Caltech’s Williams-Hedges said its students are “truly amateur, scholar athletes,” and “we are very proud of our athletics program.”

Caltech’s campus is a jumble of architectural styles, from California Mission to what might be called 21st Century Stainless Steel, nestled in a suburban neighborhood northeast of downtown Los Angeles. The university manages the nearby NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which explores deep space through robotic missions.

On a recent Southern California afternoon, students lugged backpacks laden with electronics and science textbooks across the campus. Near picnic tables on a patio, a whiteboard featured complex ratios, not far from a sculpture representing math’s golden ratio. 

Amol Patil picked up lunch after spending the entire night on his take-home statistics final. Like many students, the 20-year-old sophomore was bemused by talk of parents paying to cheat on college entrance exams or bribe coaches.

“Even if you could pay-to-play and you were to come here, Caltech is not a vacation,” Patil said. “It’s multiple all-nighters every week. You do science day in and day out and, if you don’t like science or you’re not interested in science and, if you just want to go party, you will not like it, even if you could come.”

Famous Pranks
Caltech students are known for their quirks. Despite the glorious Southern California weather, students like to explore a network of underground steam tunnels, which are adorned with murals, notes and poems dating to the 1960s.

Undergraduates also enjoy ambitious pranks. In 1987, the 100th anniversary of Hollywood, they used black and white plastic to make its famed hillside sign read “Caltech.” A few years earlier, during the Rose Bowl game between the University of Illinois and the University of California at Los Angeles, they hacked into the stadium’s electronic scoreboard to make it read Caltech 38 -- MIT 9.

Still, in one way, its campus is far less diverse than other elite schools; its 2017-2018 first-year class had three black students.

“Caltech’s policy insures that the most advantaged white and Asian students are admitted,” said Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a leading critic of the use of standardized testing in education.

Caltech said it chooses candidates without regard to race or the ability to pay. It said the school reaches out to qualified members of minority groups, flying in promising candidates and teaming up with nonprofits that encourage diversity on campus.