Universities: Caltech & M.I.T.: Rivalry Between the Best

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Tsien Hsue-shen's Degrees. Yet any picture of Caltech solely as thinker and M.I.T. solely as doer is out of focus. While M.I.T. draws no less than $126 million of its annual operating budget of $178 million from work for the Defense Department and NASA, Caltech has 181 federal research contracts and operates NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which will spend $242 million this year. Caltech's practical knowledge made JPL a pioneer in tactical missiles, in launching the first U.S. satellite, in making a soft landing on the moon and in taking close-up pictures of the moon and Mars. At the same time, such speculative M.I.T. thinkers as Physicist Charles Townes, who worked out principles that led to thet maser and laser, and Cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, whose theories helped lay the foundations of automation, make M.I.T. much more than a producer of management specialists. Ironically, both schools have also contributed to Red China's nuclear missile capability by training its missile expert, Tsien Hsue-shen (see THE WORLD), who earned his M.A. at M.I.T. and his Ph.D. at Caltech, where he rose to be a professor of jet propulsion.

A recent assessment of U.S. graduate schools by the American Council on Education rates M.I.T.'s biochemistry and mathematics departments as more effective than Caltech's and considers its economics department the best in the country. Not surprisingly, it places M.I.T.'s engineering departments (chemical, civil, electrical and mechanical) above Caltech's. Caltech, on the other hand, is rated best in the U.S. in astronomy, and it tops M.I.T. in chemistry, physics and geology.

Student homogeneity is a problem at both schools. Precisely because they are all bright and scientifically inclined, they lack diversity and suffer psychological shocks when their high school A's suddenly turn to C's or worse. Caltech's Feynman tries to ease the pain by wryly reminding freshmen that inevitably "half of every one of Caltech's classes is below the class average." Yet M.I.T. English Professor Barry Spacks finds his students refreshing because they "exhibit none of the pretenses and gamesmanship of places like Harvard —if they don't know who T. S. Eliot is they say so."

Smart Dropouts. Both schools have belatedly become bothered by high dropout rates. About one-third of Caltech's and one-fifth of M.I.T.'s frosh do not stay for four years, which implies that if such smart kids do not make it, something must be wrong with the teaching. To help freshmen adjust to the competition, Caltech now issues only "pass" or "fail" grades the first year. M.I.T., tired of the student refrain that "Tech is hell," has similarly loosened its freshman and sophomore course load, broken up its long-standard curriculum. "In the past, if a fellow was too short we stretched him, and if he was too long we shrank him—now we try to mold the system around the class," says Physics Professor George Valley.