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<p>Not THAT large of a gap. For those laureates that came out of MIT for undergrad, the majority of them graduated postwar (~late 40’s-70’s). However, for Caltech, the majority graduated prewar. You would expect that any time gap would affect all schools equally. Yet you end up with different results.</p>
<p>What I’m illustrating is that MIT (like most US schools but apparently unlike Caltech) was a far far more prominent tech school post WW2 than prewar, as I discussed in a prior post of mine. Caltech, in contrast, was already an extremely prominent, arguably the most prominent US tech school before the war. </p>
<p>A corollary to that is that it’s not particularly fair to look at the performance of those other schools before the war. The past is the past. The past is not destiny. If the past was destiny, then Caltech would still have the most faculty laureates today of any US school, just like it did in the 20’s-30’s.</p>