The popular observation (truthful joke?) on campus is that they could give a full ride to 15 consecutive classes of undergrads with all that money...

With that said, though, Caltech does provide significant need-based financial aid (gotta give credit where credit’s due, after all).

I remember this from a previous conversation on (what I think was) NYU medical school being tuition free for an incoming class, and that drove the admission rate way down because with no tuition, it got super competitive. I wonder if there’s a good trade off between competition and the amount of needs based tuition.