Yes, but you are considering that there would not be a shift in the quality of applicants accepting offers once the university starts to become more selective in applications. If someone today gets accepted in Princeton, Baruch and
CMU, this person would probably go to Princeton or Baruch. They are more selective, better ranked. Each year, say you have 60 people graduating and securing jobs in the mid-200k. Most are the ones who ended up choosing Princeton or Baruch.
My thesis is that, these top applicants are 90% responsible for their own career placement success not because they graduated from Princeton, but because they’d got accepted from Princeton in the first place. They already had a strong background that, coupled with a masters from any other top tier like
CMU, Berkeley or UChicago, would still be equivalent/enough to secure that high paying job. So, if you get a higher fraction of these best applicants to go to either Berkeley, Columbia, UChicago, or
CMU, and cut out the weakest applicants, boom: you would have very similar ranking parameters and placement numbers.
How do you get that? Gradually decreasing acceptance rate and number of students over a few years time horizon. Why don’t they do that? Tuition revenue.
Conclusion, if you are one of those strong applicants that got into Baruch, just keep up with your own standards, do your homework and have a plan at any top tier program, that you’d be equally well. As I saw another person commenting in another post, at this level it doesn’t really matter which school you choose, it is a matter of personal preference. The career success depends 90% on the individual, not on the program (of course, if you get accepted in Baruch, don’t go to a tier 3 school lol)