My ancedote here is that it&#x27;s more about opportunity than educational quality. The &quot;secret sauce&quot; of higher education isn&#x27;t the course work, or even the individual lecturers (although there is a certain minimum bar there) as evidenced by the growing trend to offer those for free. It is rather a case of brand recognition and access to a given network. The graduate of MIT has pull in pretty much anywhere of her choosing, the Georgia Tech grad faces friction as soon as she leaves the south east, the Clemson grad faces that same friction as soon as she leaves South Carolina (top tier private, top tier public, mid teir public for engineering), all other things being equal. Given the unequal distribution of employment across the nation it seems ridiculous that there are these huge paywalls in connecting qualified students to institutions best suited for them based solely on something as ephemeral as which state their parents are working when they turn 17.