That may be a good question but a better question should be how much it will matter to an individual.
In my own opinion I would say that if you're a person who wants to end up working for a top law firm (for example) then you probably need to go to a top law school and that, in turn, probably requires that you go to a top undergrad university. This likely applies to many fields. If, on the other hand, your goals are more modest then it may not be important at all and you'd be better off saving your money by going to a mid-tier university. Clearly there are exceptions to all of this but in general I'm guessing that's the way it works.
One HUGE piece of the puzzle left out of the picture is that the hs graduation rates since 2006 are much higher, and the % of students who apply to and then attend college is much higher- thus the colleges EVEN IF they were equally picky would have to shrink the admissions rates, it's simple math. If 100 people apply and only 5 get admitted, it's 5%. If 200 people apply and only 5 get admitted, now it's 2.5% I do think that there is also a huge cultural mythology surrounding the desperate pursuit of college admission to a "good school" at all costs (I mean really, it starts in kindergarten) that the tippy top schools are simply bombarded with applications. That said, somewhere around 1/2 of all accredited colleges are open admission (and 100% of community colleges are) so the bottleneck is limited to those with too narrow of focus. EDIT to add: as an alternative, attending an average state school at AnyNameU and then using a prestigious college for GRADUATE SCHOOL would change everything.
Generally true. if you go to a top law school, you're almost assured of getting into a top law firm, what they call "white shoe" firms. The other route is to finish at the top of your class at a lesser law school. Even people who go to below average law schools, provided they graduate near the top of their class, will typically get a shot at Big Law. Similar to accounting. At the top accounting schools like UT-Austin, BYU, Illinois, Michigan, Wharton, the Big Four firms practically live on campus, you'll probably get a shot if you made it in. At average schools of accountancy, like where I teach, they skim off the top 10% of the class or so.
