The articles you quoted about people being courted, as opposed to needing to find a job, apply to very few college Juniors. It doesn't matter whether you're at an Ivy League school or somewhat lower tier school.
You're going to have a much harder time getting hired at a startup, mainly because a founder can't afford to take any risks. And an unknown quantity (which is what most college Juniors are) is a risk, by definition. An Ivy League degree might make a difference, but at a startup, you're going to want to optimize for the very best people you can find, and that's in general going to be people with a lot of experience (not just in technical matters, which is why being interested in learning about business and legal issues on the side is no bad thing).
Also, while I wasn't at Google during the period when it was growing at an astonishingly fast rate, the stories that I hard was that they were taking busloads of candidates from schools such as Stanford (literally; they would bring them in buses for interviews in an essentially production-line fashion). I talked to someone who told me how hard it was interview a half-dozen people in one day, and then having to keep track of it all to write up the interview reports.
For companies going through a huge growth spurt, they are going to inevitably take some shortcuts to maximize yield, and lower the burden on an insufficiently staffed HR and interview-qualified engineers to do the bulk hiring. And stories about the hiring practices of companies who are going through that growth spurt might not be accurate when the companies' growth rate has slowed, and they can afford to be a bit more deliberate about their hiring process.
I've heard a large number of wildly inaccurate (at least from my perspective, only having worked at Google for 2.5 years) stories about how hiring works at Google, and I sometimes wonder if they are stories that reflected an era from a previous stage in Google's evolution as a company, and yet, because they are great stories, they keep on getting retold, even if in the end they are actually harmful for people who believe they are still true.
