My question is, why wouldn’t it be this way? For two equivalent students from equivalently prestigious schools, if one has a 3.5 GPA and the other has a 3.9 due

My question is, why wouldn’t it be this way? For two equivalent students from equivalently prestigious schools, if one has a 3.5 GPA and the other has a 3.9 due to grade inflation, of course the second student will have more opportunities. And more opportunities means higher pay, and higher pay means more donations back to the school. Goodhart's law and all that. Grade inflation and the grading idiosyncrasies between schools make it such that GPA is fairly meaningless as a metric to me when I’m conducting interviews. I simply don’t care. I worked my butt off in undergrad to barely get a 3.1 at one school, and in grad school it was hard to not get an A in a course. Instead, I care about what you as an interviewee know. Not what school you went to, not what contrived number you scored.