The California Institute of Technology is a very small university in Pasadena devoted almost entirely to science and engineering. All undergraduates begin with a shared core in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science, then choose from a compact set of technical majors that Caltech calls options. Research is part of ordinary undergraduate life: most students join supervised projects, and the university's laboratories connect study with work in fields from seismology to space science. This intensity rewards students already committed to technical study, while the narrow academic range leaves less room for a later turn toward business, law or the humanities.
Location
California, United States
Establishment year
1891
Students
2,401
International students
683
Female students
36%
Acceptance rate
3%
Place in ratings
There's not enough data to display the dynamics of this rating.
7th, QS World University Rankings 2027[5]; 4th among US universities[6]
Next deadlines
1 November 2026 and 4 January 2027, Fall 2027 entry[7]
Where Caltech is genuinely strong
Research is the default undergraduate experience, not a privilege you compete for — over 90% take part, about half in the first year
The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships pay a 8,110 USD award for a ten-week supervised project, and more than 50 centres and institutes take undergraduates[8]. Elsewhere you lobby for a lab.
A PhD offer is a funded offer whatever your passport: tuition, fees and a 50,000 USD stipend since 1 September 2026
It comes as a fellowship, a research assistantship or a teaching assistantship, and there is no separate funding application; the rate rose from 48,244 USD a year earlier[9].
Need-based aid for internationals is real money: 59 undergraduates held awards averaging 85,696 USD
That is 5,056,044 USD of institutional aid to non-resident undergraduates in the year covered by the 2025-26 Common Data Set[4], against a 98,622 USD budget.
Instruments, not only papers: the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, LIGO, Palomar Observatory, the Kavli Nanoscience Institute
Caltech researchers founded JPL in 1936 and the Institute has managed it for NASA since 1958. But NASA will compete the contract, and Caltech's current agreement ends on 30 September 2028.
Where Caltech falls short
Under 4% get in, and the early round does not improve those odds
Caltech admitted 428 of 11285 first-year applicants for Fall 2025[4], and says the admit rate is under 5% in both rounds with a negligible difference between them[7]. Caltech belongs on a list, not at the centre of one.
No merit scholarships exist, and international admission is need-aware
Americans are reviewed need-blind; for foreign applicants Caltech says the aid pool is limited and need may factor into the decision[1].
Skip the aid application in year one and you are locked out of Caltech aid for the whole degree
Only entering first-years may apply; those who do not, or are refused, stay ineligible for every later academic period, bar an exception for citizens and permanent residents of Canada and Mexico[10].
Six divisions and 26 undergraduate options, essentially all science and engineering
There is no law school, no business school and no medical school[11] — if your interests may shift that way, the pivot happens elsewhere.
Six divisions, 26 options and who decides what
Caltech has no faculties or colleges in the European sense. Six academic divisions — biology and biological engineering; chemistry and chemical engineering; engineering and applied science; geological and planetary sciences; the humanities and social sciences; physics, mathematics and astronomy — hold 26 undergraduate options and 31 graduate ones, taught by roughly 300 professorial faculty to about 970 undergraduates and 1300 graduate students, a 3:1 student-to-faculty ratio[11]. Option is Caltech's word for a major, and the difference matters procedurally: options own the graduate admission decision, the curriculum and the advising, while the central Undergraduate Admissions Office runs first-year entry for the whole Institute.
For an undergraduate the practical consequence is that the first year is not a choice. Everyone takes the same Core, and the option is declared near the end of that year, after a first-year adviser has worked through the curriculum and the pass-fail terms with a small group of advisees. Once you declare, you pick a faculty option adviser who stays with you to graduation[12]. For a graduate applicant the consequence is the opposite: you are applying to a research group inside one option, not to Caltech, and you may apply to only one option per cycle[13].
