It's even more nuanced than you describe. Even within the hiring funnel, which school you go to often determines where you end up in the company. I will take

It's even more nuanced than you describe. Even within the hiring funnel, which school you go to often determines where you end up in the company. I will take my old employer (Intel) as an example. MIT, Stanford, etc. had a monopoly on "integration" engineers, which were the high visibility/high impact roles that coordinated all of the wafer fabrication steps among the engineers in process, yield, metrology, etc. The rank-and-file process, data analysis, etc. engineers were pulled from the next tier of schools. Finally, metrology, reliability, and QA came from all over, usually 2nd or 3rd rung state schools.