College rankings are gossip rag material, and should be accompanied by pieces on the new dieting craze and latest adventures of Bat Boy. The number of flaws in their methodologies leave them with no merit.
We're currently hiring for a computer systems engineer, and as usual, the hiring manager is soliciting all team members for input, so I'm highly involved. This is not an entry-level position. The focus is on experience and "team fit" (hence the involvement of team members). I can tell you that the resumes that have passed through the HR and hiring manager filters to end up in my inbox have educational backgrounds running the gamut from a doctorate to no degree at all. It has never been mentioned in any of our conversations about individual candidates. Clearly, nobody cares about college.
Only if we were hiring for an entry-level position would we be interested in which college someone attended, and that would be as a tie-breaker for otherwise good candidates, because if you don't have any experience, education matters. Except that we tend to grab candidates for new systems engineers from the pool of entry-level IT folks already at hand, like helpdesk and operations, and by then we already know those people well enough that we don't care what college they went to, either. They've already demonstrated something that made us take notice.
We're not exactly Google, but there are a lot more businesses (and opportunities) in the world like us than there are like Google. We just don't get the same kind of press.
