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David AND

Goliath UNDERDOGS, MISFITS, AND

THE ART OF BATTLING GIANTS

Malcolm Gladwell

Little, Brown and Company

New York • Boston • London

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CHAPTER THREE

Caroline Sacks “if i’d gone to the university

OF MARYLAND, I*D STILL BE IN

SCIENCE.”

One hundred and fifty years ago, when Paris was at the center of the art world, a group of painters used to gather every evening at Cafe Guerbois, in the neighborhood of Batignolles. The ringleader of the group was fidouard Manet. He was one of the oldest and most established members of the group, a handsome and gregarious man in his early thirties who dressed in the height of fashion and charmed all those around him with his energy and humor. Manet’s great friend was Edgar Degas. He was among the few who could match wits with Manet; the two shared a fiery spirit and a sharp tongue and would sometimes de scend into bitter argument. Paul Cezanne, tall and gruff, would come and sit moodily in the corner, his trousers held up with string. “I am not offering you my hand,”

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Cezanne said to Manet once before slumping down by himself. “I haven’t washed for eight days.” Claude Monet, self-absorbed and strong willed, was a grocer’s son who lacked the education of some of the others. His best friend was the “easygoing urchin” Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who, over the course of their friendship, would paint eleven portraits of Monet. The moral compass of the group was Camille Pissarro: fiercely political, loyal, and principled. Even Cezanne—the most ornery and alienated of men—loved Pissarro. Years later, he would identify him self as “Cezanne, pupil of Pissarro.”

Together this group of remarkable painters would go on to invent modern art with the movement known as Im pressionism. They painted one another and painted next to one another and supported one another emotionally and financially, and today their paintings hang in every ma jor art museum in the world. But in the 1860s, they were struggling. Monet was broke. Renoir once had to bring him bread so that he wouldn’t starve. Not that Renoir was in any better shape. He didn’t have enough money to buy stamps for his letters. There were virtually no dealers in terested in their paintings. When the art critics mentioned the Impressionists—and there was a small army of art crit ics in Paris in the 1860s—it was usually to belittle them. Manet and his friends sat in the dark-paneled Cafe Guer- bois with its marble-topped tables and flimsy metal chairs and drank and ate and argued about politics and literature and art and most specifically about their careers—because the Impressionists all wrestled with one crucial question: What should they do about the Salon?

Art played an enormous role in the cultural life of

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France in the nineteenth century. Painting was regulated by a government department called the Ministry of the Im perial House and the Fine Arts, and it was considered a profession in the same way that medicine or the law is a profession today. A promising painter would start at the ficole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he would receive a rigorous and formal education, pro gressing from the copying of drawings to the painting of live models. At each stage of his education, there would be competitions. Those who did poorly would be weeded out. Those who did well would win awards and prestigious fellowships, and at the pinnacle of the profession was the Salon, the most important art exhibition in all of Europe.

Every year each of the painters of France submitted two or three of his finest canvases to a jury of experts. The deadline was the first of April. Artists from around the world pushed handcarts loaded with canvases through Paris’s cobblestoned streets, bringing their work to the Palais de 1’Industrie, an exhibition hall built for the Paris World Fair between the Champs-filysees and the Seine. Throughout the next few weeks, the jury would vote on each painting in turn. Those deemed unacceptable would be stamped with the red letter “R” for rejected. Those ac cepted would be hung on the walls of the Palais, and over the course of six weeks beginning in early May, as many as a million people would throng the exhibition, jostling for position in front of the biggest and best-known artists’ works and jeering at the works they did not like. The best paintings were given medals. The winners were celebrated and saw the value of their paintings soar. The losers limped home and went back to work.

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“There are in Paris scarcely fifteen art-lovers capable of liking a painting without Salon approval,” Renoir once said. “There are 80,000 who won’t buy so much as a nose from a painter who is not hung at the Salon.” The Salon made Renoir so anxious that one year he went down to the Palais during jury deliberations and waited outside, hoping to find out early whether he got in or not. But then be coming shy, he introduced himself as a friend of Renoir’s. Another of the Guerbois regulars, Frederic Bazille, once confessed, “I have an appalling fear of getting rejected.” When the artist Jules Holtzapffel didn’t make it into the Salon of 1866, he shot himself in the head. “The members of the jury have rejected me. Therefore I have no talent,” read his suicide note. “I must die.” For a painter in nineteenth-century France, the Salon was everything, and the reason that the Salon was such an issue for the group of Impressionists was that time and again, the Salon jury turned them down.

The Salon’s attitude was traditional. “Works were ex pected to be microscopically accurate, properly ‘finished’ and formally framed, with proper perspective and all the familiar artistic conventions,” the art historian Sue Roe writes. “Light denoted high drama, darkness suggested gravitas. In narrative painting, the scene should not only be ‘accurate,’ but should also set a morally acceptable tone. An afternoon at the Salon was like a night at the Paris Opera: audiences expected to be uplifted and entertained. For the most part, they knew what they liked, and ex pected to see what they knew.” The kinds of paintings that won medals, Roe says, were huge, meticulously painted canvases showing scenes from French history or mythol

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ogy, with horses and armies or beautiful women, with titles like Soldier’s Departure, Young Woman Weeping over a Letter, and Abandoned Innocence.

The Impressionists had an entirely different idea about what constituted art. They painted everyday life. Their brushstrokes were visible. Their figures were indistinct. To the Salon jury and the crowds thronging the Palais, their work looked amateurish, even shocking. In 1865, the Salon, surprisingly, accepted a painting by Manet of a prostitute, called Olympia, and the painting sent all of Paris into an uproar. Guards had to be placed around the painting to keep the crowds of spectators at bay. “An at mosphere of hysteria and even fear predominated,” the historian Ross King writes. “Some spectators collapsed in ‘epidemics of crazed laughter’ while others, mainly women, turned their heads from the picture in fright.” In 1868, Renoir, Bazille, and Monet managed to get paintings accepted by the Salon. But halfway through the Salon’s six-week run, their works were removed from the main exhibition space and exiled to the depotoir—the rubbish dump—a small, dark room in the back of the building, where paintings considered to be failures were relocated. It was almost as bad as not being accepted at all.

The Salon was the most important art show in the world. Everyone at the Cafe Guerbois agreed on that. But the acceptance by the Salon came with a cost: it required creating the kind of art that they did not find meaningful, and they risked being lost in the clutter of other artists’ work. Was it worth it? Night after night, the Impression ists argued over whether they should keep knocking on the Salon door or strike out on their own and stage a show just

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for themselves. Did they want to be a Little Fish in the Big Pond of the Salon or a Big Fish in a Little Pond of their own choosing?

