<p>
I doubt this is true with the exception of possibly Taiwan or China, which I honestly don’t know much about. Of course the following is just my personal experience so it doesn’t proof anything. Still I want to share it.</p>
<p>I grew up in Europe, none of my friends has ever heard of Berkeley. No employers (outside of academia) have heard of Berkeley. They would take someone from a “popular” local university (that’s not even ranked on a worldwide scale) over “some US-University” in the blink of an eye. US-Universities in general have a pretty bad reputation for being “easy” in many European countries. That reputation is actually justified in my opinion. Even though I studied EECS which is supposed to be one of the tougher subjects I know that German universities would be much more difficult academically. I wouldn’t have done remotely as well there as I did at Berkeley.</p>
<p>As an international student many of my friends are naturally international students (many from Asian countries but not China) as well. The majority of them went back to their country after graduating and had problems finding decent jobs for the same reason I mentioned above. Now, most of them did find jobs, but not jobs that were “more decent” than someone from an some unranked but good local university would have gotten.</p>
<p>As I mentioned above, all this doesn’t apply if one is aiming for academia of course. Berkeley’s grad programs and research power and absolutely top, if not the best worldwide. And people in academia know that. However, I also think the the problems above won’t happen to people who have graduated from a school like Stanford.</p>