Interested in being a quant at Citadel, DE Shaw, Renaissance etc.
No MFE will help you land even an interview at DE Shaw or Ren tech, you would need to do a PhD on an interesting topic at a great school.
Which program should I target?
You would probably get an interview at Citadel though (personally superdayed for cit sec and the likes), regardless if do a MFE at Berkeley, Baruch, Columbia, Princeton, CMU etc. Not so much the MFE program that matters, but how you perform on the interviews.
Easiest way to know career prospects for a program is just to look at the career reports for the past 5 years. "Very few UCB MFE heading to good trading firms, hedge funds etc." You can replace UCB with any of these top 5 MFEs and this sentence still holds true. Regardless of the MFE program you go to, top buy side placements is the exception - not the norm. Here's Princetons for example, CMU/Baruch is similiar, only ~1 - 2 students from each program would place into a Citadel/HRT level fund, historically 0 for JS..
Basically, Berkeley is fine, no MFE program is really a magic pill for buy side (we are not the target programs, you'll see too many MIT/CMU cs undergrads at the superdays for the firms you mentioned, IIT background is great in comparison to the general population but very so-so if conditioned on the pool of superday candidates). "Linda no longer there. New people in charge have 0 experience from the perspective of getting jobs for students." Yeah losing Linda might be a blow to the program but I personally don't feel career service is an important factor of considering a program - interviews are mainly dependent on you not your MFE program. In fact, the biggest con of Berkeley imo is that it's not a chill program - you want more time to recruit (multiple consecutive superdays will exhaust you trust me), and less time on doing school work.