thegra: The ones who learned were the ones who showed their brilliance young and got sponsors. You know the famous story with the grocer who sponsored three yeshivah bochurim who turned out to be three gedolim of the next generation (I think one was R’ Yaakov Kamenetsky)? The fact is that without the sponsorship, who knows what would’ve happened today- and who knows how many gedolim there were in potential who weren’t sponsored and did whatever they did with their lives. Most people weren’t so lucky.
Actually, purely from a scientific point of view, it would be an interesting experiment- If we had the data of how many boys there were at a given time period who could have gone to yeshivah, how many did, and then how many of those became rabbanim and marbitzei Torah, and then took similar statistics today and see how they measure up. Not meant to be pro- or anti-anything yet- just genuinely curious, because I can see it working either way.