Elite Instution Cognative Disorder, interesting take on big fish little pond/ little fish big pond

Parents Forum
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@RondoInBFlat‌, he can’t, because the numbers don’t really support his assertion.

For example, the researchers in the PhD paper used hypothetical tenure standards of 1 and 0.6 AER-equivalent papers (with publication in various lesser journals being worth fractions of getting a paper published in the American Economic Review or Econometrica).

Let’s say that to get tenure at a pretty good (not tip-top) research university in econ, you need .75 AER-equivalent papers. Over 20% of the econ PhDs from MIT, Princeton, Rochester, CMU, and nearly 20% of the econ PhDs from Northwestern and UCSD meet that standard. Less than 5% from Cornell, OSU, UMD, UT-Austin, UIUC, UC-Davis, USC, BU, PSU, (and non-top-30 econ PhD programs) do.

Let’s say that to get tenure at any university, you need .25 AER-equivalent papers. At no school does the majority of the econ PhD students meet that standard, but over of a third of the PhD students at MIT, Princeton, Rochester, UBC, UCSD, CMU and almost a third of Northwestern & Harvard PhDs achieve that standard. Less than 10% of econ PhD students at OSU, UMD, UT-Austin, UIUC, USC, BU, (and non-top-30 econ PhD programs) do.

When you take in to account that a decent number of econ PhDs don’t head in to academia (and the ones from better schools generally have better opportunities in industry), Gladwell’s assertion that the distribution is the same at all schools really falls apart under scrutiny.

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My point is a little different though. Someone, always, has to come in last. There is no way to avoid this. Gladwell seems to be claiming that the whole bottom third may somehow be eliminated by careful reshuffing, but that’s a mathematical impossibility.

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Regardless, Gladwell is selling hooey.

BTW, if you look at the high production rate of 1.5 AER-equivalent papers, over 10% of the econ PhDs at MIT, Princeton, and Rochester (and almost 10% of the econ PhDs at Harvard, Northwestern, Yale, and UCSD) reach that level, but less than 1% of the PhDs at NYU, Duke, OSU, UMD, UT-Austin, UIUC, BU, PSU, (and non-top-30 econ PhD programs) do.

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Not that it matters to the point of the story, but as a New Yorker I feel the need to point out that Hartwick is in Oneonta, not Utica. Carry on…

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I have stopped reading Gladwell. After The Tipping Point, Gladwell appears to write his books by starting with the conclusion and hunting for examples, stories and data that are consistent with his initial answer.

And, @RondoInBFlat, you are right. Every institution will always have a bottom third.

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@RondoInBFlat - I wouldn’t waste too much time trying to figure out what Gladwell was saying.

Personally, I stopped watching the video of his talk after a few minutes because I was pretty sure it was making me dumber.

PurpleTitan has it about right. The key fact is that the vast majority (easily 80%+) of Ph.D.'s don’t write anywhere near enough good papers to get tenure at a good R1 university. (This is for any number of reasons that range from having great opportunities outside of academia to not being very good). Harvard might only produce 5-10 of these people a year, but there are some top-30 schools that only produce 1 of these people every 5 to 10 years. It’s like complaining that most college basketball players at Kentucky don’t become 1st round NBA draft picks … sure it’s true, but Kentucky still does a lot better than all but a handful of programs. And the dominance in the top 10 Ph.D. programs producing tenurable faculty is actually a lot higher than the dominance in the top 10 college basketball programs producing NBA picks.

What’s amazing is that the top 10 econ departments produce over half of the people who meet this standard - that’s out of all doctorates graduated in the entire nation. Gladwell’s claim about STEM graduates also fall apart if you think about it for about 10 seconds or so.

I agree though that Gladwell does write well and his books are entertaining. Unfortunately, they’re mostly pseudo-science because they’re too slanted.

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I am OK with pseudo science, but not with pseudo math. :wink:

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This is true to some extent, but we should also remember that not all good papers are fairly assessed for publication in top tier journals. If you control the editorial and review process, then you can wittingly or unwittingly give a boost to papers from approved authors and departments, and give a knock to papers from lesser sources.

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Before watching Gladwell’s video and before reading the article I posted on CC yesterday about PhD production, I had been researching colleges for D who plans to go into a very fuzzy non-STEM field. One factor I was examining was where the professors in her field went to school themselves. My goal in that, by the way, was not to try to assess the school quality, but to discover if there were any undergrad colleges in our region we might not have thought of that have strong departments in her major.