Strength is concentrated rather than spread. Caltech's people hold 49 Nobel Prizes, 68 National Medals of Science, 15 National Medals of Technology and Innovation and 125 memberships of the American national academies[14], almost all of them in physics, chemistry, the planetary and Earth sciences, biology and engineering. The humanities and social sciences division exists and every undergraduate spends about a hundred units in it, but it is a teaching and research unit for scientists, not a route into a humanities career. Caltech is 7th in the QS World University Rankings 2027, published in June 2026[5], and fourth among American universities after MIT, Stanford and Harvard[6], which for an institution of this size says more about output per researcher than about breadth.
The campus is one block of Pasadena, 124 acres at the foot of the San Gabriel mountains, about 11 miles from downtown Los Angeles, in a city Caltech describes as enjoying roughly 300 days of sunshine a year[15]. Founded in 1891[11], it is small enough to cross on foot in ten minutes, which is why almost nobody commutes and why the residential Houses, not the departments, organise social life.
Campus Type
Urban
Library
Yes
Pasadena is the practical constraint. It is a comfortable, expensive mid-sized city rather than a student town: Caltech's own graduate budget cites average Pasadena market rents of 1,937-3,404 USD a month for a studio through a two-bedroom apartment, plus utilities, as of July 2024[3]. Undergraduates are insulated from that because they live on campus, but graduate students, partners and anyone staying through a summer are not. Getting to Los Angeles without a car is workable: Caltech's commuter programme gives members of the campus community who travel by public transit a free Metro pass valid on all Metro bus and rail lines and on Pasadena Transit, students included[16]. Students do use the city — admitted-student weekends run trips to JPL and Griffith Observatory[17] — but a car remains the default for anything beyond the transit corridors.
The climate is one of the few genuinely easy things about Caltech: dry, warm, no winter to budget for. Student life is dense but inward-facing. Each House runs its own traditions, dinners, study breaks, hiking and skiing trips; there are no fraternities or sororities at all, and the Common Data Set records 0% participation in both[4]. If you want a large, varied campus social world with a football culture and a professional-school crowd, this is the wrong 124 acres.
What 1000 undergraduates pay to be here
One rate applies to everyone; there is no international band. The published cost of attendance doubles as your proof of funds: US immigration sets no national figure, and the I-20 uses the school's own budget. The nine-month undergraduate budget for 2026-27, the most recent Caltech has published[2]:
Item
2026-27 academic year
Tuition
68,574 USD
Mandatory fees
2,655 USD
Housing
12,711 USD
Food
9,285 USD
Books and supplies
1,428 USD
Personal expenses
3,969 USD
Total
98,622 USD
Academic calendar
Quarters
Financial Aid
Yes
Bachelor
56,364USD/year
Master
54,570USD/year
Doctorate
54,570USD/year
The first four lines, 93,225 USD, are what Caltech bills you. The last two are estimates Caltech adds so that aid can cover them. Outside the table: the Caltech student health plan costs 5,388 USD for 2026-27, charged as 1,796 USD per insurance term, and can be waived with comparable coverage — aid recipients who do enrol may ask for the cost to be added to their budget and receive grant assistance for it[2]. Entering undergraduates also pay a one-time 600 USD orientation fee on top of the mandatory fees[2]. A personal computer allowance may be added on request, and a travel allowance covering two round trips exists but is restricted to US citizens and eligible non-citizens resident in the US, its territories, Canada or Mexico — which is exactly the group most international students are not in.
Room and board
on campus18,606USD/year
off campus17,784USD/year
Other expenses
on campus2,700USD/year
off campus4,860USD/year
Graduate money works on a different logic. Tuition and mandatory fees are 71,022 USD for 2026-27, but a funded PhD student never pays them: the appointment carries a tuition credit[3]. What a graduate student actually budgets is living cost, which Caltech estimated at 31,774-44,554 USD a year for 2025-26 depending on housing type, against a stipend of 50,000 USD. Stipends are taxable income in the United States; the tuition credit is not. Master's students are the gap in this system — the Institute does not generally fund them, though departments may appoint them to assistantships[9].
Undergraduate review is holistic but literal about preparation: calculus, chemistry and physics are expected, and Caltech names what it reads — Class X and XII state board or CBSE results, IB Higher Level Mathematics, A-level Mathematics[1]. There is no interview. Faculty read files directly: 25 professors worked on the class admitted in March 2026[17], which is unusual and explains why demonstrated technical depth travels further here than a polished activity list.
