Culture matters. I deliberately picked engineering/computer/mathy nerd schools for my list. A typical UC, a Calstate, or a community college won't be a nerd s

Culture matters. I deliberately picked engineering/computer/mathy nerd schools for my list. A typical UC, a Calstate, or a community college won't be a nerd school. A better point-of-comparison for UC computer science would be a Harvard, Penn, or Yale. At this point, I would say Georgia Tech has better culture than MIT. MIT is brand-obsessed and increasingly sleazy. Georgia Tech is roughly where MIT was in 1990, which is a much better nerd culture.