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I imagine the graduate degrees Hewlett and Packard earned at Stanford were, for their time, at least equal in prestige to a Stanford Ph.D in 2000.

Assuming Wikipedia can be believed:

Hewlett - 1939 Stanford "degree of Electrical Engineer"

Packard - 1938 Stanford "master's degree in Electrical Engineering"

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Stanford has been awarding EE Ph.D.s since 1919, and Stanford's prestige as an engineering institution didn't really begin until after Terman became Dean in the 1940s and began pulling in substantial government research grants.

I still agree with cfield here. There were, say 1% of the population with master degrees, and 0.2% with a Ph.D. 50 years later, there are maybe 5% of the population with master degrees, and 1% with a Ph.D. Numbers are invented, but something like that could prove that H&P's degrees were comparable to today's Ph.Ds.

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