Have your school send official transcripts for grades 9 to 11 — the school submits them, not you[18].
Book the SAT or ACT to finish before 30 November 2026 (early round) or 31 December 2026 (regular round)[19].
Sit IELTS, TOEFL or Duolingo unless you were taught in English; the result must predate the deadline.
Line up two recommendation letters: one STEM teacher at calculus level or above, one from humanities.
Apply with the 85 USD fee, or request the waiver if it is a genuine hardship[20].
If you need money, declare it on the admissions application and file the CSS Profile and Caltech's international aid forms in the same cycle — there is no later entry point[10].
Reply by 1 May 2027, then pay the 350 USD SEVIS fee and the 185 USD visa fee and book the interview.
The test policy deserves its own reading, because Caltech's is unlike anyone else's. The SAT or ACT is required again, the ACT writing and science subscores are not needed for Fall 2027, and the composite score is never considered — only individual subscores, sorted into buckets. A Math or Reading & Writing SAT section of 780-800 (ACT 35-36) appears to the committee as "Bucket A" with the exact number hidden; 750-770 (ACT 33-34) appears as "Bucket B"; below 750 SAT or 33 ACT your precise score is shown[19]. Practically: the difference between 790 and 800 is worth nothing, and the difference between 740 and 760 is worth a great deal.
Graduate admission belongs to the options, not to a central office. The Institute-wide application window runs 21 November to 15 December for entry the following autumn, and there is no minimum GPA or other quantitative cut-off; the statement, transcripts and letters carry the file[13].
Choose one option: only one graduate application per cycle, though a committee may refer your file to another option at no extra cost.
Check that option's own deadline and GRE policy — Caltech states that GRE policies differ substantially between graduate programmes, so there is no single Institute answer[21].
Name the groups you want to join — research fit carries a doctoral application.
Prepare transcripts from every institution attended, three letters of recommendation, a CV and the essays; Caltech says these components are weighed carefully and equally[21].
Funding arrives with the doctoral offer, not as a separate contest — but note that most funding sources require US work authorisation, so matriculation depends on it[9].
Restrictive Early Action is non-binding, but it locks you out of early action and early decision elsewhere, with narrow exceptions for institutions outside the United States, public universities with non-binding autumn deadlines, rolling admissions, military academies and early-deadline scholarship programmes. Deferral is used sparingly, and a deferred applicant can only be admitted or denied in March — Caltech does not waitlist deferred students. Waitlist activity from the regular round closes by mid-July[7].
Inside a Caltech term: the Core, pass-fail and the Honor Code
Caltech runs three ten-week terms rather than two semesters, and measures courses in units that correspond roughly to weekly hours: a nine-unit class means about three hours of class and six hours of homework a week[22]. That arithmetic is the honest answer to "how hard is it": a normal load of 45 to 48 units is a 45-to-48-hour working week before any research, and it repeats three times a year with no long autumn break to absorb a bad start.
The Caltech Core, unit by unit
Core requirement
Units
First-year mathematics (multivariable calculus, linear algebra)
27
First-year physics (yearlong)
27
First-year chemistry, plus laboratory
15 + 6
First-year biology
9
Menu class (astronomy, environmental science, energy, geosciences, information or logic)
9
Additional introductory laboratory
6
Introduction to programming
9
Scientific writing
3
Humanities, social sciences, and further units in either
36 + 27 + 36
Physical education
9
Every undergraduate completes this regardless of option[22].
The first two terms soften the landing: the introductory Core courses — Ma 1, Ph 1, Ch 1 and Ch 3, Bi 1, CS 1, Wr 2, the introductory lab, first-year humanities and introductory social science — are graded pass or fail, so a student arriving from a school system that never demanded this pace can recalibrate without a permanent transcript record[22]. Students who test out of a Core course work out a substitute individually with their adviser. From Fall 2025 a pilot called the Integrated Core has offered the same first-year material through cross-disciplinary courses to roughly 10% of the intake[23].
