Then I will withhold my comment about Gladwell’s hairdo.
Hairdo? 
A scenario of a few kids in the same family:
Kid #1 thrives at an elite school and has reached even higher, propelled by extremely accomplished and motivated classmates. Pre-med/STEM/definitely has been “tested” in competitive environment.
Kid #2 would want no parts of being among what some would consider “try hards” and would likely shrink under the pressure and question ability.
What I do know is that it’s not one size fits all. Just like with sports teams, sometimes “playing up” causes talent development and higher skill level in an athlete. Sometimes it kills self confidence. Conversely, sometimes playing with teammates not as developed as you can change what you might have grown to be from a talent perspective. For another kid, it breeds confidence.
It’s so important to know what’s right for you when making these important decisions.
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I do not think that this term means what you think it means.
“Ad hominin” = arguing to the person, not that argument. When I question a person’s argument, based on his past methods of supporting their arguments, that is an attack on the argument. I did not attack Gladwell’s looks, his family life, his degree, or his politics.
If I say that a person who makes a medical diagnosis is wrong because they are not a physician, that is not an “ad hominin attack”. When I say that the doctor is wrong with a diagnosis because their diagnosis procedure is flawed, and have been wrong before when diagnosing this illness before, that is not an ad hominin.
When I say that Gladwell had demonstrated that he does not support his points with reliable evidence, and therefor I do not accept his points, that is not an ad hominin attack.
Saying that a person is wrong because they lack the qualifications required to make their arguments is also not an ad hominin attack
Since the title of the thread is “Malcolm Gladwell Talks About Elite Colleges”, everything regarding Gladwell’s opinions of all issues related to higher ed are relevant.
I really liked the talk. Drawing strong conclusions from it might be risky. It does however get a person to thinking.
Some of us have been saying for quite a while that attending the highest ranked university that you can possibly get accepted to is not necessarily the right thing for every student. “Fit” is more important. However, “fit” is much more difficult to determine.
He has some statistics about the top very few students in each program publishing. I have wondered for a while (even before seeing this video) whether the top students in any program find that professors work with them closely. Perhaps other students do not get the same amount of encouragement. It is hard to be sure since so much of this could be unintentional.
Some of us have not been giving this advice. In my case I am probably biased by having watched some people struggle in the highest ranked program that they got into. I find myself wondering whether the small number of students that I saw drop out of math or CS at MIT and end up in retail sales could have done very well in math or CS at some different university.
That is my reaction to this particular video.
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One wrinkle on this is whether these students have externally vs internally referenced personality types. Most people are quite sensitive to how others view them, but some are not at all. The latter are much less likely to have their confidence “shattered” when they encounter more talented peers. I definitely see the difference amongst my kids (who’ve taken personality tests for fun and are quite different) and experienced it myself when I was in college.
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Once again you missed the point. Neither Gladwell nor his POV is the topic here. It’s a jumping off point for discussion about where students best fit.
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If we look at personality types as identified by instruments like the Myers-Briggs, I can definitely see what you’re talking about. From your comment, I’m thinking that it might be helpful to include such an assessment as part of the process of determining a student’s fit for any college. You make a great point.
I should note that the E-I dimension isn’t particularly about one’s sensitivity to the opinions and judgments of others, but more about how anyone processes information they take in, i.e. by talking things through in discussions with others or by internal reflection and connections with one’s own thoughts and ideas. But I get your point about sensitivity to judgment by others, and it’s an important point.
I agree with this. One of my best friends is an MIT graduate. He came from one of those families who pushed him to pursue STEM from the time he was a little boy; would not permit him to select any college less prestigious than HYPMS when decision time came (in fact, barely allowed him to apply to any LACs) and actively denigrated any careers in academia, government service or social science. He had to be a doctor, or else. Unfortunately for his parents. they had so hollowed out any sense of independence or agency from his personality that by the time he was confronted by that first wave of disappointing grades, he was crushed. You would think he illustrates Gladwell’s point perfectly, but looking back on it, it’s obvious he would have cracked under pressure at some point in the pipeline, whether it was undergrad or grad and would have made a lousy doctor had he been permitted to continue along those lines. For him, pursuing an economics major was the best decision he ever made.
