Kindasorta?
I mean, I’ve been tapped to fill out some of these surveys, and I’m in a program without a graduate degree—heck, for my field (linguistics), we don’t have an undergrad degree, and we barely have a minor, and so I’m not going to have a student with an undergrad degree from Yale or anywhere else in my classes.
And so yeah, the obvious ones are going to be highly ranked (Penn, Stanford, MIT, Washington, OSU), but what about what one might call the not-so-obvious tier (which, for linguistics, includes Michigan State and, yes, Yale)? Or what about the places that are really amazingly top-tier for a student who is interested in one specific subfield but maybe not as much for the discipline in its entire breadth (like Harvard and Hofstra)? And what about the programs that have a good undergrad reputation but don’t have the research intensity of a PhD-granting program (e.g., BYU and Macalester and FIU) or that have some spectacular faculty but don’t really have a lot of them so if one or two people leave it’s gonna be difficult (like UAF or Pitzer)? And on what basis am I giving these judgments, anyway?
It’s all smoke and mirrors, it is.