So one could get hired in biotech, finance, law or corporate IT without an ivy league degree? OK, very few people are smarter than an average (but not the best

So one could get hired in biotech, finance, law or corporate IT without an ivy league degree? OK, very few people are smarter than an average (but not the best) ivy league students, without having that exceptionally good training places like MIT or Yale offer, but these people are outsiders, marginalized by modern practices and social institutions. They end up making good sandwiches, like that character from Atlas Shrugged, because they habitually striving for an optimum, no matter what they are doing. In the field of OSS we have a few well-known names - recall a project with uncommonly good theoretical understanding and exceptional attention to details and you will find one (LuaJIT, nginx, redis, OpenBSD, good parts of Haskell base libraries, etc, etc). All I am trying to say is that elite colleges phenomena is a social construction that works for society which believe in it. One has to conform if one wishes to be a part of such a society. Less traveled pathways are much harder and usually are leading to unexpected and yet unknown.