Its faculty and alumni have won 39 Nobel Prizes. Graduates include former Compaq Chairman Ben Rosen and Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, known for the law that computer processing speed doubles every two years.
Is it Stanford, Harvard or MIT? No, it’s the California Institute of Technology, a school with fewer than 1,000 undergraduates in Pasadena, California.
Just before Ivy League schools notified applicants of their decisions last week, federal prosecutors alleged that dozens of parents bribed standardized test proctors and coaches to cheat their kids’ way into top universities, including Yale, Stanford and the University of Southern California.
The scandal has also renewed scrutiny of admissions favoritism shown to children of donors and alumni, as well as athletes playing exclusive sports such as crew, fencing and squash. The 128-year-old Caltech is the exception that proves the rule.
Caltech’s “selection criteria are based on the highest standards of academic excellence,” spokeswoman Deborah Williams-Hedges said in an email. The typical student has an SAT math score of 790 to 800, which represents a perfect result. The school also selects for students whose prior pursuits demonstrate a passion for science.
Perfect Grades
“The big man, or woman, on campus here isn’t the football player or the basketball player,’’ said K. Mani Chandy, a professor emeritus of computer science. “It’s the student who takes on 55 or 60 hours of coursework a week and gets straight A’s.’’
Caltech gives no preference to the applications of alumni kids, or legacies. That makes it a rarity among elite colleges. Its close cousin, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has the same policy.
A federal lawsuit accuses Harvard of maintaining quotas on the number of Asian Americans it accepts. According to court filings, they often have superior credentials but are assigned lower rankings for subjective “personal” qualities. Harvard said its system is fair and last week announced that Asian Americans accounted for a record 25.4 percent of those offered positions in this fall’s first-year class. At Caltech, Asian Americans comprise 40 percent of freshmen in the current school year.
Losing Streak
Unlike the Ivy League, Caltech plays in the less competitive NCAA Division III. In basketball, the school, almost proudly, tracked how its Beavers once maintained a 310–game losing streak, which it broke in 2015.
This year, the Beavers set another milestone by winning the 10th game of the season, the first time since the mid 1950s that it reached double-digit victories. The women’s water polo team last month won its first game in almost two years. Caltech has no football team.