In the end, the Impressionists made the right choice, which is one of the reasons that their paintings hang in ev ery major art museum in the world. But this same dilemma comes up again and again in our own lives, and often we don’t choose so wisely. The inverted-U curve reminds us that there is a point at which money and resources stop making our lives better and start making them worse. The story of the Impressionists suggests a second, parallel problem. We strive for the best and attach great importance to getting into the finest institutions we can. But rarely do we stop and consider—as the Impressionists did—whether the most prestigious of institutions is always in our best interest. There are many examples of this, but few more telling than the way we think about where to attend uni versity.

Caroline Sacks grew up on the farthest fringes of the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. She went to public schools through high school. Her mother is an accountant and her father works for a technology company. As a child she sang in the church choir and loved to write and draw. But what really excited her was science.

“I did a lot of crawling around in the grass with a mag-

♦ I’ve changed her name and identifying details.

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nifying glass and a sketchbook, following bugs and draw ing them,” Sacks says. She is a thoughtful and articulate young woman, with a refreshing honesty and directness. “I was really, really into bugs. And sharks. So for a while I thought I was going to be a veterinarian or an ichthyolo gist. Eugenie Clark was my hero. She was the first woman diver. She grew up in New York City in a family of immi grants and ended up rising to the top of her field, despite having a lot of ‘Oh, you’re a woman, you can’t go under the ocean’ setbacks. I just thought she was great. My dad met her and was able to give me a signed photo and I was really excited. Science was always a really big part of what I did.”

Sacks sailed through high school at the top of her class. She took a political science course at a nearby college while she was still in high school, as well as a multivariant cal culus course at the local community college. She got As in both, as well as an A in every class she took in high school. She got perfect scores on every one of her Advanced Place ment pre-college courses.

The summer after her junior year in high school, her father took her on a whirlwind tour of American universi ties. “I think we looked at five schools in three days,” she says. “It was Wesleyan, Brown, Providence College, Bos ton College, and Yale. Wesleyan was fun but very small. Yale was cool, but I definitely didn’t fit the vibe.” But Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, won her heart. It is small and exclusive, situated in the middle of a nineteenth-century neighborhood of redbrick Georgian and Colonial buildings on the top of a gently sloping hill. It might be the most beautiful college campus in the

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United States. She applied to Brown, with the University of Maryland as her backup. A few months later, she got a letter in the mail. She was in.

“I expected that everyone at Brown would be really rich and worldly and knowledgeable,” she says. “Then I got there, and everybody seemed to be just like me—intellectually curious and kind of nervous and excited and not sure whether they’d be able to make friends. It was very reassuring.” The hardest part was choosing which courses to take, because she loved the sound of everything. She ended up in Introductory Chemistry, Spanish, a class called the Evolution of Language, and Botanical Roots of Modern Medicine, which she describes as “sort of half botany class, half looking at uses of indigenous plants as medicine and what kind of chemical theories they are based on.” She was in heaven.

Did Caroline Sacks make the right choice? Most of us would say that she did. When she went on that whirlwind tour with her father, she ranked the colleges she saw, from best to worst. Brown University was number one. The University of Maryland was her backup because it was not in any way as good a school as Brown. Brown is a member of the Ivy League. It has more resources, more academically able students, more prestige, and more accomplished faculty than the University of Maryland. In the rankings of Amer ican colleges published every year by the magazine U.S. News & World Report, Brown routinely places among the

CAROLINE SACKS

top ten or twenty colleges in the United States. The Univer sity of Maryland finishes much farther back in the pack.

But let’s think about Caroline’s decision in the same way the Impressionists thought about the Salon. What the Impressionists understood, in their endless debates at the Cafe Guerbois, was that the choice between the Salon and a solo show wasn’t a simple case of a best option and a second-best option. It was a choice between two very dif ferent options, each with its own strengths and drawbacks.

The Salon was a lot like an Ivy League school. It was the place where reputations were made. And what made it special was how selective it was. There were roughly three thousand painters of “national reputation” in France in the 1860s, and each submitted two or three of his best works to the Salon, which meant the jury was picking from a small mountain of canvases. Rejection was the norm. Get ting in was a feat. “The Salon is the real field of battle,” Manet said. “It’s there that one must take one’s measure.” Of all the Impressionists, he was the one most convinced of the value of the Salon. The art critic Theodore Duret, another of the Guerbois circle, agreed. “You have still one step to take,” Duret wrote to Pissarro in 1874. “That is to succeed in becoming known to the public and accepted by all the dealers and art lovers....! urge you to exhibit; you must succeed in making a noise, in defying and attracting criticism, coming face-to-face with the big public.”

But the very things that made the Salon so attrac tive-how selective and prestigious it was—also made it problematic. The Palais was an enormous barn of a build ing three hundred yards long with a central aisle that was two stories high. A typical Salon might accept three or

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four thousand paintings, and they were hung in four tiers, starting at ground level and stretching up to the ceiling. Only paintings that met with the unanimous approval of the jury were hung “on the line,” at eye level. If you were “skyed”—that is, hung closest to the ceiling—it was all but impossible for your painting to be seen. (One of Renoir’s paintings was once skyed in the depotoir.) No painter could submit more than three works. The crowds were often overwhelming. The Salon was the Big Pond. But it was very hard to be anything at the Salon but a Little Fish.

Pissarro and Monet disagreed with Manet. They thought it made more sense to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond. If they were off by themselves and held their own show, they said, they wouldn’t be bound by the restrictive rules of the Salon, where Olympia was considered an out rage and where the medals were won by paintings of sol diers and weeping women. They could paint whatever they wanted. And they wouldn’t get lost in the crowd, because there wouldn’t be a crowd. In 1873, Pissarro and Monet proposed that the Impressionists set up a collective called the Societe Anonyme Cooperative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs. There would be no competition, no juries, and no medals. Every artist would be treated as an equal. Everyone but Manet was in.

