Take a tour of Harvey Mudd College, the tiny STEM 'bootcamp' outside Los Angeles whose graduates out-earn Harvard and Stanford alums

Harvey Mudd_class

Located in Claremont, California is an 829-person liberal arts college that might go unnoticed to the uninitiated. It's not a member of the Ivy League, nor does it have the celebrity of Stanford University, its neighbor to the north.

In fact, if you're not familiar with the Claremont Consortium, you've probably never heard of the school.

Harvey Mudd College is a STEM powerhouse. It routinely shows up on lists that rank the best value colleges and, based on median salary, its graduates out-earn those from Harvard and Stanford about 10 years into their careers.

With a price tag for tuition, room, and board of $71,939 a year, it's the most expensive college in the US. But the sticker price comes with a strong return on investment. Its peer institutions, like the California Institute of Technology, praise its computer science curriculum.

Business Insider recently had the opportunity to tour Mudd to see for ourselves, from the rooftop classroom to the underwater robotics lab.

Here's what it's like to attend Harvey Mudd College.

DON'T MISS: A tiny California college whose graduates outearn Harvard and Stanford grads is changing how we train students to enter the job market

We arrived on Harvey Mudd's campus on a gloomy September day about two weeks into the 2017-2018 school year.

The school is a member of the Claremont Colleges Consortium — which includes Claremont McKenna College, Pitzer College, Pomona College, Scripps College, Claremont Graduate University and Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences. Mudd students, called Mudders, can take classes at any of the other member schools.

Not even on campus 10 minutes, we realized Mudd would provide an experience unlike many of the other schools we have toured.

The campus was quiet. We'd come to find out it's due to the highly studious nature of the student body. During our five-hour visit, there was only one 15-minute period where campus seemed busy. Many were hurrying off to their next class or working on laptops.