[bane]

In the job market, reputation of your undergrad generally doesn't much doesn't matter after the first 5 years. Multiple studies show that students from different schooling backgrounds reach employment parity in most every situation.

Anecdotally, in my own case, I hit employment parity with my Ivy League/Top-10 school peers at 6 years, and have long since surpassed most of them in the job market and standard of living (due to an unbelievably smaller debt load).

The only people I know from my starting peer group who I could comfortably say have a higher standard of living than I do also went to regular 'ol state schools but just worked harder/smarter than I did.

I get fairly regular recruitment pitches from the Google's, Amazon's and Facebook's, and have worked for some of the biggest and best companies in their industries. (I've noticed an uptick in Google courtships over the last couple years as they finally brought their data crunching prowress to analyze hiring success and found that their traditional hiring pools did not necessarily provide the best employees)

All that being said, if I were so inclined, there are positions (high end consulting, finance, high-level politics) that I'm less likely to ever end up in due to fierce protectionism by "old guard". But I'm finding those hard kernels of school fashionistas are rapidly disappearing now as well.