As the author states himself, he is writing his article from the perspective of students who have the luxury of being able to afford the “brand name” schools. If you are putting yourself into massive debt then the equation changes completely and one must take into account what the author himself says, that after the first or second job, your undergraduate university no longer matters.
In the case of the OP, the same effect can be achieved with a Masters degree at the “brand name” school and it will only cost 2 years of tuition instead of 4.
if we are all into anecdotes, I have plenty having been a faculty member at Illinois Institute of Technology for 30 years. I don’t think that anyone on CC would consider IIT to be in the same league with MIT but our graduates in CS and Engineering as well as physics generally find excellent jobs and do very well on the PayScale surveys. From personal experience, my own son was a Computer Engineering major at IIT and got a very good job within a month of graduating during the height of the last recession. He graduated debt free and we did not have to compromise our savings.