The group found space on the Boulevard des Ca- pucines on the top floor of a building that had just been vacated by a photographer. It was a series of small rooms with red-brown walls. The Impressionists’ exhibition opened on April 15, 1874, and lasted one month. The en trance fee was one franc. There were 165 works of art on

CAROLINE SACKS

display, including three Cezannes, ten paintings by Degas, nine Monets, five Pissarros, six Renoirs, and five by Al fred Sisley—a tiny fraction of what was on the walls of the Salon across town. In their show, the Impressionists could exhibit as many canvases as they wished and hang them in a way that allowed people to actually see them. “The Impressionists were lost in the mass of Salon paintings, even when accepted,” the art historians Harrison White and Cynthia White write. “With...the independent group show, they could gain the public’s eye.”

Thirty-five hundred people attended the show—175 on the first day alone, which was enough to bring the artists critical attention. Not all of that attention was positive: one joke told was that what the Impressionists were doing was loading a pistol with paint and firing at the canvas. But that was the second part of the Big Fish-Little Pond bar gain. The Big Fish-Little Pond option might be scorned by some on the outside, but Small Ponds are welcoming places for those on the inside. They have all of the support that comes from community and friendship—and they are places where innovation and individuality are not frowned upon. “We are beginning to make ourselves a niche,” a hopeful Pissarro wrote to a friend. “We have succeeded as intruders in setting up our little banner in the midst of the crowd.” Their challenge was “to advance without worry ing about opinion.” He was right. Off by themselves, the Impressionists found a new identity. They felt a new cre ative freedom, and before long, the outside world began to sit up and take notice. In the history of modern art, there has never been a more important or more famous exhibi tion. If you tried to buy the paintings in that warren of

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top-floor rooms today, it would cost you more than a bil lion dollars.

The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all. Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, and Cezanne weighed prestige against visibility, se lectivity against freedom, and decided the costs of the Big Pond were too great. Caroline Sacks faced the same choice. She could be a Big Fish at the University of Maryland, or a Little Fish at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. She chose the Salon over the three rooms on Boule vard des Capucines—and she ended up paying a high price.

The trouble for Caroline Sacks began in the spring of her freshman year, when she enrolled in chemistry. She was probably taking too many courses, she realizes now, and doing too many extracurricular activities. She got her grade on her third midterm exam, and her heart sank. She went to talk to the professor. “He ran me through some exer cises, and he said, ‘Well, you have a fundamental deficiency in some of these concepts, so what I would actually recom mend is that you drop the class, not bother with the final exam, and take the course again next fall.’” So she did what the professor suggested. She retook the course in the fall of her sophomore year. But she barely did any better. She got a low B. She was in shock. “I had never gotten a B in

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an academic context before,” she said. “I had never not ex celled. And I was taking the class for the second time, this time as a sophomore, and most of the kids in the class were first-semester freshmen. It was pretty disheartening.”

She had known when she was accepted to Brown that it wasn’t going to be like high school. It couldn’t be. She wasn’t going to be the smartest girl in the class any more—and she’d accepted that fact. “I figured, regardless of how much I prepared, there would be kids who had been exposed to stuff I had never even heard of. So I was trying not to be naive about that.” But chemistry was be yond what she had imagined. The students in her class were competitive. “I had a lot of trouble even talking with people from those classes,” she went on. “They didn’t want to share their study habits with me. They didn’t want to talk about ways to better understand the stuff that we were learning, because that might give me a leg up.”

In spring of her sophomore year, she enrolled in or ganic chemistry—and things only got worse. She couldn’t do it: “You memorize how a concept works, and then they give you a molecule you’ve never seen before, and they ask you to make another one you’ve never seen be fore, and you have to get from this thing to that thing. There are people who just think that way and in five min utes are done. They’re the curve busters. Then there are people who through an amazing amount of hard work trained themselves to think that way. I worked so hard and I never got it down.” The teacher would ask a question, and around her, hands would go up, and Sacks would sit in silence and listen to everyone else’s brilliant answers. “It was just this feeling of overwhelming inadequacy.”

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One night she stayed up late, preparing for a review session in organic chemistry. She was miserable and angry. She didn’t want to be working on organic chemistry at three in the morning, when all of that work didn’t seem to be getting her anywhere. “I guess that was when I started thinking that maybe I shouldn’t pursue this any further,” she said. She’d had enough.

The tragic part was that Sacks loved science. As she talked about her abandonment of her first love, she mourned all the courses she would have loved to take but now never would—physiology, infectious disease, biology, math. In the summer after her sophomore year, she ago nized over her decision: “When I was growing up, it was a subject of much pride to be able to say that, you know, ‘I’m a seven-year-old girl, and I love bugs! And I want to study them, and I read up on them all the time, and I draw them in my sketchbook and label all the different parts of them and talk about where they live and what they do.’ Later it was ‘I am so interested in people and how the human body works, and isn’t this amazing?’ There is def initely a sort of pride that goes along with ‘I am a science girl,’ and it’s almost shameful for me to leave that behind and say, ‘Oh, well, I am going to do something easier be cause I can’t take the heat.’ For a while, that is the only way I was looking at it, like I have completely failed. This has been my goal and I can’t do it.”

And it shouldn’t have mattered how Sacks did in or ganic chemistry, should it? She never wanted to be an organic chemist. It was just a course. Lots of people find organic chemistry impossible. It’s not uncommon for premed students to take organic chemistry over the sum

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mer at another college just to give themselves a full se mester of practice. What’s more, Sacks was taking organic chemistry at an extraordinarily competitive and academi cally rigorous university. If you were to rank all the stu dents in the world who are taking organic chemistry, Sacks would probably be in the 99th percentile.

But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most competitive ponds in the country—and the experi ence of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even though she isn’t stupid at all. “Wow, other people are mas tering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can’t seem to learn to think in this manner.”

Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called “relative deprivation,” a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War. Stouffer was com missioned by the U.S. Army to examine the attitudes and morale of American soldiers, and he ended up studying half a million men and women, looking at everything from how soldiers viewed their commanding officers to how black soldiers felt they were being treated to how difficult soldiers found it to serve in isolated outposts.

But one set of questions Stouffer asked stood out. He

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quizzed both soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The an swer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps.

On the face of it, that made no sense. The Military Police had one of the worst rates of promotion in all of the armed forces. The Air Corps had one of the best. The chance of an enlisted man rising to officer status in the Air Corps was twice that of a soldier in the Military Police. So, why on earth would the Military Policemen be more satisfied? The answer, Stouffer famously explained, is that Military Policemen compared themselves only to other Military Po licemen. And if you got a promotion in the Military Police, that was such a rare event that you were very happy. And if you didn’t get promoted, you were in the same boat as most of your peers—so you weren’t that unhappy.

