Academically, Caltech is probably the most intense (harder courses and quarter system, etc.) of the three schools (Caltech/MIT/HMC), especially after Mudd relaxed its curriculum after the incidents a couple years ago. The students who go to these schools are naturally focused on STEM. Both MIT and Caltech have much more extensive humanity and social science requirements than they did 30 years ago, and more so than Harvey Mudd. Another big difference from 30 years ago is all three schools now are dominated by CS majors. Even with large portions of their student bodies, both MIT and Caltech place no restriction on class registration at all (and even without enforcing prerequisite rules), unlike HMC. Doing more advanced research is also easier at Caltech/MIT, compared to Harvey Mudd. For economics/finance/business, MIT offers Economics, Finance, and Business Analytics majors. Caltech offers Economics, and the more popular BEM (Business, Economics and Management) major (which combines economics, finance and business. It’s designed to be a second major for some adventurous students. Harvey Mudd doesn’t offer an economics major but interested students must take those classes on the other campuses, but as pointed out above, may run into class registration issues at CMC.