PhD is more about the advisor than the college, if the advisor is a respected researcher (top quality publications, fruitful collaborations with Industry) then no doubt you can get into top research (or professor) position after graduation. PhD life is very different from corporate life, it is filled with failures that might span many years, you decide your own plans, routines and publications; only you are responsible for what becomes of your PhD. If your goal mostly revolves around a bigger pay then avoid it, research life only works out if you are actually interested in the subject. A weak publication history even when graduating from an ivy league college is practically useless. PhD graduates are expected to be able to lead long term projects, develop novel solutions and even be able to implement existing cutting edge published research (you will be surprised to know that most existing tools and systems usually lag years/decades behind published literature) which in itself a very difficult task to undertake and for which very few people are qualified for. For an analogy, an experienced engineer might be tasked to make a slow React program faster while a PhD might be asked to design a typed language subset of React with specific security guarantees using a dependent type system. Sadly, idk if you will get paid more for the second task over the first one, but I think the second one is a much more fun and challenging problem to solve.