From labor economics, the strongest aggregate predictors of how well someone will do are parents' income, parents' education, and education. I don't subscribe to the narrative that working hard is a sufficient condition for success, or to the idea that success is evidence of hard work. Abstracting away from the aggregated results the next most common things (which are related to the above predictors) are going to be networking opportunities, location/culture/peers, and then maybe luck! I believe in making education accessible. I think people from all classes should have the opportunity to go to school. Let rigor and material sort them out (which is the filter we seem to have lost). Social mobility via meritocracy IMO would easily fit my ideals.

So no, I don't hate the fact that people who struggle catch a break going to college. My wife and I have been very lucky, we want for nothing for the most part. That said, it might not always be that way - everything we work hard for now could fall apart in an instant. There's no contract saying that if I do my job well and continue to develop as a human that things will turn out fine for us. I'd rather society have safety nets that guarantee that it's always feasible for things to be "okay" as long as people try than for me be able to buy a Porsche instead of a Toyota. I'm sure theres a "parallel ghost ship" of our lives where had we made one different but reasonable decision we could be much worse off.

The education bubble is its own problem related to complete inelasticity of college degrees as well as diluted standards. Being poor is not evidence of being a piece of crap - far from it! It's a classic opinion rooted in observation bias, personal bias, and ego.

Either way, this is all hyperbole. We're talking about Stanford here, not Southeast Missouri Bible Tech - Gym Satellite Campus. I went to a mediocre state school for all of my degrees and while I might not stack up against Princeton Guy I have a good enough life and enough self-awareness to know that in addition to being stubborn and motivated it was a series of educated coin tosses made with little life experience that got me here.