Speaking from personal experience, it does help in at least two ways: (1) Being surrounded by other hard-working students pushes you to do better and exposes y

Speaking from personal experience, it does help in at least two ways: (1) Being surrounded by other hard-working students pushes you to do better and exposes you to more advanced classes and research early on (a majority of my friends in CS started taking graduate courses by their sophomore year and did undergraduate research at least for a summer in one of research labs on campus). (2) Recruiting/Ability to get interviews. It isn't a problem in getting interviews for software engineering internships/full-time positions if you have MIT, Stanford or Berkeley on your resume.