<p>To datalook: Those ties have no connection with the current strength of Stanford CS department, especially for OP. He cannot work with those Stanford alumni if he decides to go to Stanford. Currently, there are 3 Turing awardees affiliated with Stanford CS department (Feigenbaum, Knuth and McCarthy), while MIT has 4 (Liskov, Rivest, Minsky and Lampson). MIT also has more membership of NAE (114 vs. 92). To put it fairly, I don’t see MIT in anyway weaker than Stanford in computer science and engineering. MIT appears to have slight edge in achievement.</p>