To a certain extent, you are correct. However, companies like Jane Street need to filter and doing so based on colleges is the most efficient when other factors are all equal. Top tier colleges strive to base their admittance on performance and strive to be racially and culturally diverse. This gives Jane Street the ability to say they filter on the same criteria.
I'm all ears if you have a better system that is more efficient. I'd also add that I went to a State college and my resume would have been tossed if I applied as a starting engineer too.
I kind of agree, but I do wonder if that’s largely confirmation bias though; they hire the best engineers they can find from an Ivy League, don’t bother even looking at decent state school people, then the Ivy League engineers they hire do well and they assume it must because they went to an Ivy League school.
I know that fancy colleges like to say that they strive to base admittance on performance, and I believe that’s true to an extent, but it certainly seems like they make an exception for students who come from a lot of money. I’ve mentioned this before but think about any politician that you think is un utter moron, and there’s still a reasonably good chance that they went to an Ivy League because they come from a rich family.
And it annoys me that people act like Ivy League schools are the only ones that accept based on performance. I applied to a bunch of state schools as a teenager and I got declined by a bunch of them. We can wax philosophical about why I was declined but I doubt it was personal, just that they probably didn’t think I would perform well based on some metric.
I'm all ears if you have a better system that is more efficient. I'd also add that I went to a State college and my resume would have been tossed if I applied as a starting engineer too.