<p>Most of you know about this already, but for those who don't, CalTech has mailed decisions via snail mail yesterday, 4th March 2009. They will email RD decisions on saturday as a backup. </p>
<p>This is ANTICIPATED as a full one week ahead of MIT decisions release date.</p>
<p>MIT works so incredibly hard when reading apps. It may seem like forever for the people waiting, but think about how much time it actually is. There are like 10ish people reading 15,000 applications and making a decision in just 2 months. That’s insane, just to let you know.</p>
<p>MIT doesn’t really care what CalTech does, when they release decisions, or how big their admissions p3nis is. If y’all keep applying 15,000 at a time, it’s going to be a wait before you get your decisions.</p>
<p>Also, mail? Psh, we are so over that. This is the 21st century CalTech, put your decisions online!</p>
<p>Caltech always releases their decisions before MIT, and it’s justified as the other posters have pointed out because Caltech has less applications to work with.</p>
<p>As for competition for cross-admits? Most kids have already made up their minds about which school they’d prefer (whether for gender ratio, location, or other factors) before decision release dates.</p>
<p>While I wish to take no active part in this discussion, due to my obvious bias, I just wanted to point out that Caltech is the beavers, with the beaver as a mascot, and MIT is the engineers, with a beaver for a mascot, as far as I know.</p>
<p>There has been some research into which school used the beaver as a mascot first, but the kid I talked to who was doing the research said he couldn’t pin an exact year down for either school, but knew that both chose it at about the same time.</p>
<p>^^Caltech “the world’s highest by far percentage of PHDs and Nobel Prize winners among alumni”</p>
<p>Caltech “the owner/manager of the Jet Propulsion Lab and the brain behind Voyager Land II’s mission outside of the solar system, Galileo mission to orbit Jupiter, Cassini mission to orbit rings and moons of Saturn”</p>