“Contrast him with the Air Corps man of the same education and longevity,” Stouffer wrote. His chance of getting promoted to officer was greater than 50 percent. “If he had earned a [promotion], so had the majority of his fellows in the branch, and his achievement was less con spicuous than in the MP’s. If he had failed to earn a rating while the majority had succeeded, he had more reason to feel a sense of personal frustration, which could be ex pressed as criticism of the promotion system.”

Stouffer’s point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible con text, but locally—by comparing ourselves to people “in

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the same boat as ourselves.” Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observa tions. Which do you think, for example, has a higher sui cide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy coun tries. It’s the same phenomenon as in the Military Police and the Air Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don’t feel all that bad. But can you imagine how difficult it must be to be depressed in a country where everyone else has a big smile on their face?*

Caroline Sacks’s decision to evaluate, herself, then, by looking around her organic chemistry classroom was not some strange and irrational behavior. It is what human beings do. We compare ourselves to those in the same

* This example is from the work of the economist Mary Daly, who has written widely on this phenomenon. Here’s another example, this one from Carol Graham’s Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Mil lionaires. Who do you think is happier: a poor person in Chile or a poor person in Honduras? Logic would say Chile. Chile is a modem developed economy. The poor in Chile make somewhere close to twice the amount of money that the poor in Hon duras do, which means that they can live in nicer homes and eat better food and afford more material comforts. But if you compare the happiness scores of the poor in both countries, Hondurans trump Chileans handily. Why? Because Hondurans care only about how other Hondurans are doing. Graham states, “Because average country income levels do not matter to happiness, but relative distances from the av erage do, the poor Honduran is happier because their distance from mean income is smaller.” And in Honduras, the poor are much closer in wealth to the middle class than the poor are in Chile, so they feel better off.

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situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school—except, perhaps, those at the very top of the class—are going to face a burden that they would not face in a less competitive atmosphere. Citizens of happy coun tries have higher suicide rates than citizens of unhappy countries, because they look at the smiling faces around them and the contrast is too great. Students at “great” schools look at the brilliant students around them, and how do you think they feel?

The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called—appropriately enough—the “Big Fish- Little Pond Effect.” The more elite an educational institu tion is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities. Students who would be at the top of their class at a good school can easily fall to the bottom of a really good school. Students who would feel that they have mas tered a subject at a good school can have the feeling that they are falling farther and farther behind in a really good school. And that feeling—as subjective and ridiculous and irrational as it may be—matters. How you feel about your abilities—your academic “self-concept”—in the context of your classroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It’s a crucial element in your moti vation and confidence.

The Big Fish-Little Pond theory was pioneered by the psychologist Herbert Marsh, and to Marsh, most parents and students make their school choices for the wrong rea sons. “A lot of people think that going to an academically selective school is going to be good,” he said. “That’s just not true. The reality is that it is going to be mixed." He went on: “When I was living in Sydney, there were a small

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number of selective public schools that were even more prestigious than the elite private schools. The tests to get into them were incredibly competitive. So the Sydney Morning Herald—the big newspaper there—would al ways call me up whenever they were holding their en trance examinations. It would happen every year, and there was always this pressure to say something new. So finally I just said—and maybe I shouldn’t have—well, if you want to see the positive effects of elite schools on self-concept, you are measuring the wrong person. You should be mea suring the parents.”

What happened to Caroline Sacks is all too common. More than half of all American students who start out in science, technology, and math programs (or STEM, as they are known) drop out after their first or second year. Even though a science degree is just about the most valuable as set a young person can have in the modern economy, large numbers of would-be STEM majors end up switching into the arts, where academic standards are less demanding and the coursework less competitive. That’s the major reason that there is such a shortage of qualified American-edu cated scientists and engineers in the United States.

To get a sense of who is dropping out—and why—let’s take a look at the science enrollment of a school in upstate New York called Hartwick College. It’s a small liberal arts college of the sort that is common in the American Northeast.

Here are all the Hartwick STEM majors divided into

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three groups—top third, middle third, and bottom third— according to their test scores in mathematics. The scores are from the SAT, the exam used by many American col leges as an admissions test. The mathematics section of the test is out of 800 points?

STEM majors

Math SAT

Top Third Middle Third Bottom Third

569 472 407

If we take the SAT as a guide, there’s a pretty big difference in raw math ability between the best and the poorest stu dents at Hartwick.

Now let’s look at the portion of all science degrees at Hartwick that are earned by each of those three groups.

STEM degrees

Percent

Top Third Middle Third

55.0 27.1

Bottom Third

17.8

The students in the top third at Hartwick earn well over half of the school’s science degrees. The bottom third end up earning only 17.8 percent of Hartwick’s science degrees. The students who come into Hartwick with the poorest levels of math ability are dropping out of math and science in droves. This much seems like common sense. Learning the advanced mathematics and physics necessary to become an engineer or scientist is really hard—and only a

♦These statistics are derived from a paper entitled “The Role of Ethnicity in Choos ing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions" by the sociologists Rogers Elliott and A. Christopher Strenta et al. The SAT scores are from the early 1990s, and may be somewhat different today.

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small number of students clustered at the top of the class are smart enough to handle the material.

Now let’s do the same analysis for Harvard, one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

STEM majors Top Third Middle Third Bottom Third

Math SAT 753 674 581

Harvard students, not surprisingly, score far higher on the math SAT than their counterparts at Hartwick. In fact, the students in Harvard’s bottom third have higher scores than the best students at Hartwick. If getting a science de gree is about how smart you are, then virtually everyone at Harvard should end up with a degree—right? At least on paper, there is no one at Harvard who lacks the intellectual firepower to master the coursework. Well, let’s take a look at the portion of degrees that are earned by each group.

STEM degrees Top Third Middle Third Bottom Third

Percent 53.4 31.2 15.4

Isn’t that strange? The students in the bottom third of the Harvard class drop out of math and science just as much as their counterparts in upstate New York. Harvard has the same distribution of science degrees as Hartwick.

Think about this for a moment. We have a group of high achievers at Hartwick. Let’s call them the Hartwick All Stars. And we’ve got another group of lower achievers at Harvard. Let’s call them the Harvard Dregs. Each is study ing the same textbooks and wrestling with the same con

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cepts and trying to master the same problem sets in courses like advanced calculus and organic chemistry, and according to test scores, they are of roughly equal academic ability. But the overwhelming majority of Hartwick All-Stars get what they want and end up as engineers or biologists. Meanwhile, the Harvard Dregs—who go to the far more prestigious school—are so demoralized by their experience that many of them drop out of science entirely and transfer to some nonscience major. The Harvard Dregs are Little Fish in a Very Big and Scary Pond. The Hartwick All-Stars are Big Fish in a Very Welcoming Small Pond. What matters, in de termining the likelihood of getting a science degree, is not just how smart you are. It’s how smart you/ee/ relative to the other people in your classroom.

