<p>A lot of the students who get in are individuals who did not make it into MIT. We all know several terrifically academically qualified individuals do not make it into MIT – a lot of them feed into Georgia Tech supposedly; this makes for a group of very smart students, given often the reason someone was rejected from MIT is unclear in the first place. Another feeding ground is Berkeley, for instance.</p>
<p>UC Berkeley isn’t the hardest school to get into, but it’s world class material for engineering, and it’s only natural that because it has a relatively straightforward admissions process that a bunch of the students with stellar academic stats end up there, knowing well that it’s one of the few schools measuring upto MIT standards.</p>