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I think it’s more about Thinking/Feeling (T-F) and to a lesser extent Sensing/Intuition (S-N) than Extraversion-Introversion (E-I) per se. My NT kid (like me) doesn’t care at all what people think, my SF kid (like my spouse) absolutely does.
In other types of personality factor research it would be referred to as Neuroticism (Big Five personality traits - Wikipedia )
Against my own best judgement, I watched the show. Exactly what I thought.
I had an entire post here, demonstrating that Gladwell was equating correlation with causation, that he was comparing Hartwick STEM students who are almost all biological sciences with Harvard students, who are mostly engineering, math, and physical sciences, and other issues.
However, the most glaring fault of the entire talk is that He Is Wrong.
STEM students are not dropping out college at selective colleges because they feel that they are not as good as their peers. They are not dropping out of any colleges for that reason. Nor are students switching majors because they do not feel that they are as smart as their peers.
In fact, students switched or dropped out when they started failing classes. That means that it wasn’t their comparisons with their peers, but the comparisons of the professors with whatever standards the school had. These kids weren’t subjectively comparing themselves with their peers and judging themselves. They were objectively failing their classes, and their judgement of their abilities was absolute, not relative.
Also, while STEM majors are more likely to switch majors, it isn’t the engineers or CS majors, but the math and natural science majors. Engineers switch major less than Education or Humanities, while CS and IT switch less than all of these, as well as social science and business. Only health care and other applied fields switch less than CS majors.
So the majors which needed the most math were the ones from which students were least likely to switch or drop out.
So what are the ACTUAL phenomena that are occurring, as opposed the those that are imagined by Gladwell:
Students who were not doing well objectively switched or dropped out.
This is what REAL data demonstrates, not Gladwell’s cherry-picked, partial data.
As for the comparisons that Gladwell did of SAT scores between Hartwick and Harvard I decided to mention this anyways)? Well, that is because he compared the SAT scores of students who transferred from all STEM fields, including engineering, math, and CS, at Harvard to students who all transferred from biological sciences at Hartwick.
The students who transferred out of STEM at Harvard had higher math SATs than the students who stayed in STEM at Hartwick, because many students who can manage the math in biology will not be able to manage the math in engineering, math, physics, and CS.
Basically the phenomenon that Gladwell described cannot be seen in data that that is collected and analyzed as data should, nor does the data he presented actually demonstrate this phenomenon.
Exactly what I wrote about Gladwell at the beginning.
Since somebody mentioned junk science above, I will simply leave these citations about the validity of the Briggs-Myers:
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I think there are some more fundamental issues. Gladwell mentions the following math SAT groups for Harvard:
Top 1/3 = 753, Middle 1/3 = 674, Lower 1/3 = 581
IPEDS has Harvard SAT stats for the past 20 years. In each of those years Harvard’s 25th percentile math score was 700+. Havard’s actual SAT score is nowhere near the numbers Gladwell reported. Looking a little deeper, Gladwell got the numbers from the paper at http://www.dartblog.com/documents/Elliott%20and%20Strenta.pdf .
The SAT numbers are from the 1980s and are for “Institution A”, which is not identified as Harvard in the paper. But the far more important issue is the percentages do not refer to STEM persistence. Instead they refer to the distribution of science majors at graduation across all students… not just those who intended to major in STEM. For example, suppose a particular college had the following SAT math distribution among science and non-science majors.
Freshmen Year: Planned science major average 700 math, Non-science averages 600 math
Graduates: Completed science majors average 720 math, Non-science averages 620 math
The kids who complete a science major do indeed have higher math SAT scores than non-science, but in this hypothetical example, it’s not because they kids with lower SAT scores are “dropping like flies”. It’s because the who intended to pursue science majors started out with higher math SAT scores.
