The article only talks about where tenured professors get their phds. If your goal is a phd, but not a tenured academic position, you may well be fine. That s

The article only talks about where tenured professors get their phds. If your goal is a phd, but not a tenured academic position, you may well be fine. That said... my experience is the coursework at top universities is significantly harder than at poorer universities. When I look at what math is required for eg an MS at various okay universities such as SJSU or SFSU, it seems to be about equivalent to the undergrad at my top 15 university. Interviewing lots of engineers and ML people has also turned me into much more of a school snob than I used to be. My experience has been that graduates of top10 ML schools know the material cold, but graduates of, say, a school ranked 50-30th can produce PhDs in stats that struggle to explain a linear regression. Which should be very easy.