California Institute of Technology

Even by the demanding standards of elite schools, California Institute of Technology is tough. Freshmen take their first-year courses pass/fail to ease into the school, but after that, professors are notoriously hard graders. There are no easy A's here, and certainly not in the popular engineering and physical sciences programs. Along with the challenging workload comes great research opportunities, a hallmark of the school. Internships at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, located near Caltech's Pasadena campus, are a prime example. The school boasts dozens of Nobel laureates among its alumni and faculty members. Techies tend to go on to great jobs, reporting salaries to PayScale that average about $81,600 within a few years of getting their degree (which is high even by elite tech school standards). Caltech isn't known for its athletics or social life. The men's Division III basketball team, for instance, had a 310-game losing streak from 1985 through 2011. There are only about 2,200 students total, and men outnumber women. But the school's residential houses pick up the social slack: One fires cannons, one drops pumpkins off of the library, and they all throw parties.