STEM SENIORS - CalTech is has changed its EA program to REA Restrictive Early Action

NOTE that CalTech is now Restrictive Early Action just like Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

No longer will you be able to "stack" CalTech alongside UChicago, MIT, and UMich if you are applying ED to a top Ivy like Columbia or Brown.

I think this is a smart move because historically CalTech has had lower yields like 53% versus 74-77% for MIT. By forcing the best STEM students to choose between MIT and CalTech up front, CalTech will likely improve its yield rate because you wouldn't apply REA to CalTech and forgo your MIT EA opportunity if you didn't really want to go there.

So if the environment stays the same, it's likely that MIT will have fewer "best-in-class" applicants to cherry-pick. They will have to admit more EA admits to ensure the same level of matriculants. So I expect EA rates at MIT to soften slightly from 4.74% to like 5.5%.

Since CalTech has been extremely slow to report its Class of 2026 admissions data, we still don't know what the acceptance rate for the last cycle was. MIT was 3.96%. My best guess right now is that CalTech was between 2.8-3.2%.

With the new REA policy in place, I think they will be able to fill about 135 of the 260-270 available seats. I think at least 35 will go to Questbridge Match scholars (35 were admitted in the last cycle). It might be more this cycle. And I think around 100 will matriculate from the REA program.

MIT only accepted 10 Questbridge Match finalists last EA cycle, so MIT is rather stingy about filling its enrollment with high achieving low-income applicants compared to CalTech which has 13% QB of its freshman class.