By the way, this pattern holds true for virtually any school you look at—regardless of its academic quality. The sociologists Rogers Elliott and Christopher Strenta ran these same numbers for eleven different liberal arts col leges across the United States. Take a look for yourself:

Top School

Third

Math

SAT

Middle

Third

Math

SAT

Bottom

Third

Math

SAT

1. Harvard University 53.4% 753 31.2% 674 15.4% 581

2. Dartmouth College 57.3% 729 29.8% 656 12.9% 546

3. Williams College 45.6% 697 34.7% 631 19.7% 547

4. Colgate University 53.6% 697 31.4% 626 15.0% 534

5. University of Rich- 51.0%

mond 696 34.7% 624 14.4% 534

6. Bucknell University 57.3% 688 24.0% 601 18.8% 494

7. Kenyon College 62.1% 678 22.6% 583 15.4% 485

8. Occidental College 49.0% 663 32.4% 573 18.6% 492 I

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School Top Math

Third SAT

Middle

Third

Math Bottom Math

SATSAT Third

9.-Kalamazoo College 51.8% 633 27.3% 551 20.8% 479 ■

10. Ohio Wesley an 54.9% 591 33.9% 514 11.2% 434 '

11. Hartwick College 55.0% 569 27.1% 472 17:8% 407

Let’s go back, then, and reconstruct what Caroline Sacks’s thinking should have been when faced with the choice be tween Brown and the University of Maryland. By going to Brown, she would benefit from the prestige of the university. She might have more interesting and wealthier peers. The connections she made at school and the brand value of Brown on her diploma might give her a leg up on the job market. These are all classic Big Pond advantages. Brown is the Salon.

But she would be taking a risk. She would dramatically increase her chances of dropping out of science entirely. How large was that risk? According to research done by Mitchell Chang of the University of California, the likeli- hood of someone completing a STEM degree—all things be ing equal—rises by 2 percentage points for every 10-point decrease in the university’s average SAT score.’ The smarter

* This is a crucial enough point that it is worth spelling out in more detail. Chang and his coauthors looked at a sample of several thousand first-year college students and measured which factors played the biggest role in a student’s likelihood of drop ping out of science. The most important factor? How academically able the university’s students were. “For every 10-point increase in the average SAT score of an entering cohort of freshmen at a given institution, the likelihood of retention de creased by two percentage points,” the authors write. Interestingly, if you look just at students who are members of ethnic minorities, the numbers are even higher. Every 10-point increase in SAT score causes retention to fall by three percentage points. “Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major,” they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don’t.

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your peers, the dumber you feel; the dumber you feel, the more likely you are to drop out of science. Since there is roughly a 150-point gap between the average SAT scores of students attending the University of Maryland and Brown, the “penalty” Sacks paid by choosing a great school over a good school is that she reduced her chances of graduating with a science degree by 30 percent. Thirty percent! At a time when students with liberal arts degrees struggle to find jobs, students with STEM degrees are almost assured of good ca reers. Jobs for people with science and engineering degrees are plentiful and highly paid. That’s a very large risk to take for the prestige of an Ivy League school.

Let me give you one more example of the Big Pond in action. It might be even more striking. Suppose you are a university looking to hire the best young academics coming out of graduate school. What should your hiring strategy be? Should you hire only graduates from the most elite graduate schools? Or should you hire students who finished at the top of their class, regardless of what school they went to?

Most universities follow the first strategy. They even make a boast out of it: We hire only graduates of the very top schools. But I hope that by this point you are at least a little bit skeptical of that position. Shouldn’t a Big Fish at a Little Pond be worth at least a second look before a Little Fish at a Big Pond is chosen?

Luckily there is a very simple way to compare those two strategies. It comes from the work of John Conley and Ali Sina Onder on the graduates of PhD programs in economics. In academic economics, there are a handful of economics journals that everyone in the field reads and

CAROLINE SACKS

respects. The top journals accept only the best and most creative research and economists rate one another accord ing to—for the most part—how many research articles they have published in those elite journals. To figure out the best hiring strategy, then, Conley and Onder argue that all we have to do is compare the number of papers published by Big Fish in Little Ponds with the number published by Little Fish in Big Ponds. So what did they find? That the best students from mediocre schools were al most always a better bet than good students from the very best schools.

I realize that this is a deeply counterintuitive fact. The idea that it might not be a good idea for universities to hire from Harvard and MIT seems crazy. But Conley and On- der’s analysis is hard to refute.

Let’s start with the top economics PhD programs in North America—all of which are among the very top pro grams in the world: Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. Con ley and Onder divided up the graduates of each of those programs according to where they ranked in their class, and then counted up the number of times each PhD grad uate was published in the first six years of his or her aca demic career.

99th 95th 90th 85th 80th 75th 70th 65th 60th 55th

Harvard 4.31 2.36 1.47 1.04 0.71 0.41 0.30 0.21 0.12 0.07

MIT 4.73 2.87 1.66 1.24 0.83 0.64 0.48 0.33 0.20 0.12

Yale 3.78 2.15 1.22 0.83 0.57 0.39 0.19 0.12 0.08 0.05

Princeton 4.10 2.17 1.79 1.23 1.01 0.82 0.60 0.45 0.36 0.28

Columbia 2.90 1.15 0.62 0.34 0.17 0.10 0.06 0.02 0.01 0.01

DAVID AND GOLIATH

99th 95th 90th 85th 80th 75th 70th 65th 60th_ 55th Stanford______ 3.43 1.58 1.02 0,67 0.50 033 0.23 0.14 0.08 0.05 ~

Chicago 2.88 1.71 1.04 0.72 0;51 0.33 0.19 0.10 0.06 0.03

I realize that this is a lot of numbers. But just look at the left-hand side—the students who finish in the 99th percen tile of their class. To publish three or four papers in the most prestigious journals at the beginning of your career is quite an accomplishment. These people are really good. That much makes sense. To be the top economics graduate student at MIT or Stanford is an extraordinary achieve ment.

