Don't misrepresent where you went to school.

[brodie]

I know this happens at some companies, but prestige is usually based on the reputation of the program rather than the entire school. For example, no one would call UTD or SHSU prestigious overall, but they're prestigious when it comes to criminology and criminal justice. Penn State is more prestigious than UPenn when it comes to criminology. Only looking at overall rankings simplifies things to the point of being inaccurate.

Thats how it works at most companies. I'm sure there are a few specialty fields where certain schools are known to have good programs, but that simply isn't most cases. Harvard is the most prestigious school in the entire world. It's only natural that some of that glow will wear off on its alumni, extension or not. At the end of the day, most of the professors are from Harvard, and the ones who aren't are from BU, Tufts, or universities of a similar tier. I'm honestly not sure how to compare it to a traditional program, because thats not what it is. If a student has the opportunity to go to the best program in their field, they should do it. For the rest of us, it seems like HES is a great value.

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If that's how it worked at most companies, Big 3 graduates would have a tough time finding employment. There are many employers who value experience over where you went to school. 

Even if most companies created piles, it ultimately means nothing. Probably 99% of college graduates didn't attend a top 50 school. If employers only hired from top 50 schools, they wouldn't have enough workers.

This really, really, really depends on the person and what they want from their degree. I agree that the vast majority of jobs only see a degree as a box you check. Prestige isn't really the goal if you want to get a promotion from middle management to upper management or work in a corporate HR department or increase your earnings or whatever. It's just a piece of paper. 

That being said, oftentimes degree prestige and connections are the difference between a job and the job you want. I know two people who wanted to be writers, for example... one went to the University of Michigan where made numerous connections who helped her get published and get into an MFA program that was fully funded where she met other writers who eventually helped her sell a novel for publication, meanwhile the prestigious funded MFA helped her land a day job teaching at a liberal arts college. The other went to Eastern Michigan University and didn't have any of that... she submitted to some litmags and didn't get any publications, decided to pay for an MFA which didn't help her because nobody in publishing respects programs that don't fund their students, she didn't make any literary connections and eventually stopped writing and took a respectable but boring job as a content writer for a birth injury law firm's website. The moral here is that some fields are really strongly based on who you know and some degree of snobbery... these may be the 1% of careers, but if your goal is to be in one of them you need to be cognizant of that fact. There are exceptions to every rule, but an exception never disproves the rule.