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Comment by michael_nielsen | Hacker News Reader

Nobel Prizes per undergraduate is an interesting measure. More than one in every 1000 Caltech undergrads wins a Nobel Prize, and that number rises substantially if one restricts just to science students, not engineering (which doesn't have a Nobel). This suggests that the admissions office there is doing something right.

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I think it's actually Nobel Prizes per alumnus, i.e., it includes advanced degree-holders as well. (See http://www.admissions.caltech.edu/about/notable, which states that "Caltech has over 20,000 living alumni—of whom 17 are Nobel Prize-winning scientists", and goes on to list lots of notable Caltech Ph.D. alumni.) So the graduate admissions committees are apparently doing a good job, too (though clearly they screwed up in my case :-).

You can get a Nobel Prize science prizes for "physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine" but they often give them to 2 or 3 people so let's say 17 / (~8 per year over ~40 years) which gives you ~5%. That sounds great but I think most Nobel Ph.D. have 2 or 3 schools (if not more) in their background so it's really more like 2% which sounds about right for one of the top 25 science schools in the world.

I've heard two different figures for Caltech. The 17 figure I read on Steve Hsu's blog; presumably he has the same source as you, although I assumed he was referring to undergrad only. That assumption seems to have been a mistake. The reason I made the assumption is that while I was a postdoc, one of the oncampus papers ran an article that set the number at 27, if I recall correctly, roughly equally split between undergrad and grad. In either case they're a long way ahead of other US Schools.

Are you controlling for those not admitted that went to similar caliber schools, or have an example of how that statistic compares to those schools with a similar quality applicant pool?

You can show fairly quickly that the success of Caltech alumni in sciences, as measured by awards, is comparable only to the École Normale Supérieure (and possibly Phystech in Russia depending on how you count). Check out http://www.arwu.org/rank2008/ARWU2008_A(EN).htm

The column 'Alumni' compares the number of Nobel prizes or Fields Medals won by Alumni to the number won by Harvard (in percent). Caltech scores 52.8 on this, and ENS 53.4. But Caltech and ENS are by far the smallest of the universities on the top 100 list (unless I am mistaken). Both Caltech and ENS enroll about 200 undergraduates a year, with ENS enrolling only about 100 of those in science and engineering. Caltech has a population of another 1200 graduate students.

One thing to note about Caltech, ENS, and Phystech, they are extremely small, extremely selective, have no legacy admissions, limited or no affirmative action, and pay heavy attention to competitive exams, in the case of ENS and Phystech, administrating them.

Caltech admissions struck me as particularly clean. I think part of this is that they're very much into maths and sciences, fields in which SAT score do a great job of determining proficiency. You either know the answer or you don't. On top of that, they give back to their alumni in other ways; one couple that donated 200M to the university had their kid denied, but the university named a star system after them.

Even more successful would be Cambridge University. 83 Nobel Prize winners in total. (31 Nobels from Trinity College, Cambridge alone!) http://www.cam.ac.uk/univ/nobelprize.html

That said, Cambridge is a far bigger University than Caltech and others, but a large proportion of those degrees are awarded in non-science fields.

Ah, one issue from the SHJT list is that they weight more recent awards more heavily. Cambridge was a preeminent force in science and engineering in the earliest half of the century, but seems now to have diminished somewhat relative to others.

Here is a list of the Nobel Laureates per university straight from the source (based on affiliation at the time of the Nobel Prize announcement):

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/universities.html

Wikipedia has another list based on what universities claim themselves:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_Laureates_by_univ...

So while Caltech is doing very well indeed, there are 15 universities with more affiliated awardees.

The first list is the list of the Nobel Laureates they OWN not they EDUCATED! Richer is the University more N.L it can hire and pay. :)

The Wiki is the one.

I know that Swarthmore, my alma mater, has had 5 Nobel laureates (if you count one Economics prize), and is comparably selective, and only slightly larger than Caltech. Note that it only has 20-30% as many science grads as Caltech [rough estimate].

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