More likely is that the child of prominent academics might actually be more intelligent than average themselves and certainly provided more opportunity to flourish.
I'm confused as to what you are asking - Jane St certainly hires plenty of people out of college not for nepotism reasons.
The fact that he did not have a prior job before college is not evidence he was hired for nepotism.
Let me guess - he also got into MIT through nepotism as well.
I know kids who definitely got in because of parents money, but it certainly did not impact their grading.
What grade inflation really means is that for many, if not all, majors at a school like Harvard, you can take a path of classes that will end up with you completing your major and having a high GPA.
That said, there are certainly classes that will be much less nice to you when grading and have a self-selected group of students. My guess is that if JS has enough people from, say, Harvard, they will know the difference between a student who took hard upper level courses to complete their major vs. just the simple basics.
In terms of why this grade inflation is so prevalent, one reason I think is that faculty want to have students in their courses/run a "superstar" course, and students select classes with the easiest grading policy. Schools like MIT (and Princeton as well) specifically combat this and so are known for grade deflation.
I'll let others decide on whether they find that reasoning convincing!
It seems entirely reasonable to me that Jane Street would consider a Bachelor's degree from MIT in math or computer science, being clever, and a prior internship at Jane Street as qualification to work at Jane Street.
> Jane St (unlike customer-facing finance firms, like Goldman Sachs) does not really engage in this style of nepotism hiring that I know of.
Wow i'm sold.
I promise you I have no affiliations with JS whatsoever, just think that there is lots of sloppy reasoning going on in this thread.
Makes your claim unconvincing though. At least if you had worked there you might be in a position to make a claim either way.
The class of people hired by firms like Goldman Sachs is obviously nepotistic in nature and very different from the class that JS hires.
A substantial portion of the GS mix is athletes & what I would call traditional Northeast elites, Jane St hired mostly out of the top physics, CS & applied math classes I was in.
Beyond that, having parents who are prominent professors is nothing special at these schools and definitely would not give you pull at these institutions. Finally, Jane St has no incentive to engage in this sort of hiring because they are not customer/client facing.