This School Doesn't Care Who Your Parents Are

  • Unlike Ivies, Caltech doesn’t favor the children of alumni
  • School’s sports teams are famed for their epic losing streaks
The Caltech campus in Pasadena, California.Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon
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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.