Harvard, Wharton, Columbia, Booth, etc... does it matter?

Hi everyone...

I'm applying next year and I'm doing my research now for Top 10 schools and wanted your honest opinion on the opportunities at each school. For clarification, I used the GMATClub rankings,so that includes Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Chicago, Columbia, MIT, Haas, Tuck, Kellogg, Stern.

I did a quick evaluation of the top employers at each school (when data was available) and it seems like all the big guns in consulting (MBB) and banking (GS, MS, etc.) take a fairly high percentage of the classes at every MBA program. I mean McKinsey alone took over 10% of Columbia's last class! In fact, even the distribution of class by job function was pretty similar (surprising to me, as I would have thought a Wharton would index much higher in Finance than a Kellogg might). The exception I noticed was with Stanford, where a crazy amount of people went into entrepreneurship.

So my question is, aside from culture and teaching methods, is there a lasting benefit between going to one school versus another in the top 10? Beyond welcoming any free response that the board might have to that question, I also have a few theories which I was hoping people could either affirm or reject...

a) Is there difference in the long tail in terms of career opportunities between schools? For instance, as many PE shops and VC firms run quite lean, they hire less people and would therefore not show up on the top employer surveys. Would the long tail show that they hire more often at a Harvard than a Booth?
b) Is the network created at any one of the schools really that much more beneficial than another? Does anyone really believe the overall quality of applicants at one school is in some way greater than the overall quality of applicants another school in the Top 10?

A lot of these questions arose from reading this board. I see how badly some people ONLY want to get into Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton, and I just have to wonder to myself... is there any evidence for the benefit? Does it really matter? If you are one of those people, can you please provide some insight into why only those schools?

Also, I'm compiling reports and stats into one Excel spreadsheet and then cleaning it for easy filtering and analysis. Will share that once I get it to a pretty-enough point.

Thanks!