[mstoehr]

I've definitely seen evidence that the school one goes to correlates with success, but are you sure that the causality flows in the direction: academic credential --> success? It seems plausible at least that if the parent is wealthy, seeing to it that their kid is well-educated is a good way of signaling that their kid is decent material, it's a costly signal so only the wealthiest of parents will probably be able to afford it. And since the kids of wealthier parents tend to do better, the education signal, by some accident ends up being used a great deal to gauge future success.

I actually think that it used to just be a straightforward signal of wealth, but these days we don't want to admit that that's the case, we instead want to justify it as producing some useful economic product.