While I don’t disagree with the big fish / small pond philosophy being espoused here, it really does not address the premise the OP gave us, namely “looking for the most rigorous program with best potential for good internships for undergrads”.
Not sure how to measure “most rigorous”, US News chose to measure it by the number of papers schools published in the Computer Science area. The rankings this generated:
1. MIT
2. Stanford
3. Harvard
4. UC Berkeley
5. Tsinghua University (China)
6. University of Texas, Austin
7. Nanyang Tech Univ (Singapore)
8. Princeton
9. UCSD
10. National University (Singapore)
11. UCLA
12. Georgia Tech
13. Hong Kong Univ
14. Carnegie Mellon
15. Univ of So Cal (LA)
16. City Univ (Hong Kong)
17. Univ of British Columbia
18. Swiss Federal (Zurich)
19. Univ of Waterloo
20. Univ of London
If one were to use ROI as the measure, then the list is pretty interesting:
1. California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
2. MIT
3. Stanford
4. Georgia Institute of Technology
5. Harvard
6. Princeton
7. Carnegie Mellon
8. UC Berkeley
9. Columbia
10. Cornell
11. UCSD
12. University of Illinois, Urbana
13. Yale
14. UC Santa Barbara
15. University of Maryland, College Park
16. University of Texas, Austin
17. UC Irvine
18. University of Washington, Seattle
19. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
20. UC Davis
21. UCLA
22. Rutgers
23. Purdue
24. University of Mass, Amherst
25. Ohio State