Assessment runs on the Honor Code, a single sentence: no member of the Caltech community shall take unfair advantage of any other member of the Caltech community. In practice it means take-home and unproctored exams with stated time and resource limits, 24-hour access to campus facilities, and problem sets that are explicitly expected to be solved collaboratively[24]. International students used to invigilated national examinations should read this carefully rather than romantically: the rules on each exam cover sheet are binding, enforcement is by a student Board of Control, and "everyone at my school did this" is not a defence.
Academic support is built around people rather than centres. A first-year adviser is assigned at the start of the first term and meets advisees individually and as a cohort; each residence hall carries peer advisers, health advocates, Title IX advocates and a resident associate, and some have faculty in residence[25]. With a 3:1 student-to-faculty ratio, office hours are genuinely available. What Caltech does not offer is a way to carry a light term: the Core is the Core.
Caltech awards no merit scholarships at all. Every institutional dollar is need-based, and for an international applicant three rules decide everything.
Rule one: the money is real but the pool is small. In the year covered by the 2025-26 Common Data Set, 59 non-resident undergraduates held institutional need-based aid, sharing 5,056,044 USD, an average of 85,696 USD each[4]. That average covers most of a 98,622 USD budget, so an award is transformative when it arrives. But 59 recipients sit inside a body of 154 international undergraduates, and Caltech states plainly that funds for international students are limited and that a request for aid may be considered in the admission decision[1]. US citizens and permanent residents are reviewed need-blind; you are not. Treat aid as competitive on top of an already sub-4% admission rate, not as something that follows automatically from demonstrated need.
Rule two: year one is the only entry point. International students may apply for aid only as an incoming first-year. If you do not apply then, or you apply and are found ineligible, you may not apply in any later year of the degree. The single exception is citizens and permanent residents of Canada and Mexico. There is no international aid at all for transfer or 3/2 applicants, and everyone who does hold an award must reapply annually[10]. This is the most expensive mistake available on this page: a family that decides to "try without aid and ask later" has closed the door for four years.
Rule three: the paperwork is its own deadline. The international first-year aid file is built on the CSS Profile plus Caltech's own forms and parents' tax or non-filer documentation, with form deadlines in November and December that run ahead of, or alongside, the admissions deadlines rather than after them. You must also disclose on the admissions application itself that you intend to apply for aid. International students cannot receive US federal aid of any kind — no Pell Grant, no federal work-study, no federal loans — so the Caltech grant is the whole of the package[10].
The aid pages lag the admissions pages
Checked on 17 September 2026, Caltech's Restrictive Early Action aid page for international applicants still described the previous cycle — entry in fall 2026, with form deadlines of 15 November and 15 December 2025[26]. The admissions deadlines for Fall 2027 were already published. Work from the admissions calendar, and email the financial aid office for the current form dates rather than reading last year's off the page.
Doctoral funding is a different world and should not be judged by the undergraduate picture. Every PhD student is offered full tuition and fee coverage plus a living stipend, conditional on full-time enrolment, satisfactory progress and securing a thesis adviser. Support comes as an internal or external fellowship, a research assistantship, a teaching assistantship or a combination, and there is no separate financial aid application — the offer carries it. The stipend is 50,000 USD for twelve months as of 1 September 2026, up from 48,244 USD; the average Caltech PhD runs five to six years[9]. Two caveats are easy to miss: most funding sources require US work authorisation, so matriculation is conditional on it unless the admitting option arranges something special, and outside employment is capped at one day a week and needs written approval from the Dean of Graduate Studies. For an internationally mobile student without family money, the funded PhD is by a wide margin the more realistic Caltech route — and the general landscape of scholarships and financial aid in the USA confirms how unusual full doctoral funding of this kind is outside the research universities.
Houses, Rotation and what renting costs instead
Caltech guarantees housing and requires undergraduates to live on campus for their first two years; most stay all four. There are 11 residence halls: eight traditional Houses and three unaffiliated halls, with singles, doubles, triples and suites[25]. The result is a campus where 99.2% of first-years and 93.2% of all undergraduates live in Institute housing[4] — a figure worth pausing on, because it means the House is your social unit whether or not you planned for it to be.
