I don't really think a Yale degree makes you better than someone with a community college degree. There's no magic at Yale. The education you get everywhere is pretty good now because of all the resources universally available to all students.
But Yale basically applies a filter function and attracts the top 0.01% of high school graduates every year (plus some less elite legacy students and DEI admits). When you hire a Yale graduate, that's what you are paying for. Not the Yale education. If you could find a similar filter function some other way, you'd hire that 0.01% of high school graduates via that filter function.
And in fact companies are always trying to get ahead of their competitors and find other, less well-known, filter functions to get high performers who others don't know about. In the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft was among the first to discover that Indian IIT graduates were products of an extreme filter function applied to Indian high school students (IIT grads are like top 0.0001% of Indian high school grads). For a long time Microsoft hired those engineers for cents on the dollar. By the 2000s though, the word was out ... hiring IIT grads is as difficult as getting any other high performing grads.
There was also a brief period of time when Google had an edge in recruiting by identifying high school kids who were good at programming competitions online and via contributors to projects in Google's open source projects. But now, that signal is well-known too.
So John's community college degree doesn't matter if John is an elite performer.
As someone who has studied at both kinds of schools I can tell you there is a WORLD of difference.
In a middling school the professor was constantly providing remedial education to the students and had to cut down the curriculum breadth and depth.
When we are talking about the elite 0.01% of students the professor is irrelevant for regular coursework. They are almost uniformly autodidacts. A mentor is of course useful at the very boundaries of knowledge that textbooks and papers don't cover. But by the time you are in that range of work, you will be recognized through your performance, and you can find mentors by reaching out to them with links to your work.
Generally, people are completely unaware of what top 0.01% of performance looks like because we are so rarely around these people unless we are in some very elite institution or working on some project which attracts such people.
But Yale basically applies a filter function and attracts the top 0.01% of high school graduates every year (plus some less elite legacy students and DEI admits). When you hire a Yale graduate, that's what you are paying for. Not the Yale education. If you could find a similar filter function some other way, you'd hire that 0.01% of high school graduates via that filter function.
And in fact companies are always trying to get ahead of their competitors and find other, less well-known, filter functions to get high performers who others don't know about. In the 1980s and 1990s Microsoft was among the first to discover that Indian IIT graduates were products of an extreme filter function applied to Indian high school students (IIT grads are like top 0.0001% of Indian high school grads). For a long time Microsoft hired those engineers for cents on the dollar. By the 2000s though, the word was out ... hiring IIT grads is as difficult as getting any other high performing grads.
There was also a brief period of time when Google had an edge in recruiting by identifying high school kids who were good at programming competitions online and via contributors to projects in Google's open source projects. But now, that signal is well-known too.
So John's community college degree doesn't matter if John is an elite performer.