My point is--as I think you get--that you don't go to Yale to get a job at a local insurance firm, you do it to get a job at the State Department or on Wall Street. You don't go to Stanford to work as an accountant in a small city, you go to get a job at a tech giant.
So while the rich and successful insurance agent up the street from me might rightfully argue that you can get a great education at Alabama, and that you can do very well for yoursefl with that degree, he might be right. But he if he wants certain elite jobs, he is going to have a MUCH harder time getting it with that degree.
Certain degrees open doors that others generally cannot. And the people who control those jobs and are represented in those industries (with the obvious exceptions to any rule) all consider certain schools to be THE schools (I think you'd throw Amhurst and Williams into that mix), and everythig else to be second, third, or fourth teir. Look, for example, about the schools of Supreme Court clerks and law professors.
Sure, the Top kids from any school stick out, and maybe more so for being the best from somewhere. But almost everyone else is not at the top.
Notre Dame is not in that Top Tier. Duke, like Penn, Dartmoth, Brown, and Cornell, is on the cusp. Oklahoma is not part of the conversation. The only public schools in the arguement for somewhere in second tier are a couple of the California schools, UVA, and possibly UNC and Michigan.
Anyway, its easier to defeine the top than the middle, and Stanford is most certianly at the top for everyone except the New Yorkers and Bostonians who only like Harvard or Yale and think Princeton is a back-up.
