This could just be because CMU students have less exposure to startups and the like, so your tour was proportionally more interesting to them. I'm a Berkeley s

This could just be because CMU students have less exposure to startups and the like, so your tour was proportionally more interesting to them. I'm a Berkeley student, and I bet that your tour would have been less well attended here, simply because we're inundated with startups as is. (And because anybody wanting to start a company is probably going to stay in the Bay Area, but that's another story.) Maybe (very likely, even) I have a poor view of Pittsburgh, but my impression was that it is not particularly full of tech startups. This is also self-reinforcing to some degree--the sort of people who like startups are more likely to choose one of the other top CS schools because they're in significantly more startup-friendly areas (e.g. Boston or the Bay Area). That was actually one of my main criteria when considering CMU.