In my hiring experience, there is little correlation between the performance at work and the college the employees graduate from; my experience in meeting graduates from Ivy League schools is more often on how quick they
With MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses), many colleges are offering online courses, lasting from 4 to 12 weeks; some have the same syllabus as the campus offering and provide first-hand experience about the colleges too. Most online courses are well planned, well 
executed, and the willing students would learn the subject in proportion to the effort put in. From the idea to the implementation, the MOOC is just an amazingly good deal with exceptional quality and wonderful staffing team behind each course. let you know their school. Yet, when it comes to searching for colleges, most of us chase the highly ranked colleges for ourselves, for our kids.
Maybe it should not come as surprise that online classes vary in quality. And maybe it should not even be surprise that the Ivy League Colleges offer classes with higher standard.
- There is correlation between quality and the ranking of the colleges in the professionalism, the homework challenges, the case study, and the level of difficulty of the course. I particularly like those courses that have homework challenges like the Software as a Service course offered by Berkeley and the Data Science course by University of Washington; at the completion of homework, the satisfaction from that realization how the homework experience has guided the understanding of what is covered in the online videos.
- Higher ranked colleges are stricter in their passing grades and have firm deadlines.
- The more difficult courses have more active student participation in online forum, either asking each other for advice, or general feedback.
- This is not necessarily obvious, but judged by the responsiveness of the teaching staff to student feedback and hiccups; I suspect the higher-ranked colleges have a far stronger supporting staff and deeper resources.
In spite of whatever cause-and-effect on how well the college graduates fare in the workplace, there is evidence that higher-ranked colleges offer better quality education with more resources; and well maybe better quality of students to begin with.
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