It's brutally hard. I had an easier time buying skylinesort.com n posting the skylinesort algorithm there, than publishing through professors n academia. Typically not feasible for undergraduates, least of all anybody not paying tuition. Same way professors are expected to have an undergraduate degree at the very least (4 profs at Stanford have just an undergraduate degree), a Master's degree (a handful have that and no more), but typically a PhD is required (literally all the other professors have PhD's). Is required. Who requires it? Who says, "I require a PhD."? Is expected? Who expects it? Who says, "I expect a PhD."? Passive voice is typical in academia. Very rare to get around the gatekeeping, frankly. I couldn't publish on arxiv for years because of lack of academic affiliation alone.

Took years to get to this point in terms of the effort I dedicate to getting recognition for my work.

Thanks Daniel. Could you expand on this comment? What did you have to do to be able to publish a paper on arxiv?

At the time, i needed academic affiliation, meaning be in college or more likely have a professor vouch for me. What i ended up doing was return to Stanford undergrad n take classes related to algorithms, show my algorithm portfolio in office hours, then get referred to other profs, one of them being Jeffrey Ullman, in 2019. N then after emails back n forth we met in person in the Gates building, it went from there.

Very happy to have met Professor Jeffrey Ullman.

Not sure if this is what you're talking about, but you don't typically pay to get a PhD (in fact you get paid in the US).

Yeah n how much do you get paid, n for what? You get paid to take on professorial duties, TA'ing, lab assistant, that sort of thing usually. Pretty rough in many ways.