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Just my two cents, because this thread is mildly interesting sometimes and I've just gotten through the college admissions processes of both Caltech and MIT.
Somebody up there said that there are 'outliers' who would prefer Caltech over MIT -- I'd suggest it might be more like 'clusters.' What I'm starting to see more and more, looking closely at both schools, is that many of their aspects will appeal to different categories of people. And I think it's often hard to decide into which cluster, if you will, you'll fall.
At the same time, I think it's worthwhile to point out that it's not surprising that Caltech has a lower yield than MIT, since it doesn't do nearly as much advertising before May 1st. Plus, there aren't that many 18-year-old kids out there who are confident enough in their interests to rule out any real possibility of studies outside of pure math/science and some engineering.
From Caltech's approach to admissions, I get the feeling that it doesn't really mind the relatively low yield -- it seems like a lot more people going there would be miserable if they had matriculated because of a mistaken impressions of well-roundedness/whatever other easy-going cliches.
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