Outstanding being as such compared to other PhD graduate peers from peer/better ranked graduate programs in the same field/subfield.
And even then, there is an issue of age discrimination in many departments, including some engineering fields. A reason why my engineering PhD holding cousin and some Profs in a variety of fields have strongly recommended students that while it’s ok to take a few years in between undergrad and PhD, to not wait too long to start.
Yes and that’s becoming more important as many hiring committees and grad departments are becoming less tolerant of grad students taking more than 7 years to complete their PhDs.
A few universities such as Princeton has been ahead of the curve in this respect by having a stipulated 5 year limit for full fellowship funding while leaving it up to individual departments to decide whether to allow students who exceeded that limit to continue by being funded by outside sources as was the case with a friend who took 9.5 years to finish his PhD in the Math department or an older undergrad classmate’s father whose department had a policy of kicking students who exceeded that limit out and thus, forcing them to finish their PhDs elsewhere.