But then the puzzles start. Look at the 80th percentile column. Schools like MIT and Stanford and Harvard ac cept somewhere around two dozen PhD students a year, so if you are in the 80th percentile, you are roughly fifth or sixth in your class. These are also extraordinary students. But look at how few papers the 80th percentile publishes! A fraction of the number of the very best students. And by the way, look at the last column—the 55th percentile, the students who are just above average. They are brilliant enough to make it into one of the most competitive grad uate programs in the world, and to finish their studies in the top half of their class. And yet they barely publish any thing at all. As professional economists, they can only be considered disappointments.

Next let’s look at the graduates of mediocre schools. I say “mediocre” only because that’s what someone from one of those seven elite schools would call them. In the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings of graduate schools, these are the institutions that are buried some

CAROLINE SACKS

where near the bottom of the list. I’ve selected three for comparison purposes. The first is my own alma mater, the University of Toronto (out of a sense of school spirit!). The second is Boston University. The third is what Con ley and Onder call “non-top 30,” which is simply an average of all the schools at the very, very bottom of the list.

99th 95th 90th 85th 80th 75th 70th 65th 60th 55th

Utriv. of Toronto 3.13 1.85 0.80 0.61 0.29 0.19 0.15 0.10 0.07 0.05

Boston Univ. 1.59 0.49 0.21 0.08 0.05 0.02 0.02 0.01 0.00 0.00

Non-top 30 1.05 0.31 0.12 0.06 0.04 0.02 0.01 0.01 0.00 0.00

Do you see what is so fascinating? The very best students at a non-top 30 school—that is, a school so far down the list that someone from the Ivy League would grimace at the thought of even setting foot there—have a publication number of 1.05, substantially better than everyone except the very best students at Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and Chicago. Are you better off hir ing a Big Fish from a Tiny, Tiny Pond than even a Middle- Sized Fish from a Big Pond? Absolutely.

Conley and Onder struggle to explain their own find ings/ “To get to Harvard,” they write,

* A small point of clarification: Conley and Onder’s chart isn’t a list of the total number of publications by each economist. Rather, it is a weighted number—getting a paper accepted by one of the most prestigious journals (The American Economic Review or Economelrica') counts more than getting a paper published in a less com petitive journal. In other words, their numbers aren’t measuring just how many articles an academic can turn out. They are measuring how many high-qualily arti cles an academic can get published.

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an applicant has to have great grades, perfect test scores, strong and credible recommendations, and know how to package all this to stand out to the admissions committee. Thus, successful candidates must be hardworking, intel ligent, well-trained as undergraduates, savvy and ambi tious. Why is it that the majority of these successful ap plicants, who were winners and did all the right things up to the time they applied to graduate school, become so unimpressive after they are trained? Are we failing the students, or are the students failing us?

The answer, of course, is neither. No one is failing anyone. It’s just that the very thing that makes elite schools such wonderful places for those at the top makes them very dif ficult places for everyone else. This is just another version of what happened to Caroline Sacks. The Big Pond takes really bright students and demoralizes them.

By the way, do you know what elite institution has rec ognized this very fact about the dangers of the Big Pond for nearly fifty years? Harvard! In the 1960s, Fred Glimp took over as director of admissions and instituted what was known as the “happy-bottom-quarter” policy. In one of his first memos after taking office, he wrote: “Any class, no matter how able, will always have a bottom quarter. What are the effects of the psychology of feeling average, even in a very able group? Are there identifiable types with the psychological or what-not tolerance to be ‘happy’ or to make the most of education while in the bottom quarter?” He knew exactly how demoralizing the Big Pond was to everyone but the best. To Glimp’s mind, his job was to find students who were tough enough and had enough achieve

CAROLINE SACKS

ments outside the classroom to be able to survive the stress of being Very Small Fish in Harvard’s Very Large Pond. Thus did Harvard begin the practice (which continues to this day) of letting in substantial numbers of gifted athletes who have academic qualifications well below the rest of their classmates. If someone is going to be cannon fodder in the classroom, the theory goes, it’s probably best if that person has an alternative avenue of fulfillment on the foot ball field.

Exactly the same logic applies to the debate over affir mative action. In the United States, there is an enormous controversy over whether colleges and professional schools should have lower admissions standards for disad vantaged minorities. Supporters of affirmative action say helping minorities get into selective schools is justified given the long history of discrimination. Opponents say that access to selective schools is so important that it ought to be done purely on academic merit. A group in the mid dle says that using race as the basis for preference is a mistake—and what we really should be doing is giving preference to people who are poor. What all three groups take for granted is that being able to get into a great school is such an important advantage that the small number of spaces at the top are worth fighting over. But why on earth are people convinced that places at the top are so valuable that they are worth fighting over?

Affirmative action is practiced most aggressively in law schools, where black students are routinely offered posi tions in schools one tier higher than they would otherwise be able to attend. The result? According to the law profes sor Richard Sander, more than half of all African-Ameri

DAVID AND GOLIATH

can law students in the United States—51.6 percent—are in the bottom 10 percent of their law school class and al most three-quarters fall in the bottom 20 percent? After reading about how hard it is to get a science degree if you’re at the bottom of your class, you’ll probably agree that those statistics are terrifying. Remember what Caro line Sacks said? Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can’t seem to learn to think in this manner. Sacks isn’t stupid. She’s really, really smart. But Brown University made her feel stupid—and if she truly wanted to graduate

* The law professor Richard Sander is the leading proponent of the Big Pond case against affirmative action. He has written with Stuart Taylor a fascinating book on the subject called Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. I’ve provided a summary of some of Sander’s argument in the notes at the back of this book.

For example, one of the questions Sander looks at is this. It is harder for a minor ity student to become a lawyer if he or she goes to a better school. That’s clear. But what if that difficulty is offset by the fact that a degree from a better school is worth more? Not true, Sander and Taylor argue. Getting great grades at a good school is about the same—and maybe even better—than getting good grades at a great school. They write:

A student who went to thirtieth-ranked Fordham and ended up in the top fifth of her class had jobs and earnings very similar to a student who went to fifth ranked, much more competitive Columbia and earned grades that put her slightly below the middle of the class. I found that in most cases like this, the Fordham student had the edge in the job market.

This should not be surprising. Why should black students behave any differently from anyone else who is forced to leant from the least advantageous position in the classroom?

Sander’s arguments are controversial. Some of his findings have been disputed by other social scientists who interpret the data differently. On a general level, though, what he says about the perils of the Big Pond is something that many psy chologists, going back as far as Stouffer’s work in the Second World War, would consider to be common sense.

