> I believe MIT has strong prominence in Asia is mainly due to its proximity to Harvard.

I don’t know that that is true — when my parents decided to visit the US for a couple of years in the late 60s my Indian grandfather apparently said that I would end up at MIT.

At that point I was just a little kid with no bias for science vs arts, but apparently didn’t consider Harvard relevant, even though one of his brothers was a diplomat and another a literature prof and he himself surely would have heard of the place.

(I’m glad my parents didn’t tell me this “prophecy” until long after I graduated as I did end up going back and attending MIT!)

> Caltech is too obscure. Stanford starts gaining provenance with Silicon Valley Internet tech bros I believe.

Caltech is much smaller than MIT. It’s true that Stanford was still not well known outside the western US into the early 80s, but its global prominence increased significantly long before those “tech bro” carpetbaggers showed up — the causality runs the other way.