When someone (e.g. employer) considers school prestige, is s/he really judging you by ...

[ucbalumnus]

@mackinaw

I cared most about the quality of the PhD program the applicant studied at, who she worked with (major professor), what skills she had (language, statistics, computers), her research and publications, her teaching experience. I didn’t care about GPA or test scores. I paid attention to letters of recommendation.

Now it could well be that applicants from the better PhD programs tended to come from more selective undergraduate institutions.

It is not that consideration of which PhD program the applicant studied at implies consideration of which undergraduate school the applicant studied at, but that it carries an implicit consideration of *how well the applicant did as an undergraduate/i, since that affects which PhD program was willing to admit the applicant.

Obviously, this is not to say that recent achievements during and after PhD study are not highly important, since they obviously are for faculty hiring.