How you end up in one is the part no other university does. You arrive, get a temporary room, and during the first two weeks take part in Rotation: visiting each residence, eating with the students who live there, joining their activities, then submitting a ranked preference. Participation in individual activities is optional, almost everyone gets one of their top choices, and nobody is assigned to a residence they disliked. At the end of each year you may stay or move[25]. One hard rule catches a few early-entry international applicants: you must be 17 by 1 October of your matriculation year to live on campus in year one, and Caltech does not help families find off-campus housing.
Housing and food are 21,996 USD of the 2026-27 undergraduate budget[2], billed by Caltech, so an aid award that meets full need meets this too. Graduate housing is separate, allocated by lottery, and guaranteed for all new graduate students in their first year[3]. Monthly rates for 2026-27[27]:
Graduate accommodation
2026-27, per month
Catalina four-bedroom quad, furnished, per bed
830 USD
Catalina two-bedroom double, furnished, per bed
987 USD
Catalina one-bedroom single, furnished, per bed
1,664 USD
Caltech-owned studio apartment, furnished, whole apartment
Utilities are billed on top — roughly 100 USD per person in a quad and 120-160 USD in a single, plus 20 USD a month for internet. Compare that with the open Pasadena market, where Caltech's own budget cited 1,937-3,404 USD a month for studios through two-bedrooms as of July 2024[3], and the case for staying in Institute housing on a 50,000 USD stipend makes itself. Private renting in Pasadena also means a credit check, a deposit of one to two months and, for a newly arrived international student with no US credit history, frequently a guarantor or several months paid up front.
Over 90% of Caltech undergraduates do research, and about half start in their first year[8]. The mechanism that makes this routine rather than exceptional is SURF, the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships, running since 1979 and deliberately modelled on grant-seeking: you find a mentor, define a project with them, write a proposal, and faculty review the proposals and recommend awards. Fellows work ten weeks full time — no courses, no second job, in person only — file two interim reports and an abstract, submit a technical paper approved by the mentor, and present at a SURF Seminar Day. In 2026 the award was 8,110 USD for the period[28]. The transferable part is the proposal: for a student heading towards a PhD, writing and defending one at nineteen is worth more than the stipend.
Term-time research runs through the labs directly, and the facilities are the reason to come. Caltech has more than 50 centres and institutes on campus, and students work with LIGO, which made the first direct detection of gravitational waves; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; the Kavli Nanoscience Institute; the Beckman Institute; global seismic networks; shock and wind tunnels; and the Huntington Library's collections a few blocks away[29]. SURF has dedicated tracks at JPL and LIGO. Keep the JPL caveat in view: NASA will compete the operating contract and Caltech's current agreement ends on 30 September 2028, so a student entering in 2027 should treat the JPL relationship as valuable now rather than guaranteed for the whole degree.
Doctoral research is structured around the thesis adviser rather than coursework. Funding is conditional on securing one and on satisfactory progress toward the degree, and the average PhD takes five to six years[9]. That is why the graduate application is really an application to a group: naming the laboratories whose problems you want to work on, and saying something specific about them, is the substance of the file, not a flourish on top of it.
Six scholars programmes and a term in Chicago
Caltech's Fellowships Advising and Study Abroad office runs six official programmes open to students in any discipline: Cambridge, Copenhagen, École Polytechnique in Paris (French proficiency required), Edinburgh, London and Melbourne. You apply in your second or third year and go in your third or fourth, because the first year belongs to the Core and the second to your option. There is also a fall-term Study Away exchange with the University of Chicago[30]. It is a short list by the standards of a large university, and deliberately so — the calendar simply has little slack in it.
