<p>The Fields Medal is colloquially known as the “Nobel Prize of Mathematics.”</p>
<p>And Nobel prizes take a lot of luck. You have to be working in the right field at the right time.</p>
<p>Furthermore, while Millikan later moved to Caltech, he performed his “oil drop experiment” at Chicago. Arthur Compton was a antebellum Nobel winner at Chicago as well. As for Anderson, yes, he won his Nobel Prize for his cooperation with Millikan on the discovery of the positron at Caltech. That’s the Nobel Prize work conducted at Caltech in the antebellum era. Thomas Hunt Morgan made his Nobel discovery at Columbia and then moved to Caltech. Do old Nobel winners who choose to move to another institution after their famous discovery make it prestigious, even if the research wasn’t done there? Well, perhaps it does - as we see during WWII, many Nobel laureates moved to American universities and boosted the prestige of those. But does the presence of a few Nobel Prizes make an institution extremely prestigious? 3 is an awfully small sample size.</p>