> Those institutions are trusted to only hand Ph.D's to those who have earned them. I disagree. Even MIT and the highfalutin Ivey's have a lot of mediocre grad

> Those institutions are trusted to only hand Ph.D's to those who have earned them. I disagree. Even MIT and the highfalutin Ivey's have a lot of mediocre grad students to keep the cogs of the research machine running. This is especially true in the biomedical field because of the cheap labor supply of grad students - vs - the cost of highly trained lab techs. All of these students pass and earn PhDs. Inside your own little field in academia you are judged by your peers on both your work as well as who you work with, not where you sit or the stamp on the letterhead. Sadly, outside of our small fields we have very poor (if any) tools to assess researchers, and thus fall back on regular consumer judgements: brand recognition, familiarity and advertising.