Careers, OPT and the rules that are still unsettled
CALE, Career Achievement, Leadership, and Exploration, is the careers service, and it covers students, postdocs and alumni: career exploration, graduate and professional school advising, job search strategy, internships and employer partnerships[31]. The newest cohort Caltech reports is the Class of 2025: 40% went on to graduate or professional school, 40.9% accepted a full-time job, 10% took a fellowship, internship or similar position and 9.1% took time to explore other options, and the admissions office puts the median starting salary band of Caltech graduates at 120,000-129,000 USD[32]. It names only a handful of destinations — recent graduates heading to Meta, SpaceX, research laboratories and graduate schools — and says that since 2000 the most common graduate schools have been Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton and Caltech itself[32]. That is a summary rather than a full outcomes report: it gives no response rate and no salary spread, so read the band as a midpoint for the whole class, not as a forecast for your option.
Beyond campus the rules are federal, not institutional. On an F-1 you may work 20 hours a week on campus during term and full time in official breaks; general off-campus work is closed in year one and afterwards only opens under narrow hardship categories. Optional Practical Training then gives 12 months, plus 24 more for STEM graduates whose employer is enrolled in E-Verify and stays enrolled — which, at an institution where essentially every option is a STEM field, means up to 36 months for almost every graduate. Since 2 September 2025 nearly all F-1 applicants, including renewals, attend an in-person consular interview, so build the appointment queue into your timeline rather than assuming a waiver.
Duration of status is in court, not in force
A DHS final rule published on 17 July 2026 (91 FR 44976) would have replaced open-ended duration of status for F-1 students with a fixed admission period tied to the I-20 and capped at four years, shortened the departure window to 30 days and required Form I-539 to extend[33]. Its stated effective date was 15 September 2026. On 14 September 2026, the day before, a federal district court in Massachusetts issued a preliminary injunction blocking implementation in Presidents' Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration v. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, No. 1:26-cv-13799 (D. Mass.)[34]. Duration of status therefore still applies as of 17 September 2026, the litigation is unresolved and an appeal is expected. A five-to-six-year Caltech PhD is exactly the case the rule would have affected, so check the position again before you accept an offer — and note that some official pages, including the DHS explainer last updated on 10 September 2026, still describe the rule as taking effect.
Thirty-eight nationalities cannot get an F-1 at present
Since 1 January 2026, Presidential Proclamation 10998 of 16 December 2025 has suspended F, M and J visa issuance to nationals of 38 countries — 19 under a full entry ban and 19 more under a partial one — plus holders of Palestinian Authority travel documents[35]. In Africa the partial list includes Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Angola, Gabon, The Gambia, Malawi and Mauritania; India, the Philippines and the UAE are not on either list[36]. As of 1 October 2026 the US Embassy in Abu Dhabi and the Consulate General in Dubai state that routine visa processing is not available in the UAE and direct nonimmigrant applicants to a US post in their country of residence or nationality, so a UAE-based family should plan the visa interview around that. A Caltech offer does not override the suspension, and the exceptions are narrow — among them a visa already valid on 1 January 2026, or a second nationality whose passport is not listed. The suspension was still in force when checked in September 2026[37]; confirm your own position before you pay the SEVIS fee.
Caltech wants a transcript sent by a school official and publishes no WES or ECE requirement — ask before paying for one. Budget instead for certified English translations of your diploma and transcripts, with names spelled as in your passport; Indian applicants need Class X and XII mark sheets, and Caltech names CBSE and state board results, IB Higher Level Mathematics and A-level Mathematics as qualifications it reads directly[1]. For WAEC, NECO or Philippine senior high school results Caltech publishes no subject mapping — email admissions rather than assume one. Applicants from UAE schools should check which curriculum their transcript is issued under, since the American, British and IB streams are read against different expectations.
Pay fees by card in US dollars and check your international card limit before deadline week; a declined 85 USD application fee on 4 January is an avoidable way to lose a cycle. On the student visa side, since June 2025 F-1 applicants must list social media accounts used in the past five years on the DS-160 and set those profiles to public for consular vetting. The statutory 250 USD Visa Integrity Fee, created by Public Law 119-21 with an effective date of 1 October 2025, may be charged at visa issuance[38], but collection has been uneven across consular posts and no uniform implementing rule has been published — confirm with the post handling your application rather than treating it as a fixed line in your budget. For context on how the American system fits together before you commit to a single institution, see the structure of US education and the wider picture of admission to US universities.
