For those of us in academia, peer assessment is really the main thing we care when hiring new faculty or admitting new PhD students. Many people on this site whole-heartly embrace holistic admission at the undergraduate level, in a way peer reputation is our holistically assessing our professional/academic peers.
For PhD admission, the evaluation criteria can include many things such as undergraduate institution/department reputation, reference letters (and reputation of referrees), research experiences, course rigor and GPA, test scores, etc.
For international students, it is not easy to get H1 visas with only BS degrees.