“For example, in the survey of hundreds of employers in a variety of industries at https://chronicle-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/5/items/biz/pdf/Employers Survey.pdf , college reputation was listed as the least influential factor in evaluating resumes of new grads for hiring decisions.”
I agree with that but here’s the thing again, if word got out in silicon valley company that you used reputation or rankings to make a hiring decision, you’d be excoriated and probably lose your interviewing privileges. This is something that even if you do it, you won’t admit it, even in a survey. Again though, I do think that reputation could matter in getting the interviews, that’s why grads from the top-10 in us news engineering/cs (UCB, Stanford, CMU, MIT, UM et al) may have a slight advantage.