> But give the sheer scale of the population applying in India assessing each individual is obviously on the surface impractical.

I forgot to add there's another aspect - fighting corruption. Since there are so few quality educational institutes, and the competition so high, introducing any other additional form of assessment (like based on essays or interviews) would invite criticism of corruption and prejudice (linguistic, religion and caste mostly in India). (And it is a fair criticism - in the US some colleges actually moved away from admission based on standardised testing because they wanted to limit number of Jews in their institute. In ancient India, quality education was limited to the upper caste only.). Common entrance exams are thus perceived as more fair to everyone.

> But Netscape was one of the first that hired uneducated engineers in the history of computing.

This was something I really admired about American businesses in the past, but feel it has changed a lot - they didn't mind hiring workers having proficient skills who are passionate about their work, even if they didn't have a degree. This has really changed now and I blame Asian American immigrants for this, especially indians who tend to look down on someone who don't have a degree or even tend to scrutinise which college they have a degree from before deciding whether to respect their professional skills (Indian Hindu Brahmins, most of whom now run the BigTech's, in particular tend to be worse about this attitude because they have to compete even harder due to affirmative action policies and thus tend to have a tunnel vision when it comes to judging people through their degrees).

(I do know that the IT industry has always leaned towards hiring qualified professionals because it is a relatively young field).

This also reminds me of someone's struggle in India - he had failed to clear a few subjects in his engineering (from an average indian college) and thus didn't get his degree in the usual 4 years. He cleared those subjects and finally got his degree after 2-3 years. But he had been working in the IT industry, without a degree, right after college. Here's the kicker - Indian companies refused to recognize his work experience (based on which pay negotiations are done) during the period he worked without a degree. So they would subtract the 2-3 years he had worked without a degree, and offer him less pay. This was even after he had worked hard to get additional certifications in the industry to make up for the lack of passing away from a "good" college. He found true professional respect based on his experience only in the USA.

> Finally, I’d note that Asian society often doesn’t have much of a second chance path.

That's is true, but money and social connections also play a great role here. Middle class and rich people have more options for second chances, than the poor. And what you described about your wife's family situation is indeed quite common - some of my classmates had brothers and sisters who couldn't afford a decent college education because they were poor, and instead chose to sacrifice and pay for their siblings education. But again, note that our social culture (unlike the west) lays a lot of emphasis on helping family member, and often, these educated siblings did contribute back financially (if they were decent individuals who didn't succumb to selfishness). One of my friend and classmate ensured that he paid for brother's kids education for the sacrifices his brother made for him.