I’ve seen a few people claim that big publishers are filled with MFA grads. Not authors, but the actual editors, publicists, etc. working in publishing. This is really not the case. It is not the norm for a big 5 editor (or marketer or publicist or publisher) to have an MFA even within “literary fiction.” Publishing has other pipelines—including publishing programs at universities totally disconnected from the MFA world—and most people who work their way up the publishing ladder start young. ETA: wrote about this