California Institute of Technology (Caltech)

Pasadena, California · Founded 1891

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Testing policy

SAT / ACT required

Caltech requires the SAT or ACT, but reads them unlike anyone else: it does not look at your composite score at all, only the individual section scores. Strong section scores are grouped into bands and the committee is shown only the band, not your exact number; weaker ones are shown outright. ACT writing and science are not required. Caltech states plainly that there is no cut-off score and no minimum. Source: admissions.caltech.edu (verified September 2026).

About

Caltech is deliberately small: roughly a thousand undergraduates study alongside 1,400 graduate students and more than 300 professorial faculty. Everyone takes the same demanding Core Curriculum in mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology before specializing, and undergraduates work in research groups from early on.

History

Founded in 1891 as Throop University, a vocational school in Pasadena, it was rebuilt into a research institute in the 1910s and 1920s by astronomer George Ellery Hale, chemist Arthur Amos Noyes and physicist Robert Millikan, taking the name California Institute of Technology in 1920. Work by its faculty and alumni has been recognized with 49 Nobel Prizes.

What stands out

A required Core Curriculum in math, physics, chemistry and biology
Manages the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA
Co-founded and co-manages LIGO, which first observed gravitational waves
Owns and operates the Palomar and W. M. Keck Observatories
An Honor Code that lets students take most exams unproctored

Popular majors

Computer ScienceMechanical EngineeringElectrical EngineeringPhysicsMathematicsApplied and Computational MathematicsComputation and Neural SystemsChemistryBiology

Campus life

Student life is organized around eight residential Houses that students join in their first year and usually keep for all four. The Honor Code shapes daily life - most exams are taken unproctored, often at home - and elaborate pranks are a long-running tradition.