In some countries, like France and the United kingdom, the educational pyramid is even more skewed. In the United kingdom, graduates of Oxford University and Cambridge University are in a class of their own. Oxbridge alumni are overrepresented in politics, business, and the media. In France, the same phenomenon is at work with the École Polytechnique, the Écoles Normales Supérieures, and a few others. This creates sh…
In the end that's what's causing revolutions, i.e. members of the educated middle-class being left out and not getting on the financial bandwagon. Imo it all started with the French Revolution, some people say that it was a bourgeois vs nobles thing but many bourgeois were doing quite all right (think the banker Necker [1]), it was the small bourgeois (and lawyer) from out-of-Paris like Robespierre that was feeling left out.
The same thing happened between the two world wars in Europe. In my parts of the continent (Eastern Europe) there were too many college graduates chasing too few State jobs (the only ones available to college graduates at the time), plus Jewish students crowding them out in domains that were lucrative even if not working for the State (think Law and Medicine). The solution some of those people thought of? Joining the right-wing movement that was advocating for "cleansing the State" and doing very bad things to those Jewish students that were competing for the same jobs.