siserune

That's false. I did not "describe HES as an open-admissions community college", as can be easily verified above.

It should be obvious what the relevance is of the story about an imaginary, obscure and unselective college sharing a name with Oxford. This issue comes up in trademark disputes all the time. e.g., Congress passed a law a few years ago called the "Made in USA Label Defense Act" to prevent Chinese-manufactured textiles from being sold as Made In USA by import through Saipan.

Harvard, in fact, has an office that enforces its brand by (for example) suing enterprises that use the word Harvard prominently in their name, as in:

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=101471

Your example of the MIT PhD if anything makes the opposite of your point.
Her CV reveals that she was an MIT undergraduate in computer science for 2 years, and "gave the valedictory address" at her high school, which is an elite private girls' school near Boston. Then she was a teaching assistant in the Harvard CS department. Apparently at this point she signed up for Extension Courses (there is a tuition discount for employees). She is also a black woman, which is a highly recruited admissions category for hard science PhD's at MIT.

In other words, she already had quite a few things driving her admission to MIT that were in place before she ever set foot in the HES. HES may have been a formality that she needed, or a way to reintegrate into the system. But to make your point you would need examples of people who are admitted to selective graduate programs entirely on their HES credentials, not use HES as an addition to other factors that already make most of the case for admission.