So I took her current list of safeties, matches and reaches and checked out the faculty bios. I kept seeing the same handful of top universities over and over again for the origin of the faculty PhD’s. Schools like Oxford, UMich, Cal, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale–none of which were on her list because they are too elite and far from home. But what surprised me–even though for my older kids I had fallen in the camp of going to the best school you get into–was that their undergrad degrees were also mostly from those same few universities and always from a top college. If there was an outlier and the professor’s undergrad degree had come from a good but not top school, then that was the very school which had hired him/her as professor.

Now this D is not going to be in the top performance tier at a top school, if she can even be admitted. She is a very good but not exceptional student, so for her we were actually thinking of the big fish in a little pond plan for undergrad, so she could maximize GPA and research opportunities in order to improve her grad school options. But given how inbred her field is, perhaps we should reconsider.

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@TheGFG, is she going for a PhD? Does she have a goal of becoming tenured faculty?

Do note that only the cream of the crop among undergrads get PhDs and only the cream of that cream become tenured faculty. If those aren’t her goals, then it may not matter, and what route to take would depend on her goals.

Also do note that HS performance may not be perfectly correlated with success later on.

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At the end of the day, there are only so many tenure track positions at R1 universities, so regardless of how biased the review process is, the vast majority of Ph.D’s will not have good enough publication records to be a faculty at an R1 university. That doesn’t mean their publication records aren’t good, but just not good enough.

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PurpleTitan, no she is not planning on striving for a faculty position. But I wonder if the same elite school biases are a big factor for the sort of career she IS considering, which is still academic in nature, eg. classics or classical archaelogy for museum curatorship.

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If the student is looking for a career in university-level academia, eliteness of college must be considered, but not necessarily at the undergrad level. But the Ph.D-granting institution is important.

For everyone else, there are too many factors to be considered when choosing a college. This is the problem with statistical studies, be it in education, medicine, etc. Too much reliance on statistics and “evidence-based” decisionmaking can lead to undesirable outcomes when applied to individuals in particular circumstances.

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@TheGFG‌, maybe, but don’t discount honors at a public that may have a pretty good classics department. What state are you in?

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I’m not, and our flagship does offer the major. But we have two issues. One, is that we had been looking mostly at LAC’s because of D’s personality and desire for a smaller environment. And secondly, she is very weak in standardized math testing, so her test scores may be a problem for schools which are less holistic. She will probably go test optional for some applications.

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@TheGFG‌, not sure how strong any LACs are in Classics. Maybe Bryn Mawr? They may be one of the few. You could consider universities in the UK, as well, where they will only consider how well you can do in your major of interest (no switching or liberal arts education, though; you only take the courses in your stream).

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Bryn Mawr is at the top of her list! Looked at Dickinson, Wesleyan, F&M, and Haverford too. Plan to visit Connecticut College. Brown, Holy Cross, Fordham, Johns Hopkins, Rutgers, Seton Hall are all under consideration as well, but are bigger and/or a little farther away than she’d like to go. We may have to totally shake up her list.

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TheGFG: They are both bigger and farther away even than those other options, but your daughter may want to take a peek at McGill and Toronto, too. My kids had a number of classics friends, and lots of them thought those colleges were very viable options if they couldn’t get into the Harvard or Oxford type schools. A couple of them even went there. One (Toronto) is now a Philosophy PhD student in a first-rate program in that discipline, and another (McGill) is about to get her PhD from a top archaeology program (and is virtually assured of a good job, because she has developed some big-deal new technique, which she claims is due not to any genius or insight but merely to hard work understanding some science and new technology). We also know someone who turned an art history major at Toronto into quite a nice career (so far, she’s 31) as curatorial staff in the U.S. The residential college system at Toronto, providing you choose one of the small colleges, can make a big institution a lot smaller.

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I don’t know about McGill, but my understanding is that Toronto is sink-or-swim like a lot of state schools here in that they have a harsh curve & don’t have a problem flunking kids. Granted, the examples I’ve heard from are in STEM disciplines, not humanities.

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McGill is “sink or swim” only in the sense that you need to be a self starter and not easily distracted by the off campus activities that Montreal has to offer.