<p>If it were me, and the only difference were that one candidate had (better school, good GPA) and another had (good school, better GPA), I’d choose the one who went to the better school. Naturally, that doesn’t necessarily generalize to other people. My reasoning is thus: the one who went to the better school beat out a lot more people to get in than the other guy. That means he might have a longer, more consistent or more impressive track record. Otherwise, it means he is more ambitious and driven, which are also positive. Also, having e.g. a 3.4 GPA at a good school indicates that the student did well (A’s and B’s) but wasn’t necessarily breezing through the coursework. Anybody with a 4.0 in a technical discipline is either (a) not the kind of person I’d want to hire or (b) somebody who had a relatively easy time in undergrad… if he ever struggled at all, it was the difference between an A- and an A+, which means the material was too easy for him. I went to a decent - though, frankly, mediocre - school and had a near-perfect GPA, and if I had it to do again I’d have looked at more presitigious or well-respected institutions.</p>
<p>That being said, Harvard isn’t necessarily better than other schools for every technical discipline. Although school X might be “good but not great” compared to school Y, school X’s program in Z might be leagues ahead of school Y’s comparable offering. This isn’t a fundamental problem with your question, just an observation that the level of granularity should be the program, not the school.</p>