CAROLINE SACKS

with a science degree, the best thing for her to do would have been to go down a notch to Maryland. No sane per son would say that the solution to her problems would be for her to go to an even more competitive school like Stanford or MIT. Yet when it comes to affirmative action, that’s exactly what we do. We take promising students like Caroline Sacks—but who happen to be black—and offer to bump them up a notch. And why do we do that? Be cause we think we’re helping them.

That doesn’t mean affirmative action is wrong. It is something done with the best of intentions, and elite schools often have resources available to help poor stu dents that other schools do not. But this does not change the fact that—as Herbert Marsh says—the blessings of the Big Pond are mixed, and it is strange how rarely the Big Pond’s downsides are mentioned. Parents still tell their children to go to the best schools they possibly can, on the grounds that the best schools will allow them to do what ever they wish. We take it for granted that the Big Pond expands opportunities, just as we take it for granted that a smaller class is always a better class. We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is—and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvan tage. It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.

At the time she was applying to college, Caroline Sacks had no idea she was taking that kind of chance with the thing she loved. Now she does. At the end of our talk, I

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asked her what would have happened if she had chosen in- stead to go to the University of Maryland—to be, instead, a Big Fish in a Little Pond. She answered without hesita tion: “I’d still be in science.”

“I was a very enthusiastic student growing up, and I really liked learning and I liked school, and I was good at it,” Stephen Randolph began. He is a tall young man with carefully combed dark brown hair and neatly pressed khakis. “I took high school algebra starting in fourth grade. Then I did algebra two in fifth grade and geometry in sixth grade. By the time I got to middle school, I was going to high school for math and for biology, chemistry, and Advanced Placement U.S. history. I also went to a lo cal college starting in fifth grade, taking some math, but I did other science in fifth grade as well. I actually think by the time I graduated high school, I had more than enough credits to immediately get a bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia. I’m pretty certain of that.”

Every day from first grade until the end of high school, Randolph wore a tie to school. “It’s kind of embarrassing,” he said, “kind of crazy. But I did it. I forget how it started. I just wanted to wear a tie one day in first grade and then I just kept doing it. I was a nerd, I guess.”

Randolph was valedictorian of his high school class. His college admission-test scores were nearly perfect. He was

♦ “Stephen Randolph” is a pseudonym.

CAROLINE SACKS

accepted by both Harvard and MIT and chose Harvard. In the first week of school, he walked through Harvard Yard and marveled at his good fortune. “It occurred to me that everyone here was a student who got into Harvard. Which was a crazy thought, but it was like, oh, yeah, all these peo ple are interesting and smart and amazing and this is going to be a great experience. I was so enthusiastic.”

His story was almost word for word the same as Caro line Sacks’s, and hearing it a second time made it plain how remarkable the achievement of the Impressionists really was. They were artistic geniuses. But they were also pos sessed of a rare wisdom about the world. They were ca pable of looking at what the rest of us thought of as a great advantage, and seeing it for what it really was. Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir, and Pissarro would have gone to their second choice.

So what happened to Stephen Randolph at Harvard? I think you can guess the answer. In his third year, he took quantum mechanics. “I didn’t do well,” he admitted. “I think I might have gotten a B-minus.” It was the lowest grade he’d ever received. “My perception was that either I wasn’t good at it or I wasn’t good enough at it. Maybe I felt that I had to be the best at it or be a genius at it for it to make sense for me to continue. Some people seemed to get it more quickly than I did—and you tend to focus on those people and not the ones who are just as lost as you are.

“I was excited by the material,” he continued. “But I was humbled by the experience—humbled as in, you sit in the class and you don’t understand and you feel like, ‘I will never be able to understand this!’ And you do problem sets and you understand a little bit of this and a little bit of that,

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but you always think that the other people in your class understand it a lot better. I think one of the things about Harvard is that there’s just so many smart people there that it’s hard to feel smart there.” He decided he couldn’t go on.

“You know, there’s something about solving a math problem that’s very satisfying,” Randolph said at one point, and an almost wistful look came over his face. “You start with a problem that you may not know how to solve, but you know there are certain rules you can follow and certain approaches you can take, and often during this process, the intermediate result is more complex than what you started with, and then the final result is simple. And there’s a certain joy in making that journey.” Randolph went to the school he wanted. But did he get the education he wanted? “I think I’m generally pleased with the way things turned out,” he said. Then he laughed, a little rue fully. “At least that’s what I tell myself.”

At the end of his third year in college, Randolph de cided to take the entrance exam for law school. After grad uating, he took a job with a law firm in Manhattan. Har vard cost the world a physicist and gave the world another lawyer. “I do tax law,” Randolph said. “It’s funny. There are a fair number of math and physics majors who end up in tax law.”

NOTES

CHAPTER THREE: CAROLINE SACKS

The discussion of the Impressionists is based on several books, princi pally: John Rewald, The History of Impressionism (MOMA, 1973); Ross King, The Judgment of Paris (Walker Publishing, 2006), which has a marvelous description of the world of the Salon; Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists (Harper Collins, 2006); and Harrison White and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Wiley & Sons, 1965), 150. The first academic paper to raise the issue of relative deprivation with respect to school choice was James Davis’s “The Campus as Frog Pond: An Application of the Theory of Relative Deprivation to Career De cisions of College Men,” The American Journal of Sociology 72, no. 1 (July 1966). Davis concludes:

At the level of the individual, [my findings] challenge the notion that getting into the “best possible” school is the most efficient route to occupational mobility. Counselors and parents might well consider the drawbacks as well as the advantages of sending a boy to a “fine” college, if, when doing so, it is fairly certain he will end up in the bottom ranks of his graduating class. The aphorism “It is better to be a big frog in a small pond than a small frog in a big pond” is not perfect advice, but it is not trivial.

