[mycologos]

> You're either one of the few winners and get to live a comfortable life with a professional job, or you're off to WalMart or an Amazon warehouse, or Prison. The "kind of comfortable middle class life" is shrinking quickly. So it's not enough to just get straight A's. You need extra credit, get a 5.0 GPA, take all the "right" AP classes, have the "right" extracurriculars, and the "right" community service and so on. Otherwise you risk landing on the bad side of the career bimodal distribution.

This seems a little hyperbolic. The requirements you describe are probably true enough for top 20 universities, but they aren't true for top 100, and there still seem to be plenty of random white collar office jobs that hire people from merely medium-ranked universities.