You may find this article interesting.
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/12/why_caltech_is_in_a_class_by_i.htmlMinding the Campus
December 9, 2010
Why Caltech Is in a Class by Itself
By Russell K. Nieli
...
Of the top two dozen or so elite universities in America only one has
managed both to avoid the craziness of the post-60s intellectual fads,
and to establish something pretty close to a pure meritocracy --
California Institute of Technology, which has not received the general
recognition among academics that it clearly deserves.
The statistics on Caltech's students and faculty are simply
spellbinding. An entering Caltech freshman last year who received a
770 on the math SAT would be exceeded in this area by three-quarters
of his fellow entering freshmen. Many Caltech freshmen got a perfect
800 on their math SAT, while a near-perfect 1560 combination score
placed an incoming freshmen at only the 75th percentile of his
entering classmates. A combined SAT score of 1470 (the 99th percentile
by national standards) placed an entering Caltech freshman at only the
25th percentile among his fellow students. (At Harvard and Princeton,
by contrast, the 25th percentile is reached by a score of only 1380).
All recent Caltech undergraduates have scored 700 or above on the math
SAT, and far from being a bunch of inarticulate science and math
geeks, the vast majority have scored over 700 on the English verbal
SAT as well. Most Caltech matriculants have also taken numerous
Advanced Placement courses in high school, and attained perfect scores
on their AP exams. In short, Caltech is interested in enrolling only
the academically most accomplished and advanced students, who have a
genuine passion for the STEM subjects (science, technology,
engineering, mathematics), and virtually all of its entering students
have achieved at the 98th or 99th percentile in terms of their scores
on competitive national exams.
What this means is that at Caltech, there are no dumb jocks, dumb
legacies, or dumb affirmative action students. It is clear from its
published statistics that the non-academic criteria that preoccupy
admissions committees at all other elite universities count for little
at this beacon of pure meritocracy. Perhaps the most striking
difference from all other elite universities -- including institutions
like MIT and the University of Chicago which forgo athletic
recruitment -- is Caltech's complete indifference to racial balancing.
In a state and a region of the country with the largest Hispanic
population, Caltech's entering freshmen class in 2008 was less than 6
percent Hispanic (13 out of 236). The unwillingness to lower standards
for a larger black representation is even more striking -- less than 1
percent (2/236) of Caltech's 2008 entering freshmen were listed as
"non-Hispanic black". This "underrepresentation" of blacks and
Hispanics, of course, was more than made up for by the huge
"overrepresentation" of Asians. Only 4 percent of the U.S. population,
Asians made up a whopping 40 percent of the incoming freshmen class in
2008, a slightly larger proportion than the 39 percent figure for
whites. Applicants to Caltech are clearly seen as representing only
themselves and their own individual merit and achievement, not their
race or their ethnic group. As a professor at Caltech who has taught
there for many years explained to me in an email, "We try, like our
competitors, very, very hard to find, recruit, and nurture
underrepresented minorities but we won't bend our standards."
...
