True. It should be pretty simple to model this out in Bayesian fashion. Doing so would probably bear your theory out, i.e., these schools seem overrepresented i

True. It should be pretty simple to model this out in Bayesian fashion. Doing so would probably bear your theory out, i.e., these schools seem overrepresented in top-tier finance relative to their numbers of graduates in any given region (VC in this case, perhaps IB/PE/etc. in other cases). It goes beyond the credential, though. The credential is a side effect. Many (most?) lucrative careers in finance don't happen when a person with a Harvard/Yale/Princeton/Stanford diploma applies blindly to a job at Goldman Sachs. They begin when that person is an undergraduate at H/Y/P/S, where the Goldman recruiters show up in greater numbers (and with bigger quotas) at those schools than they do elsewhere. That's where the pipeline begins, and that's precisely why it's very hard for any credential to rival the pipeline these schools have built. From there, advantages begin to accrue and compound over the years (the "Cumulative Advantage" Theory). Arguably, in many cases you could trace the origins of the pipelines even further back, to the elite private and prep schools with well-paved inroads into H/Y/P/S/etc. There's no question you need to be smart to flourish at these schools, and to succeed in high finance. Probably in the top decile of IQ and effort, at least. But smart is just table stakes.