Stouffer’s study (coauthored with Edward A. Suchman, Leland C. DeVinney, Shirley A. Star, and Robin M. Williams Jr.) appears in The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life, vol. 1 of Studies in So cial Psychology in World War II (Princeton University Press, 1949), 251. For studies of so-called happy countries, see Mary Daly, Andrew Oswald, Daniel Wilson, and Stephen Wu, “Dark Contrasts: The Para dox of High Rates of Suicide in Happy Places,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 80 (December 2011), and Carol Graham, Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Mis erable Millionaires (Oxford University Press, 2009). Herbert Marsh teaches in the Department of Education at Oxford University. His academic output over the course of his career has been extraordinary. On the subject of “Big Fish/Little Pond” alone, he has written countless papers. A good place to start is H. Marsh, M. Seaton, et al., “The Big-Fish-Little-Pond-Effect Stands Up to Critical Scrutiny: Implications for Theory, Methodology, and Future Research,” Educa tional Psychology Review 20 (2008): 319-50. For statistics on STEM programs, see Rogers Elliott, A. Christopher Strenta, et al., “The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions,” Research in Higher Education 37, no. 6 (December 1996), and Mitchell Chang, Oscar Cerna, et al., “The Con tradictory Roles of Institutional Status in Retaining Underrepresented

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NOTES

Minorities in Biomedical and Behavioral Science Majors,” The Review of Higher Education 31, no. 4 (summer 2008). John P. Conley and Ali Sina Onder’s breakdown of research papers appears in “An Empirical Guide to Hiring Assistant Professors in Eco nomics,” Vanderhut University Department of Economics Working Papers Series, TAty 28,2013. The reference to Fred Glimp’s “happy-bottom-quarter” policy comes from Jerome Karabel’s fascinating book The Chosen: The Hidden His tory of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Mariner Books, 2006), 291. Karabel comments:

Would it be better, [Glimp] implied, if the students at the bottom were content to be there? Thus the renowned (some would say no torious) Harvard admission practice known as the “happy-bottom- quarter policy” was born....Glimp’s goal was to identify “the right bottom-quarter students—men who have the perspective, ego strength, or extracurricular outlets for maintaining their self-respect (or whatever) while making the most of their opportunities at a C- level.”

The question of affirmative action is worth discussing in some detail. Take a look at the following table from the work of Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It (Basic Books, 2012). It shows where African-Americans rank in their law school classes compared with white students. The class ranks run from 1 to 10, with 1 being the bottom tenth of the class and 10 being the top.

Rank Black White Other 1. 51.6 5.6 14.8 2. 19.8 7.2 20.0 3. 11.1 9.2 13.4 4. 4.0 10.2 11.5 5. 5.6 10.6 8.9 6. 1.6 11.0 8.2 7. 1.6 11.5 6.2 8. 2.4 11.2 6.9 9. 0.8 11.8 4.9 10. 1.6 11.7 5.2

There are a lot of numbers in this table, but only two rows really matter—the first and second rows, showing the racial breakdown of the bottom of the average American law school class.

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NOTES

Rank Black White 1. 51.6 5.6 2. 19.8 7.2

Other 14.8 20.0

Here is the way that Sander and Taylor analyze the costs of this strategy. Imagine two black law school students with identical grades and identical test scores. Both are admitted to an elite law school under an affirmative-action program. One accepts and one declines. The one who declines chooses instead—for logistical or financial or family rea sons—to attend his or her second choice, a less prestigious and less selective law school. Sander and Taylor looked at a large sample of these kinds of “matched pairs” and compared how well they did on four mea sures: law school graduation rate, passing the bar on their first attempt, ever passing the bar, and actually practicing law. The comparison is not even close. By every measure, black students who don’t go to the “best” school they get into outperform those who do.

Black Career Success White Black (Affirmative

Action) Percentage who graduate from law school 91.8 93.2 86.2 Percentage who pass bar first attempt 91.3 88.5 70.5 Percentage who ever pass bar 96.4 90.4 82.8 Percentage who practice law 82.5 75.9 66.5

Sander and Taylor argue very convincingly that if you are black and you really want to be a lawyer, you should do what the Impressionists did and steer clear of the Big Pond. Don’t accept any offer from a school that wants to bump you up a notch. Go to the school you would have otherwise gone to. Sander and Taylor put it bluntly: “At any law school the bottom of the class is a lousy place to be.”

By the way, those of you who read my book Outliers, where I also discussed affirmative action and law school, know that in the book I was interested in making a very different point—that the usefulness of IQ and intelligence starts to level off at a certain point, meaning that the kinds of distinctions among students made by elite institutions are not necessarily useful. In other words, it is wrong to assume that a lawyer admitted to a very good law school with lesser credentials will be a less able lawyer than those admitted with sterling credentials. To back this up, I used data from the University of Michigan Law School, which shows that their black law school affirmative-action graduates had ca reers every bit as distinguished as their white graduates.

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Do I still believe this? Yes and no. I think the general point about the benefits of intelligence leveling off at the high end remains. But I now think the specific point made about law schools in Outliers was, in ret rospect, naive. I was not familiar with relative deprivation theory at the time. I am now a good deal more skeptical of affirmative-action pro grams.

CHAPTER fou r: DAVID BOIES

A good general introduction to the problem of dyslexia is Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Harper, 2007). The Bjorks have written widely and brilliantly on the subject of desir able difficulty. Here’s a good summary of their work: Elizabeth Bjork and Robert Bjork, “Malang Things Hard on Yourself, But in a Good Way: Creating Desirable Difficulties to Enhance Learning,” Psychology and the Real World, M. A. Gernsbacher et al., eds. (Worth Publishers, 2011), ch. 5. The puzzles about the bat and ball and the widgets come from Shane Frederick, “Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 4 (fall 2005). The results of Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer’s experiment with the CRT at Princeton are described in Adam Alter et al., “Overcoming Intuition: Metacognitive Difficulty Activates Analytic Reasoning,” Journal of Experimental Psy chology: General 136 (2007). Alter has a wonderful new book about this line of research called Drunk Tank Pink (Penguin, 2013). Julie Logan’s study of dyslexia among entrepreneurs is “Dyslexic En trepreneurs: The Incidence; Their Coping Strategies and Their Business Skills,” Dyslexia 15, no. 4 (2009): 328-46. The best history of IKEA is Ingvar Kamprad and Bertil Torekull’s Leading by Design: The IKEA Story (Collins, 1999). Incredibly, there is nothing in Torekull’s interviews with Kamprad to suggest that Kamprad had even a moment’s hesitation about doing business with a Commu nist country at the height of the Cold War. On the contrary, Kamprad seems almost blase about it: “At first we did a bit of advance smuggling. Illegally, we took tools such as files, spare parts for machines, and even carbon paper for ancient typewriters.”

CHAPTER fiv e: EMIL “jAl” FREIREICH

Sources for the London Blitz include Tom Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz (Collins, 1976). “Winston Churchill described London as 'the greatest target in the world,’” appears on page 22; “I lay there feeling

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