He’s right; you can’t be pro-paper ceiling and anti-elitist.

Degrees as a filter is useful due to the willful dismantling of our secondary education system, in order to gatekeep higher-paying jobs.

Rich elites want college to be too expensive or exclusive for regular people, so their rich kids who can go get to be first in line at jobs.

Rich, private high schools have advanced subjects like comp sci, pre-med tracks, pre- law, etc, while the people who can afford to send their kids there are lobbying state governments to cut public school funding and programs.

I did 3 years of comp sci, including 600-level courses in OS design, architecture, and even Assembly. Literally nothing in those courses is useful to my IT career. Everything useful that I learned before working in IT, that was IT-related, I learned independently from my college courswork.