I think you're looking at it backward in some sense. A "top-tier" university doesn't teach any skills that couldn't be learned at most other universities (especially at the undergraduate level). However, the characteristics of an average student can be vastly different between a top-tier university and those lower in the rankings.
These sorts of requirements aren't put in place because there are particular skills necessary to do the job. They are in place to cut down the applicant pool to a reasonable size while raising the average quality (or at least not lowering it). It's classic signaling.
They let the university do most of the screening for them, weeding out the people who aren't smart, driven and dedicated enough to get into and graduate from a top-tier school.
Some extremely prestigious consulting firms won't look at a resume that isn't from one of a handful of schools. They fully realize that this policy results in them outright rejecting hundreds of excellent applicants. But they still end up with top-tier people, and they don't have to wade through tens of thousands of resumes to do it.
Highly sought-after employers can do this. But it doesn't work as well the further down the corporate "food chain" you go. This works especially well in industries like finance where ambition and a drive to perform while working within a fairly narrow set of parameters is paramount.
Peter Thiel is a big name, his companies are big names. Therefore they can use this strategy to their advantage, even if they don't particularly care about any specific set of skills.
"weeding out the people who aren't smart, driven and dedicated enough to get into and graduate from a top-tier school."
Wow. Since the rest of your post seems to equate "top-tier school" with the Ivy's (plus maybe MIT/stanford or whatever) this is just amazingly wrong to the point of being offensive.
There are tons of smart, driven and dedicated high school students in America who have no chance of getting into Ivy League schools. If you're lucky enough to be born into the right family so that you can go to the right private jewish prep school in one of a handful of posh suburbs, then being smart, driven and dedicated means you can probably get into one of the Ivy schools.
For every kid going to a public school in the midwest, who has to check the "will need financial assistance" checkbox (if the application fee alone didn't make them skip applying) and doesn't have any legacy or connections, then applying to Harvard is a lottery ticket even with perfect grades, stellar test scores and a long resume of extra-curriculars.
There are plenty of smart, driven and dedicated 18 year olds who won't be heading to Harvard or Yale next fall. Admittance to one of those schools correlates more with growing up privileged than it does about intelligence.
I didn't say those are the only people who are weeded out, just that, in general, people who don't have those qualities are less likely to get into "top-tier" schools.
Admissions at these schools actually work a little bit like hiring at prestigious firms in this sense, right? Plenty of awesome applicants get rejected or are priced out of even applying (as you pointed out). But since the average applicant is still quite qualified, that doesn't really matter to the institution, nor to our discussion.
As something of a footnote, I really didn't mean to imply that only Ivy League grads are smart, driven and dedicated. I'm definitely not one, and I like to think I'm reasonably bright.
These sorts of requirements aren't put in place because there are particular skills necessary to do the job. They are in place to cut down the applicant pool to a reasonable size while raising the average quality (or at least not lowering it). It's classic signaling.
They let the university do most of the screening for them, weeding out the people who aren't smart, driven and dedicated enough to get into and graduate from a top-tier school.
Some extremely prestigious consulting firms won't look at a resume that isn't from one of a handful of schools. They fully realize that this policy results in them outright rejecting hundreds of excellent applicants. But they still end up with top-tier people, and they don't have to wade through tens of thousands of resumes to do it.
Highly sought-after employers can do this. But it doesn't work as well the further down the corporate "food chain" you go. This works especially well in industries like finance where ambition and a drive to perform while working within a fairly narrow set of parameters is paramount.
Peter Thiel is a big name, his companies are big names. Therefore they can use this strategy to their advantage, even if they don't particularly care about any specific set of skills.