The best of the best.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here. OK, OK, so Caltech is not actually in New England ….

You would expect armies of white coated nerds running around on the way to clean rooms with multiple levels of security and AK armaments, wielded by 007 style villans, in what is arguably the greatest school of pure science and engineering on the planet. Far from it.

What you get is predominantly 1930s architecture housing some of the finest brains in the universe, all discreetly hidden away in largely unexceptional buildings. If Hollywood, just down the road, boasts of its accomplishments with glitz and bright lights, The California Institute of Technology keeps a very low profile by comparison.

Admission? Well, it’s largely fughedaboutit. You need a 4.0 GPA and 1600 on your SAT (well, used to, until SATs were suspended) just for your paperwork to make it through the door. And with Caltech closing in on 50 Nobel prizes in Chemistry and Physics (and one for the comically named ‘Peace’ prize) you can imagine this sort of brain power has been around quite a while, the first being awarded to Robert Millikan in 1923 for work on the photoelectric effect. Or something. (Millikan turned out to be a nut for eugenics, so is now persona non grata at the school. Not all Nobel prizes are created equal).

1930s architecture.

A lovely late summer day found my son Winston and I luxuriating in the dulcet tones of our guide, a long time friend who just happens to be a tenured professor at the school. I understood precisely 9.72% of what he said with my son maxing at some 31.45%. So follow up reading is strongly indicated and I now almost know what a polymerase chain reaction is. Or something.

Most science buildings at the great American schools flirt with ugly and if there’s the occasional outlier at Caltech it can be forgiven by the generally cohesive appearance of the campus. In this image my son, contemplating the complexities of gravitational waves, is following our tour guide. Those east coast losers at MIT actually also had something to do with these:

The occasional outlier.

And everywhere our splendid guide took us saw magic going on. In one area there were screens documenting in real time tremors across the earth, the area of focus switchable at will. A glance at the adjacent map of seismically active areas confirmed that Caltech is actually doomed and that my Scottsdale, Arizona home will soon be beach property. Have a big quake anywhere and the film crews line up with their broadcast vans, plugging in to the provided receptacles to advise Hung So Low that, yes, his former shack in Beijing is now so much rubble. Ah, science.

Even geniuses with no social skills need solitude for relaxation and the beautiful grounds of the campus provide plenty of opportunities for that increasingly rare experience.

Solitude.

Reading rooms are, as you might expect, everywhere, and if the British walnut and oak model is any guide, Caltech has adopted its forbears’ tastes with aplomb.

One of many reading rooms.

And everything is an experiment. This innocuous lily pond is actually used to demonstrate how methane is created by these plants with annual late night illustrations of the combustible power of the gas when ignited. As our guide told us, “Caltech students love to burn up things”. The campus provides for 900 undergraduate and 1400 doctoral students, and their aggregate IQ exceeds that of all but a small handful of nations. And there are so many faculty members that you cannot go a block without encountering a dozen. Add in a generous ‘prank’ budget and you have a combustible mix. Or something.

Explosive lily pond.

With an endowment of $4.6 billion for just 2300 students money is no object here and driving around it seems that the school owns most of the buildings in Pasadena. Come here as a visiting prof and you get splendid housing, perfect weather and the thrilling prospect of the Big One which will wipe everything out. Just avoid the freeways if you hate parking lots.

A beautiful place for your child genius.

Everything is an experiment.

Images snapped using an iPhone 12 Pro Max, much of whose tech content probably originated here.

Even better second time around.

We previously toured Union College in May, 2017 and loved its compact and high quality feel. Since then my son Winston has interviewed with the school and decided to visit it for a second tour, which we took yesterday. This time we were guided by a sophomore student.

Union College clearly reinvests its ample cash flow in facilities and there’s not a tired building to be found. The new Science Center, a $100 million capital investment, opened in late 2018 and will be completed come the fall of 2020. It is magnificent, as you should expect for that sort of money.

The Grant Admissions Center – lovely inside and out.

Our tour, conducted by the enthusiastic Sophia Anderson, commences.

Fall colors frame a unified architectural style.

Inide the Philip R. Beuth ’54 atrium which bridges common areas and the library.

These students are studying the Microscopic Characteristics of Catalytic Aerogels.
That’s fire retardants in English.

