This essay is weakened significantly by one glaring clanger. If this person had equal levels of talent and yet wasn’t from the place they are, they would never make the foolish statement: “exposure to prestige can't make you successful any more than spending time around rich people can make you wealthy”.

Apart from that I think they’ve got some of the causality the wrong way around. Consulting and finance are not buying excellence, they’re buying prestige. If you become excellent, no-one in top tier FTC will care, except maybe the T strand of that. F and C never wanted your excellence, they wanted to use your prestige as a cover for extracting large fees from high net worth individuals and companies respectively. The T strand is interesting, because the value of your prestige here isn’t to the company as a whole, but rather this is just another high net worth company you as an individual can target to extract high fees from using prestige as your weapon.

So if you’re an Ivy league grad, generally your most valuable asset is your prestige, not your skill. You can make an entire career based on being prestigious, so long as you’re careful not to dilute it. And this is why T is grouped with F and C: if you take a career inside top tier FTC, you maintain your prestige, outside it you dilute your prestige, and therefore dilute your most valuable asset.

The point that he’s missing is that Ivy league grads are not the top students. They are the most prestigious students. The top students in terms of excellence are scattered around the country/world and most come from universities you’ve never heard of. And will hopefully succeed by sheer excellence. And companies that hire these students will rise, and companies that hire prestigious students over the excellent students will fall (unless their business model is based on the projection of prestige).

So he doesn’t need to worry about the future. The future is fine. Him and his classmates were never the future, except for the future of extracting large fees from high net worth individuals and companies.

All that said, it’s nothing but great if he’s deciding to start playing the excellence game and stop playing the prestige game. I just think he’ll be surprised at how close to zero he’s located at within that game if he starts playing it in earnest.