to understand it, go read Pride and Prejudice for a primer. I am not joking, it is pretty ridiculous, but it exists. When I left from Florida State to take a job at SUU, a teaching school, I threw away most of the credibility I ever had. My advisor even told me that I just ruined my career! Even though I have more A-level publications than any finance professor at Utah State, I can guarantee you that they wouldn't look at me now, even though they did invite me for a fly-out 10 years ago when I was thinking of moving back west. I now have the stench of a lower rated school on me and it will never go away. Schools mainly recruit faculty from schools perceived to be better in their field, and so unless you are a potential superstar, you always place down as a doctoral student. It can be very petty, as Indiana always avoided bringing in a graduate from Purdue's doctoral program, and they did the same with ours. To hire one of their grads was to admit that they were at a higher level than we were at.

Now with that perspective, you can see why association with other highly rated institutions is so valuable. Realistically, you can look at the numbers for WSU and say they aren't as good, but they still attract very good faculty because they are in the PAC-12 and you can sort of hope that affiliation with Stanford, UCLA and Berkeley will create continued impetus for improvements at your own institution. Does it mean that money doesn't talk sometime? Of course. The Big 10 brought in Rutgers and Nebraska, who definitely brought down the average rating of the universities already in the conference. But that is the exception. For those schools, it was as if they were Elizabeth Bennett marrying Mr. Darcy and coming into possession of a fortune and status they never had before. Does everyone still remember it is Nebraska? Sure, but you can see that they have invested heavily to become an AAU school and improve their research environment in order to catch up.

I know it seems ridiculous, and makes no sense to people who really don't give a crap about perceived research quality and resources. But it makes complete sense to academics.