This is a hypothetical example. In the real world freshmen who plan to pursue science do indeed average higher math SAT scores than non-science. But there is also some degree of sorting among the students who plan to pursue science, such that some persist and others do not. The ones with higher SAT scores do tend to have a higher rate of persistence, but that correlation drops tremendously often to the point of no longer being statistically significant after you add controls for other factors, particularly for HS preparation. That is kids who have a stronger HS curriculum preparation are more likely to persist through freshmen STEM classes, and kids who have a stronger HS preparation also tend to have higher SAT scores.
Harvard and other similar colleges are well aware of the challenges faced by students who have weaker HS backgrounds, particularly in math/STEM, and take special measures to address and support these kids. For example, Harvard requires also students to take a math placement test to help determine most appropriate math starting point. They also have math placement advisers who discuss results and consider the individual student and goals. The student might choose any of the following starting points – Math Ma,b; 1a,b; 19a,b; 20; 21a,b; 23a,b; 25a,b; and 55a,b. The lowest level (MA) is a half normal speed calc/pre-calc type class , while Harvard’s website describes math 55 as “probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country”. Very few students attempt to take math 55, and many students who do attempt it drop out to a slower/easier math sequence by the end. However, top math students, such as IMO participants do tend to take math 55, so other students rarely see IMO-level math students in their intro math classes.
When choosing a college, one might look at whether similar support measures are in place vs thrown in to the deep end and sink or swim, rather than just looking at how a particular student’s math SAT score compares the school’s average.
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Two other things of interest to me from this talk:
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If his advice is at some level, “Go to a less competitive school so you are ranked higher and can feel more puffed up about yourself, which will give you the mindset to continue pursuing your STEM/whatever goal”, then how can this be useful at a societal level? If all the kiddos who would be in the bottom half at Harvard choose Hartwick, then the kids who WOULD have been in the top at Hartwick will now be pushed down lower at Hartwick and will be discouraged. So now those kids who would have been tops at Hartwick but are now bottoms, need to choose Less-than-Hartwick. And so on, and so on, and so on until we are creating new bottom-bottom schools to accommodate the kids who need to go down further so they can be big fish. Ultimately, you’d empty out the top schools, because there will always be a bottom half that should leave. Basically, at any school there will be a top third and a bottom third, there’s no way around that. If everyone listened to him, we’d have a real race to the bottom!
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He makes the point near the end that certain kids shouldn’t go to Harvard/elite and would do better going to UMaryland. On an individual level, if you buy his story, this could be better (I am among those who really have loads of questions about his story, though). But where he takes a crazy leap and is flat-out illogical is when he then implies, “So companies shouldn’t hire the kids from the elite, they should seek only the cream-of-the-crop from any school.” Now, not that that’s bad, BUT, if the kids DID stick out the STEM degree in the elite school, then they already survived the trial and didn’t need to drop out and are all set to be good hires. I only see his logic at the individual level, saying YOU may fail if you put yourself to the test too much, but once the kids who ultimately succeed at the elite school and get their degree graduate, I do not see the logic as to why they are bad hires.
Also, his example on the journal publications was just weird and unconvincing. I can’t remember now what PhD programs he was talking about (was it Economics? All degrees? Just stem?), but it may be true that just the tippy top elite Phd students stay in academia and publish…a lot of the other successful PhD students may be wooed away with very attractive, lucrative offers to use their degrees in other places (could be PE or other finance careers that are desirable to some of them, etc). I wouldn’t assume that publishing papers in these journals is the only indicator of success, at all!
All that said, I agree with many posters that this is really an individual things. Many of us do better when we “play up” ( I count myself among them, even in sports. When I play against excellent tennis players, I am a MUCH better player and learn a lot to improve my game, but don’t come out the champion; when I play against weak players, I get lazy or messy or generally play much worse, but am more likely to win that game.). I think this really is something where people need to do soul-searching and figure out what’s right for THEM.
