<p>Prospective, you are asking kind of an absurd question. I’m hardly an expert on PhD programs, but everything I know tells me that “the prestige/weight or the degree” counts for almost nothing. It’s all about the particular applicant, what he or she has done, what kinds of things his or her recommenders say (and who knows the recommenders), the applicant’s ideas, and to a very limited extent the GREs. That’s not to say that students from Harvard don’t have an advantage over students from East Podunk State University. But it’s not because of the magic qualities of the name “Harvard”. It’s because they started out better test-takers and better self-promoters, are more likely to have engaged in cutting-edge research and to have the support of well-known faculty, may well have a more sophisticated understanding of their chosen field of study, and often are the kind of people who are successful at whatever they do. If someone like that happened to end up at EPSU, chances are he would have the same kind of success as his peers at Harvard. And people like that DO come out of EPSU-type schools, and DO succeed in graduate school, just not as many of them.</p>
<p>Hypothetically, people like that could come out of HES, and probably sometimes do, but it will be a lot more rare even than some random directional state university. PhD admission committees would probably be confused to see an HES graduate, so it would create something of a headwind. But the main thing is that I don’t think HES is set up to give you the sophistication, community, back-and-forth, and research opportunities you would want to put yourself into position to apply to high-quality PhD programs. You might be able to overcome those issues, and to show other people that you had overcome them, but you would have a lot less work to do if you were coming out of a regular, full-time student program almost anywhere. And chances are you wouldn’t be coming out of a program “anywhere” if you went the full-time route. As a backstop, you would probably be able to be a full-time student at a good public university, in New York State or elsewhere, and that would make 50x more sense than HES.</p>
<p>Again, not my area of expertise at all, but I think there are other “nontraditional student” programs that might serve your needs a lot better than Harvard’s – more integration with the regular student body. And you really owe it to yourself to find out if you can resume your education at Cornell, because the chances of your doing better than that, in terms of actual quality AND perceived prestige, are sub-microscopic.</p>