To clarify, this was based on something I heard a parent of a Caltech alum say–they were largely disparaging the extremely techical and rigorous nature of the curriculum, but said that it does prepare you better for a PhD than most instititutions.
The (admiteddly few) people I’ve seen online who’ve gone on to do PhDs in CS after graduating from places like Berkeley, Cornell, and CMU seem to be disproprtionaly likely to have acquired Master’s degrees first. Perhaps this is just a result of me not having a large enough sample size, I’ll do a little more research on this front.