I was responding to this part of your post:

> rather than a symbol of educational attainment.

Your original argument appeared to imply that it was a system designed to separate people by class, not by merit or educational attainment.

In my experience the people who are that selective about university pedigree are either doing it out of laziness (outsourcing selection process to the university filtering mechanism) or they have a degree from that system and believe that hiring people from it will automatically grant them more allies, thereby improving their own power.