I mean, only if it actually is a good pedigree. I used to work at a company where one of the HR directors went to Harvard for undergrad. He could say that and people probably would have nodded their heads in agreement. You can't say that if you went to Ohio State. Nothing against the Buckeyes but it's just not in the same tier, to the point where that "pedigree" -- I can't even imagine anyone referring to their Ohio State education as a "pedigree" in any serious sense -- isn't any better or worse than any of the other ~60 half-way decent "$STATE State" or "$STATE University" schools.

There's also a lot of discussion here around the people who get excluded because they lack that pedigree. I don't think anyone is saying that you can't find brilliant folks who went to a small school you've never heard of. They're saying that you're hiring for one professorship, there are a lot of unknowns, and you're trying to eliminate false positives to avoid a bad hire. Seeing that between two otherwise-identical candidates, one of whom has a BA from Harvard and one of whom has a BA from West Virginia State, you're well within your duty as a member of the hiring committee to assume that the person from Harvard has at least as good a chance of being acceptable as the other one. False negatives are okay (not great), false positives are horrible.