It was a rhetorical question. The point was, Andrew Mason's accomplishments don't seem quite so respectable anymore.
The article is about the growing number of Liberal Arts graduate s. My point is that if you are going to study liberal arts in this economy, you'd be better off studying somewhere good and have more opportunities later.
I submit that if you get into a name brand university, you probably already have the upper-middle-class/upper-class background, connections, and upbringing necessary to do well in the job market regardless of what you actually study. And either way, now that you're in the elite social category of "people who got into a name brand university". That's all status, and no one ever argued that status didn't get you places in the world.