It is possible things have changed substantially over the years, but when I was there and definitely for quite a long time after, attending parties outside of campus was very rare at Caltech. Parties on campus were not common either, and most of them were parties within a house.
Caltech undergraduate life is kind of like being in a science monastery. It's not merely a school of nerds. It's a school of the people who nerds think are too nerdy.
On the STEM vs. non-STEM issue, I'm not treating "fresh out of high school engineering students as rational actors and everybody else as ignorant buffoons".
Everyone, without exception, needs to rely on expert opinion in some matters. No one has the time and capacity to become expert themselves in all fields that are relevant to all important decisions we have to make in our lives.
Sadly, in many of the areas where we have to rely on experts there are many with financial or ideological interests in getting people to not listen to the experts. This results in people being presented with conflicting opinions all purporting to be from or backed by experts in the relevant areas.
One of the best ways to resolve such a situation is, if you can do it, is to learn enough about the subject yourself to be able to look at the same information and methods that were used to produce the conflicting opinions and determine which came from actual experts and which did not.
In this one very particular area, namely determining if a particular set of behavioral rules and procedures to prevent a particular community from getting COVID and to limit its spread within that community if it does get in is scientifically justified, STEM students are going to be more likely to be able to do the type of evaluation described in the prior paragraph than are non-STEM students.
Would you say I'm being a "STEMlord" if I said Caltech students were more likely than, say, students in Julliard's piano bachelor's degree program to be able to evaluate evaluate whether someone making a claim about the theoretical upper limit on the efficiency of a classical thermodynamic engine is correct?
It works the other way, too. There are plenty of areas where I'd expect that Julliard piano student to be way better than any Caltech student at evaluating conflicting purported experts. It is just that those areas don't happen to be relevant to the specific problem of convincing a group of people that specific anti-COVID measures are correct.
If I personally knew a bunch of Julliard students who did a better job at this than Caltech students, then I'd certainly ask for some actual data backing up your claim. I see no reason why a freshmen majoring in CS is more likely to make healthy pandemic choices than a freshmen majoring in history.
Maybe CalTech is very different, but I truly cannot imagine this at MIT. Students go out and party, even at top programs that have a disproportionate number of "traditionally nerdy" people.
Further, students aren't the only people present. Faculty exist, and some of them can bring Covid into the bubble. Administrators and staff exist, and some of them can bring Covid into the bubble. Once a few students are infected the "don't leave campus" plan does not achieve much of anything. You mention daily tests, but you can be infectious before a test is positive. And faculty will throw a fit about this.
> At Caltech, every undergraduate could understand the science and the mathematical models behind the policy, and see that it is correct.
There are STEM faculty at top universities who can't seem to understand the basics of how the pandemic functions. I cannot possibly imagine that every single 18-year-old who is smart and interested in science is going to be able to resist the enormous amount of misinformation about the pandemic and stay-at-home orders.
> Same for MIT and Harvey Mudd on the science aspect, although I'm not quite sure about MIT. MIT does offer undergraduate degrees in quite a few fields that aren't STEM, such as music, theater arts, global studies and languages, and several others, and I'm not sure how much STEM people in those majors have to take.
This is crossing a STEMlord line for me. Where my wife works, her department (in the humanities) has more teachers choosing to teach online than the computer science and physics departments. I think you are enormously quick to treat fresh out of high school engineering students as rational actors and everybody else as ignorant buffoons.