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I think prestige is still about ivies and rankings, but I also think it depends where you live. There are schools that are prestigious that some have never heard of.
After a while nobody talks about it. It’s more about what you do, in my experience.
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While prestige might matter for certain fields, it doesn’t matter for many.
What matters more is what you do: research, publications, maturity, communication skills, prior experiences, etc.
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i can’t find my post, but i would guess it implies that “some” care about grad placement. can’t imagine i said that i feel that way, but maybe i was tired that day.
Yes, I took it to mean that some might feel that way, not you! 
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For many grad schools, the prestige of the undergraduate institution matters a great deal. This is especially important in the Humanities and in many Social Sciences fields, but even for STEM. That being said, in most cases, experience, accomplishments, and LoRs carry more weight in admissions to grad programs.
However, the level of accomplishments that are required for a graduate of, say Southern Illinois University to be accepted to the History or English graduate programs at, say, one of the Ivies, would need to be enough to qualify for a few international awards. That would still only put them in equal footing as a graduate of an “elite” program with moderate accomplishments. For STEM, though, it isn’t as bad.
For hiring in academia, the prestige of the graduate program is one of the most central requirements. This, however, has weird twists and exceptions, which we don’t need to go into here.
If you look at faculty listings, it seems it depends on the school.
Isn’t it more specifically the prestige of the department or LoR writer among PhD program faculty more than overall prestige among the general public?
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I was thinking more along the lines of health care, where the undergrad name is not as important as what you do: experience, research, communication skills, etc.
Yes, my error.
However, there are indeed graduate programs which care about the undergraduate institution, regardless of program. You just have to look at the graduate students in the English Department at Harvard to see that. They have students with undergraduate degrees from places like Dartmouth or Georgetown, but not from places like UIUC or UT Austin, which both have more highly ranked English programs than either Dartmouth or Georgetown.
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I only have an anecdote to share (and anecdotes are not data), but that has not been my experience. I attended grad school at a Top X program (single-digit undergrad acceptance rate, Top X overall, and reputedly Top X for the field) for a field in the humanities. One person in the grad program attended a Top X for undergrad, but the others I can remember were either from state flagships, some international universities (not Oxbridge), and one, I believe, was from a branch state campus. And, for clarity, this was for a funded doctoral program, not a pay-exorbitant-fees for a Master’s grad program. Though I did not read their grad applications, nobody made mention of winning any international awards.
So perhaps it depends on the Top X institution, or the particular non-STEM field, or a host of other factors, but I thought that the anecdote was at least worth mentioning.
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I think it’s important to distinguish between MA vs PhD vs professional vs … rather than lump them all together. It’s relatively common for students attending a not especially selective public flagship to attend Ivy+ type colleges for grad school, but the bulk of those degrees are usually master’s programs, rather than PhD programs.
As an example, I looked up UConn post grad outcomes, which admits the majority of applicants. Among UConn grads, the top 3 most common grad school institutions were UConn, BU, and Columbia. An Ivy+ college appeared in top 3. Cornell and Yale also are among the more common grad school institutions. Looking at English majors specifically, Harvard was among top 5. Among all UConn grads, 71% of grad programs were master’s. Among English majors, 81% of grad programs were master’s.
It does depend on these, and the culture of admissions to a program can also change.
not rare enough that it would be shocking, but not common enough that you can expect it with above average performance
Graduate school acceptance is a different ball game, often depending on the actual degree and career path you are seeking.
My very selective Philosophy PhD program definitely had disproportionate representation from fancy private universities, but it wasn’t monolithic. My first year roommate was from the University of Texas, another woman in my PhD class was from the University of Toronto, over the years there was quite a variety of Internationals, regularly some LACs, and so on.
I would note I always thought part of why there were so many fancy privates was we were the answer to the question who the heck wants to do a Philosophy PhD program anyway? It is not exactly a practical decision, and in fact most of my first year PhD class ended up going to law school eventually, including both me and Texas (Toronto actually did become a professor). We were funded, but still, that’s quite the opportunity cost.
So I think a lot of this is correlated self-selection, booksmart people making repeat decisions to value academic self-satisfaction and such over practical ROI sorts of considerations.
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Are the UT/UIUC grads applying to the Harvard program? That’s likely something we just can’t know.
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My History Ph.D. program (generally ranked in the top 20, sometimes higher depending on field) was disproportionately attended by grads of Ivies and other top universities (Chicago, top flagships, etc.), top LACs (Williams, Swarthmore, and Carleton were especially well-represented, but also others of their ilk), and LACs that tend to attract a lot of grad school aspirants (St. Olaf and other non-Carleton Minnesota LACs, Reed, etc.). There were also grads from a wide range of other kinds of institutions, but they tended not to enter with the best support, and as a result they were less likely to finish. But causation is tricky here. Did those top universities and colleges offer the best training to equip their grads to finish their Ph.D.s? Were those students smarter (I doubt this)? Were they more motivated to pursue graduate work from the start? Were they more savvy about how graduate school worked because they had more attentive mentoring? Or were disparities in financial support make the difference in whether someone finished or not? If students from highly-ranked schools were more likely to get those packages (and my evidence is anecdotal, not scientific, that they were), then it’s hard to determine exactly what factors propelled them toward the finish line.
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Could it be that students from fancy private schools are less likely to be worried about practical ROI (and therefore more likely to feel free to do a Philosophy PhD) simply because so many of them are already wealthy, or at least financially comfortable?
I will also add an anecdote. I knew a Philosophy PhD student at Stanford who was a plumber. He was successful and happy as a plumber, went back to school to do a PhD purely for fun, and planned to just go back to being a plumber afterwards.
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