Names attached to Caltech
Caltech's reputation rests on a small number of people who changed whole fields from a 124-acre campus. The Institute counts 48 Nobel laureates across 49 prizes among its faculty, alumni, postdocs and trustees[39].
Caltech names you are likely to recognise
Linus Pauling (PhD 1925) — the only person to win two unshared Nobel Prizes, Chemistry in 1954 for the nature of the chemical bond and Peace in 1962.
Richard Feynman — professor of theoretical physics, Nobel Prize in Physics 1965 for quantum electrodynamics, and the author of the Caltech lecture course that became a standard text worldwide.
Murray Gell-Mann — professor, Nobel Prize in Physics 1969 for the classification of elementary particles; proposed the quark.
Barry Barish and Kip Thorne (BS 1962) — shared the Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 for LIGO and the first direct detection of gravitational waves, an instrument Caltech built and still operates.
Frances Arnold — professor, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2018 for the directed evolution of enzymes.
Andrea Ghez (MS 1989, PhD 1993) — Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 for the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy.
Ardem Patapoutian (PhD 1996) — Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021 for the receptors for touch and temperature.
John Hopfield — professor, Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 for foundational work on machine learning with artificial neural networks.
Names and years from Caltech's own record of its laureates[39]. The pattern is worth reading as information about the place: the list is physics, chemistry, biology and instrument-building, with no economists to speak of beyond two alumni and nobody from law, medicine as a profession, or business.
Does Caltech publish graduate admission statistics?
No Institute-wide applicant or admit figures are published; ask the option you are targeting, since it makes the decision.
Do international students pay more than Americans?
No, the price is identical for everyone; only aid eligibility differs, and that difference is large.
Is a perfect SAT or ACT section score worth anything extra?
No. From the Fall 2027 cycle, sections of SAT 780-800 or ACT 35-36 reach the committee as a band with the exact number hidden, as do SAT 750-770 and ACT 33-34; composites are never considered[19].
When do I have to choose my major?
Caltech students declare an option near the end of the first year, after the shared Core and with a first-year adviser.
Can I work to cover part of the cost?
Not meaningfully as an undergraduate. On-campus work is capped at 20 hours a week in term, and 20 hours of campus pay does not move a 98,622 USD budget. Funded PhD students are in a different position: the stipend is the income, and outside work is capped at one day a week with written approval[9].
Is there a master's route into Caltech?
There is, but the Institute does not generally fund master's students, though departments may appoint them to teaching or research assistantships[9]. If the goal is a funded degree, apply to the PhD.
What is the Integrated Core?
A pilot running since Fall 2025 that covers the same first-year material through cross-disciplinary courses, open to roughly 10% of the intake[23].
Caltech suits a narrow profile
Choose Caltech when your subject is science, mathematics or engineering and you want it undiluted; when you want a research group in your first year rather than your third; when you are aiming at a funded PhD, where citizenship changes nothing about the money; or when your family can pay 98,622 USD a year or document need and is prepared to apply for aid in the one year the door is open.
Look elsewhere when you want breadth or a professional school: Princeton University and the University of Chicago give a wider undergraduate world with comparable research strength. For the same technical intensity at several times the scale, and with a business school attached, weigh MIT and Stanford University before you spend your single early-round slot. If money decides it, start from the general picture of scholarships and financial aid in the USA and work back to the shortlist you can actually fund.
Before you spend the early-round slot
your school will send transcripts directly, by the supplemental deadline of 6 November 2026 or 10 January 2027;
your SAT or ACT finishes before 30 November or 31 December 2026, and your section scores clear 750 SAT or 33 ACT;
your English result predates the application deadline;
both recommenders are booked, one STEM at calculus level or above and one from humanities;
you have declared your intention to apply for aid on the admissions application itself — it cannot be revisited in a later year;
you can document the full 98,622 USD budget for the I-20 if no award arrives.
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