Also, thanks for starting this discussion Bill! I always think it’s interesting to ponder these types of questions.
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This.
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Also all the kids entering elite schools basically have comparable stats. There is no way to know ahead of time who will be in the top half of the class vs the bottom half. No one plans to be in the bottom half before classes even start! So is Gladwell saying you should assume you’ll be in the bottom half before even trying, so go to a nonelite school – all on an assumption?
Well, kind of.
The kids that get into the elite colleges without any hooks (i.e. not an athlete, legacy, URM, first-gen, etc.) are concentrated in the top quartile in terms of incoming stats. In addition, because the elite colleges reject many with perfect or nearly perfect test-scores, the unhooked kids that are admitted have distinguished themselves in one or more areas through awards that show their true strength.
My observation is that these kids continue to do very well in the elite colleges.
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However, it is harder for an individual student to know where their own academic strength ranks against other admits when the other admits’ academic awards and achievements beyond the usual stats (GPA, rank, SAT/ACT that are all pressed up against the ceiling) are hard to know (from outside the admissions office) and subjectively graded.
Absolutely. Moreover, he is, as usual, ignoring the facts of academia, because he does not understand academia.
Publications ae only the focus of those faculty members who end up in academia, and high rates of publications are only the focus of those who end up as faculty in research universities. Since academia is prestige-ridden, research universities prefer to hire from more “prestigious” universities. So gradates of MIT economics are more likely to be teaching in a research university than graduates of U Mississippi.
However, these people are not publishing because they are more productive, they are publishing because their university requires that they publish that many in order to get tenure. A person who is a faculty member at a comprehensive university with only a master’s program only needs to publish one of two articles to get tenure.
Furthermore, some of the absolutely most coveted faculty positions are at “elite” liberal arts colleges. A faculty position at Williams or Pomona is the dream job of many graduates from Harvard or UPenn. These need to publish a lot less than people teaching at, say Indiana University. Yet he is somehow claiming that these faculty are less successful than the faculty at SUIC.
There are around 3,200 non-profit institutions of higher education out there. Of them, close to 1,000 are community colleges and junior colleges.
There are 261 research universities in the USA.
Gladwell’s entire premise of that part of his talk is based on the idea that the measures of success in those 261 universities are the rule, while the measures of success in the other 3,000 colleges and universities are unimportant and trivial.
Actually, it is worse. More than half of all the people in the field that he uses are not even academics, and their measures of success don’t even include publications.
Finally, he really chose one of the worst fields for his example. Economics a field in which there is not a glut in PhD production, quite the opposite. Getting a faculty position, and then achieving tenure is the rule, not the exception. Since, for most PhDs, THAT is the true indicator of success for the vast majority of people with PhDs, so his entire fable is bunk.
Had he had even the most basic understanding of academia, he would have used English or History, and measured success by the number who had TT positions within 5 years, or were tenured within 10 years of getting their PhD…
As usual, he makes assumptions on the system he uses as an example, in this case higher education, with only the most shallow knowledge of it, and even less understanding of how it works. He then takes those assumptions and comes to conclusions which range from trivial and meaningless to downright false. He then takes his trivial to false conclusions and uses them to “prove” something about how the world works. Again.
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Well this would depend if the school in question marked such that there was a regular distribution of grades. If not, it could be that at elite colleges the difference in GPA between a student at the top and one at the bottom would not be that materially different, say a 4.0 vs a 3.8. Would a student with a 3.8 care about their relative ranking within the class or would they just be happy knowing that they had a high GPA relative to students at all schools?
Would a student with a 3.8 care about their relative ranking within the class or would they just be happy knowing that they had a high GPA relative to students at all schools?
The only reason GPA matters is for grad school applications, so B is what is important.