Yes, to get meaningful measure once has to count only graduates of less than top schools that were accepted to at least one of the top schools.

And money-wise the middle-middle class is the one that got squeezed the most: higher income folks can pay for college of there kids, lower income ones will get financial aid.

Just an example: company I am working for hired several engineers in their early 30s with pay well over $100k a few years ago now we know that best of them is no more than barely OK, the most of them mediocre and few did a lot damage - and it has nothing to do with careless hiring we simply could not find anybody better.

So, if you are good it will be noticed pretty soon and you will make good money while having pretty interesting work (use #2,5,8 and 10 on this list as an example http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/108648/25-top-paying-companies?mod=career-salary_negotiation).

If you are not so good, it usually takes years to be discovered by your coworkers and mangers and then there is a good chance that there will be nobody better around, the pay will be still pretty decent with interesting work and in the worst case you will have to move once in a few years when your professional problems will become apparent.

Just do not work for IT departments/services, IT has reverse reward scale: worse people get rewarded and the best ones go unnoticed and the absolute worst morons become IT managers - nothing could be done about it, it is the ingrained the nature of IT services, deviations from this common pattern are no more than deviations.

free software is alive and well only because it makes a lot of commercial sense for companies that do not sell software but have software component in their products, get over it.

just let them do what they want, namely, kill each other, we simply cannot put an American MP on every crossroad of the world.

most of the journos already support them

now it could attract only brain-dead pinkos.