose big grand things to spend that time doing, they were all successful at it. Nobody just went with the flow.
The "not bad but not great either" people who were just lucky enough to have opportunity early on but don't have the skill to keep turning the opportunity into success (or just want to chill and raise a family) tend to seem shoehorned onto career paths that dead end somewhere in middle management.
I think the issue is more that we have a lot of positive feedback cycles/signal boosting that occur based on early career opportunities. I don't think research fraud is necessarily part of it though, because once you're accepted into a PhD program at a top program you're probably going to graduate anyway; same with undergrad. But the signal boosting is very real, and I find it especially problematic given how much luck there is in things like getting into a certain college.
I'd imagine that these to-be MBA-holders will seek positions at less grind-y places. Would not surprise me if a lot of them went to join VC firms, or product manager jobs at larger firms, before VC.
The number of people who make "correct, active decisions" is vanishingly small.
It's less they've cheated than "Did you really make correct decisions or did your coin just come up heads 8 times in a row?" Other people may have been as smart or smarter, but if the coin flip went tails, they get politically hammered.
Success has a large part of "survivor bias" to it.
Not quite running the FED, but look at the years, pretty close.
Orszag earned an A.B. summa cum laude in economics from Princeton University in 1991 after completing an 80-page long senior thesis titled "Congressional Oversight of the Federal Reserve: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives."[11] He then received a M.Sc. (1992) and a Ph.D. (1997) in economics from the London School of Economics.
He served as Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy (1997–1998), and as Senior Economist and Senior Adviser on the Council of Economic Advisers (1995–1996) during the Clinton administration. Director of the OMB by 2008.
Obamas speechwriter were in their early 20s as well for instance.
The Fed is way more stringent - - a fresh PhD would be an analyst or research associate, nothing more.
State departments and organizations have a lot more hierarchy for better or worse.
Presumably once those people are in such high-power positions, they also have a track record of real accomplishments behind them; it's certainly possible they've lied and cheated their entire career but it's definitely less likely they'll make it that far that way.