<p>kville,
Not sure how you reached your conclusions, but I am highly confident that major employers don’t have anywhere near the same differentiation among schools and student quality as you imply in your post. U Penn may have the highest prestige among undergrad business schools, but they certainly don’t have a monopoly on the good students. In reality, the quality differences are quite small among the students coming from any of the schools that you mentioned. </p>
<p>The fact is that there are a lot of very, very good places and even more very, very good students/potential employees. Furthermore, businesses understand that having a broad mix of colleges represented at their companies is intelligent and probably good for business (some do it in the name of diversity, others from a desire to avoid groupthink). You’d be amazed at the kids that sometimes come out of the most unlikely places, eg, U Nebraska, Texas A&M, BYU, etc. They may not have Duke on their resume, but some of these kids are very, very smart and very, very able. And in contrast to some of their student peers coming from more prestigious schools, they usually work extremely hard and well with others and bring a lot less of a sense of entitlement to the workplace.</p>