They still do great on this metric, though! MIT comes out looking a bit short of Harvard, on par with Stanford. These schools ride a bit higher than the top tie

They still do great on this metric, though! MIT comes out looking a bit short of Harvard, on par with Stanford. These schools ride a bit higher than the top tier of LACs (Williams/Amherst/Pomona/Swarthmore), which isn't necessarily the fairest comparison, but Caltech fits right in with those. Maybe they'd be richer if their admissions was more open about taking quasi-bribes, but I suspect you're dramatically underestimating the orders of magnitude of difference that appear on this metric. You find clear tier gaps. Don't get me wrong, this is a silly proxy metric about three degrees out from anything you'd actually want to know. But it gets surprisingly good results for how simple it is to tabulate.