And he only went to MIT as an undergraduate because his first choice Columbia had a "Jew quota" and they had already admitted all the Jews they wanted to for that year. Besides the antisemitism, it's also a reminder that in the 1930s MIT was seen as a good, but not particularly elite school and would be somebody's backup school.
From an interview[0] with Charles Weiner in 1966 Feynmann reminisces about not wanting to go Princenton and rather staying at MIT after graduating, because “MIT is MIT”, but does so only after being persuaded by one of the professors from MIT. I think he made several remarks of MIT having a high status at the time.
Probably WWII, with the American radar research program (not as famous as the Manhattan Project but probably equally or more important) centered there.
Gunsights too. That was how Doc Draper who later pioneered inertial navigation and whose lab designed the Apollo Guidance Computer first made his name. (Draper Labs is no longer formally affiliated with MIT as it was divested during the Vietnam War.)
But WWII was probably a major catalyst in the US to the rise in prominence of all the great science and engineering research universities. (There are actually a lot of inventors from that era like Draper who although they were also theoreticians to some degree one suspects might not fit in with a modern research university faculty.)
Makes me wonder how big a role did the "Jew Quota" or similar discriminatory practices played in holding back the likes of Columbia. Also whether we will see a similar effect over next 50 years with affirmative vs non-affirmative schools.
MIT was only a few decades old at the time -- having been founded about 75 years prior. Columbia was over twice as old at the time (185 years) and was well-established as a global center of physics research.
It seems to me that the prestige of a university is largely a function of it's age. It takes time to become prestigious in the eyes of the public through word of mouth. If you look now at the research universities that are only about 70 years old or less, they are not taken very seriously and are "backup schools" regardless of the quality of research or instruction going on there. Moreover, some of the prestigious "ivy" schools have fallen off their game and aren't really top tier in any academic fields anymore, yet are still highly regarded by the general public.
