Stanford has been awarding EE Ph.D.s since 1919, and Stanford's prestige as an engineering institution didn't really begin until after Terman became Dean in the 1940s and began pulling in substantial government research grants.
I still agree with cfield here. There were, say 1% of the population with master degrees, and 0.2% with a Ph.D.
50 years later, there are maybe 5% of the population with master degrees, and 1% with a Ph.D.
Numbers are invented, but something like that could prove that H&P's degrees were comparable to today's Ph.Ds.
