<p>Without knowing anyone's statistics when they applied to grad school makes your arguement of their placement @ Caltech worthless.</p>
<p>For applications to some place like Caltech, we can be assured that they have, for the most part, their pick of the best of the best. If we assume that these individuals had steller GRE scores (not unlikely) and good GPA's, then their admission has little if anything to do with their undergrad institution. It's just like the HS students in the pre-med forums here who ask "If I have a 36 MCAT, and a 3.9 GPA with a triple major, and I volunteer and I'm published, will I get accepted to Harvard Med? Because I really think this is all doable and yada yada yada..." The answer ends up being "well yeah, you have a shot, but the trick is actually getting those sorts of accomplishments."</p>
<p>The thing is though, that MOST people don't end up with scores like those and have that type of GPA, and all those accomplishments that lead to getting into a place like Caltech. If getting those things was easy, then everyone would have them. The safest assumption then is to figure most people asking these questions are going to have fairly average scores and GPA. They then need to find things that will make them stand out in the crowd. And while I know that most of the people on this site are obsessed about prestige, the prestige of graduate school isn't as important. Understanding that prestige doesn't matter is particularly important for medical school (where the goal should be just to get in somewhere) and graduate school, where different programs have very different strenghths - and so the search would be for programs whose strength matches one's interests.</p>
<p>Let's try an example (since I majored in sociology at Nebraska), Nebraska has a very highly regarded program in Marriage and Family sociology, but the rest of the programs (like say theory or sociology of latinos) are relatively average or weak. It's possible that Wisconsin-Madison (usually considered the nation's top sociology department, or pretty damn close) has a weak Marriage and Family focus (I really don't know, it's just an example). Then for the person who really wants to study Marriage and Family and do their dissertation on some topic therein, it would be better for them to go to Nebraska. They probably might even have much lower scores then someone who was admitted to Wisconsin for Marriage and family (who applied there because of being overly impressed by the prestige). But since they have rather average scores and GPA, they need something to make them stand out, like research while an undergrad. </p>
<p>With that mindset of trying to stand out in a relatively equal field, then the original poster needs to focus on places that are going to be the best at supplying those opportunities. In this case, a Research I university.</p>