The new Science Center cost $100 million and is almost finished. A wonder to behold.

Bad leg spotted in one of the many student common areas.

The F. W. Olin Center, funded by the arms manufacturer’s foundation.
Two symmetrical wings flank a central circular rotunda, which rises through
the three above-grade floors of the building. Science is studied here.

“Formulating strong theses”. One of the mandatory classes – the other is on
how to conduct professional research – at Union College. English as she is wrote.

The Henle Dance Pavilion, one of two Theater facilities.
Part of the 8 acres of formal garden is visible.

The color of the architecture is conformed throughout the many campus buildings.

The Minerva concept sees freshmen grouped into dorms with
discretionary funding to do their own thing.

This was a great experience complemented by an excellent tour guide.

We dined at Johnny’s Italian Restaurant in nearby Schenectady, a short walk away, expecting the Sopranos to enter at any moment.

Lunch at Johnny’s.

iPhone 11 Pro snaps.

A bucolic setting.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

Home to some 2,600 students on 850 acres, and a ten minute walk from the lovely town of Saratoga Springs a few miles north of Albany, NY, Skidmore College started life as an all girls’ school. The school went co-ed in the 1970s and we were lucky to visit it on a crisp New York autumn day. The lovely campus, replete with trees and perfect buildings, is one we have long wanted to visit for its mix of setting and academic quality.

Everything here is in perfect condition, the dorms are spacious and modern, the food center is beyond compare and the academics are first class. The nearby town of Saratoga Springs, famous as the oldest site for professional horse racing in the US, is within walking distance, and while home to only 25,000 residents is sophisticated, beautiful and safe. Dining (and coffee!) choices are abundant.

Alumni include director Jason Reitman and Grace Mirabella of Vogue.

Snapped on the iPhone 11 Pro.

Interview day.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

We made our way due north from Philadelphia to Middletown Connecticut for Winston’s final interview at Wesleyan University today, this being our second visit. The weather continued perfect though the traffic was awful, seemingly the whole world having decided to leave work early for Monday’s Labor Day, as we made our way through the horrors of Manhattan’s west side en route to our destination.

The open and welcoming design of the campus fronts for a high quality college with traditional values – work ethic, fairness, and decency. Wesleyan alumni succeed in all walks of life. Winston’s concerned visage notwithstanding, his interview went well.

As good as it gets.

For an alphabetical index of the New England College series of pieces, click here.

Swarthmore College is not an easy place to get admission to. With an acceptance rate of just 9% it rivals Harvard for exclusivity and its graduates occupy the highest reaches across any number of disciplines in the US. The small student body of just 1,620 has delivered 5 Nobels, 11 McArthurs, 30 Rhodes, 27 Truman and 10 Marshall Scholars, along with 201 Fulbright grantees. Phew! A seriously high SAT score is the key dictate for admission here. That, and the right personality fit, for this is no degree mill.

So it was with some trepidation we set foot on the campus which is a few minutes south west of America’s 6th largest city, Philadelphia. Oh! Boy!, was it ever an experience, on a picture perfect day. It’s hard to convey the glories of this richly endowed campus, whose endowment capital of $2.1 billion computes to a stunning $1.3 million per student, affording the college an 8:1 student:faculty ratio and grounds that have to be seen to be believed. From memory only Princeton, Harvard and Yale are richer on a per student basis. There is not one iota of deferred maintenance to be seen, and all is perfection. Many a moment I thought I was back in the Kew Gardens of my youth, west of London, albeit without the rain.

Swarthmore is a liberal arts college and before you start telling me that STEM is the future I would remind you that the core tenet of capitalism is to obsolete its costliest component: Labor. To that end the foretellings of Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ are writ ever louder in our society, with machine intelligence taking over from man. But one thing machine intelligence will never do is supplant human imagination, original thinking and writing. Just about anyone can do math. Few can communicate. That takes a solid liberal arts education and Swarthmore offers the best there is.

Please join with me in sharing in the abundant glories of this magnificent campus.

What an extraordinary campus, and what a special day in the life of my son. The small world feel and the open and generous nature of the many students we spoke with was a flashback for Winston to the fall of 2015 when he first interviewed at Northfield Mount Hermon, his Massachusetts prep school. On that day, long past, he told me that NMH was his school of choice. Today his emotions were similar.