<p>Thank you for clarifying the awkward phrasing in my post, Omgninja.</p>
<p>With respect to quadrupling students and Nobels.</p>
<p>While you could argue that you wouldn’t necessarily quadruple Nobels, you could make the opposite argument as well. There might be increasing returns to scale or scope in research environments. I have heard people say that Caltech was too small – by which they meant that even adjusting for size, Caltech would be outperformed as a result of not having enough people for a “critical mass” or what have you.</p>
<p>For instance, looking at Nobel Prizes by country, there is clearly a spillover effect from the overall excellence of so many top American universities that gives the US an advantage beyond mere size. Since the top universities in Japan or Germany concentrate the cream of their students, they should have proportionately more Nobelists, but that is clearly not the case today. [For institutional and complicated political/economic reasons of course.] Conversely, before WWII, German universities such as Goettingen had disproportionately huge numbers of Nobel laureates, as did the Cavendish lab in Cambridge, England.</p>
<p>So it is a worthwhile observation that Caltech does better on a student adjusted basis than any other institution in the US. [In fact, this is also an answer to a CC poster who condescendingly remarked elsewhere that only 7 of the Caltech Nobelists were undergrad alums. Making the appropriate corrections goes dramatically in Tech’s favor.] After all, who would have expected that one of those alums would win it in Economics? If Barro eventually wins, that would be a second alum. Not bad odds for a small school without a “big” name in Econ.</p>