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Yes, when I went to MIT in the 80s, Stanford was often considered to be the best overall university in the country, and MIT wanted to become more like Stanford.

I don't know when it achieved such stature, but it also had been one of the Big 3 Computer Science graduate schools for quite some time. (I.e., MIT, Stanford, and CMU.)

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No love for Berkeley? I would argue that if you were a perspective student reading USWNR, simply due to proximity to the silicon valley makes the average student get much better chances at jobs and experience in tech.

At the time, Berkeley was considered a distant forth, but there was also a big gap between Berkeley and the rest of the pack.

I recall that my undergraduate advisor thought that I probably wouldn't be able to get into MIT, Stanford, or CMU for grad school, but that I'd have no problem getting into Berkeley. He said staying in would be the problem. They had a reputation at the time for accepting a lot of students and then weeding them out.

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