Your post is dead accurate! So much success depends on other things than the right degree. Family and friend networks, for example. I grew up in a working class home and was the second person in my family to attain a college degree. Both my parents and I had no knowledge of how to put that degree to good use. So, in my case, it took a lot longer to get ahead - and a lot of kicks along the way!
My dad’s family loved books and had excellent vocabularies, a carryover from the antebellum era when going off to school was not just attainable but expected, of the eldest son at least. I guess they were “ genteel po,” lol, a faded old homeplace tha was once grand, a lot of land and little else. That may have given me a better start, I don’t really know. I know there was a family scholarship that nobody in the immediate family knew about, that helped.