[RyanZAG]

Has it though, really?

Google's company-defining products are (in my opinion):

  Search - not relevant to hiring practices, Search came before the company
  Gmail - initial version made by Paul Buchheit - 
    Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
  Adsense - created by Oingo and acquired by Google
  Android - created by Danger and acquired by Google 
    (Andy Rubin - Utica College, Utica, New York)
  Chrome - basically Webkit, created by KHTML project and Apple

As far as I can tell, the breakthroughs Google has had are completely unrelated to any Ivy League hiring practices.

[rdouble]

In addition to having a few key products, a company also needs hordes of smart, hardworking and reliable people to keep things running and add incremental improvements. Top grades from a good university is a pretty good filter for "smart, hardworking and reliable."

[arindone]

Agreed -- it's a good filter for a higher probability of better talent (note: I say "probability" and not "guarantee") and their stock price and potential for growth speak for their human resources strategy.