That's an extremely watered down definition of "right connection." My brother is at JPM/MS/GS. We're immigrants, we grew up outside of New York entirely outside of the finance orbit, we went to public K-12, etc. He got into an Ivy-league school because he's a nerd who always turned in his homework early since age 6 and prepped hard for the SAT. I was the one who gave him advice on "which fields to study" and "which companies to apply to"--based on nothing more than doing some research on internet forums. (He was originally planning to go into a PhD program in STEM, something we had exposure to from our upbringing.) The interviewing process didn't require "know[ing] someone at a firm." The companies came on campus and interviewed the STEM nerds with the highest GPAs. The process isn't easy, but it's highly structured, and meritocratic for some definition of meritocratic.[1]

[1] I think its more accurate to say that the field requires lack of significant adversity more so than "connections." The median family income at Harvard is $168,000, the 80th percentile. These kids aren't working all summer to help their parents make ends meet. At the same time, their neighbors are engineers, doctors, government employees, etc., not hedge fund managers.