I agree - I think that the employers in STEM themselves have figured it out and combine convenience of proximity/quality of STEM as the decision point/size of recruitable pool. In fact the secret hack is probably to figure out the university recruiting schedules of your target companies and work backwards. [0]
I do think society in general and finance/medicine/law (which are harder to analyze based on test scores/leetcode and have more fuzzy needs for network effects) still uses legacy measurement techniques for "worthiness".
The report identified the following universities as having the most graduates become employees at major tech companies, along with the number of employees.
University of Washington (16,786 employees)
University of California–Berkeley (13,260 employees)
Stanford University (12,973 employees)
University of Texas–Austin (11,049 employees)
University of Southern California (9,071 employees)
Arizona State University–Tempe (8,320 employees)
Carnegie Mellon University (8,274 employees)
Georgia Institute of Technology (7,961 employees)
University of California–Los Angeles (7,829 employees)
University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign (7,671 employees)
Even with that definition it may still be irrational as a student, or at least short-sighted. The further you get in your career, the less it matters which school you went to.
Employers may be interested in your schooling if you're fresh out of school, but after that, they're much more interested in your work experience.
I went to community college and then transferred to an fairly inexpensive 4-year college. In my first job I got a huge amount of work experience and leveled-up to the senior software developer title.
Maybe an employer after that first job would look at me suspiciously for my choice of schools, but they really shouldn't.
