Acclaimed author Malcolm Gladwell has some advice for teenagers looking into college.
"If you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to Harvard," he says. Harvard is filled with the smartest people in the world, and perversely that makes it a dispiriting place to go to school.
At Harvard, the lower tier students are as smart as the top tier students at an average school. However, the lower tier students get just as discouraged at Harvard as the lower tier students at an average school. The result: They don't get their degrees in math or science. The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels inadequate and drops the degree.
This is crazy, because as Gladwell points out, a science and math degree is the "most valuable commodity any graduate can have in today's economy." He says that "as as a rule of thumb, your odds of successfully getting a math degree fall by two percentage points for every ten point increase in the average SAT score of your peers."
So, if you're a kid and you have a choice between, Harvard and the University of Maryland, go with Maryland because its SAT scores are 150 points lower on average. That means you have a 30% better chance at getting your degree. However, most people will still choose Harvard, even knowing this, says Gladwell. Why? Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions.
I went to Harvard (for grad school) and taught there as a TF; I also have lots of experience of other private and public schools. I don't think Harvard's lower tier students are as smart as the top tier students at an average school. Let's set aside the egregious legacy or athletic admits. Is the second-lowest quintile of Harvard students smarter than the top quintile of "average school" students? More polished, yeah, sure; more cunning (not necessarily in a negative sense, but in the sense of understanding how to work the system, how to give evaluators what they want), sure. And maybe by the end, there's more difference than there was coming in, thanks to competitive motivation and other network effects. But admissions are something like a lottery, and I would say that the mean "smartness" of Harvard students is not much different from that of a generic selective private school (let's say, Harvard's second-lowest quintile would be the middle quintile at another reasonably selective private school), and that the top percentiles at a generic public school would perform quite comparably to Harvard's top quintile (even if Maryland has a lower mean, as Gladwell notes).
Are there very smart people at Harvard, and other prestigious liberal arts universities? Absolutely. But there are lots of people who are merely above average and lucky, by dint of birth or chance, and some people who aren't even above average. (FWIW MIT and Caltech have much better claims to being filled with the smartest people in the world -- rigorous standards of admission, no legacies, NCAA Div3 athletics, etc.)
I went to a mid-tier school. The low-tier Harvard students are assuredly smarter than the top-tier students from my school. One reason is that students don't exist in a vacuum. Your peers influence your intelligence. Being surrounded by smart people, i.e. people with novel and interesting ideas, makes you smarter. The second reason is that the choice to go to Harvard is itself a smart choice. So people who make that choice are likely smarter than those who don't make that choice. I was in the top-tier of my school. The first time I was exposed to people from top-tier universities is when I entered the industry. I was absolutely blown away by the quality difference. The experience permanently readjusted by aptitude scale.
I agree with that. I went to a low-ish tier school (UIC) and was not particularly motivated to do anything. My classmates just wanted to be drunk 24/7, I wanted to go build robots and stuff. It wasn't the experience I was looking for and dropped out. I wish I had at least chosen UIUC. The corn fields aren't that bad, in hindsight.
I did get to take a Unix Security Holes course with DJB. That was the first semester I was there, and that was kind of another mistake. When you're doing 400 level classes your first semester, it sucks when you have to go back to the basic 100 level classes to complete an arbitrary requirement for your degree. (Had to take "Intro to Java" taught by a chemistry professor. He did not know how to program. Huge waste of time and the state's money.) I have avoided a number of security pitfalls in my own work because of what I learned in that class, though, so it was definitely worth taking. Set me up for a career of accurate and bug-free code ;)
(Incidentally, what precipitated me dropping out was the Unix Security Holes course. The homework for the class was to find 10 security flaws in existing software. This was quite the easy task back in 2004. I found a bug in the course registration system. The vendor that made it was infinitely appreciative, patched it instantly, and sent me an iPod as a thank you. The school was very mad at me and tried to have me expelled for violating their computer use policy ("hacking"). It was a client-side XSRF issue though, so technically their computers weren't used, and I obviously investigated the flaw responsibly; the system wasn't destabilized, no production data was changed, etc. DJB fought hard for me and I didn't get expelled. Also got one of the highest grades in that class! The school did silently block me from using computers in computer labs and using the course registration system, though, after DJB's rage had blown over. I didn't have the will to fight it, so I just left.)
TL;DR: go to the best school you can get into and afford. You won't regret it.
>The low-tier Harvard students are assuredly smarter than the top-tier students from my school. One reason is that students don't exist in a vacuum. Your peers influence your intelligence.
You might be conflating class signaling with intelligence. I've dealt with plenty of people from Harvard that did not impress in the slightest, but oh boy were they good at getting their suits tailored.
I second this notion. I was actually super well-qualified for Harvard, because I happened to go to a feeder prep school and I took calculus, Latin, and Greek. But I had some class gaps if you will, and sometimes kids with worse grades and qualifications made me feel stupid.
One snobby rule there that some kids had was to always pretend like you know more than you do, and never show weakness. So you have to say "Whaaaat? You've never heard of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?" -- even though you only learned about it last week. You psych out the competition so that you don't have to compete on a level playing field.
I’m not conflating class signaling with intelligence. It says something about your worldview that you would take that away from what I said. My point was that college involves the exchange of ideas, and each student’s intelligence is a combination of their baseline intellect combined with the ideas they’re exposed to. Most of this idea exposure comes from other students. If the students you are surrounded with have good ideas, then the quality of your own ideas improves.
the few ivy league graduates i've worked with were idiots with no original thought who constantly needed handholding. they were good at parroting other people's opinions & ideas and at schmoozing with the boss so maybe those are the good ideas that students at their school had.
If you can get beyond the clickbait title - what Gladwell is really trying to say is there are likely many highly qualified students who enter top tier university as STEM majors but select themselves out of STEM majors and into a generic liberal arts degree.
He's essentially saying at a societal level/personal income level - a STEM degree from a mid tier school > generic liberal arts degree from a top tier school. Particularly if the recipient is not truly passionate about the liberal arts degree and is using it as a backup plan.
I think what you are experiencing is a bit related to survivorship bias. You are being exposed to the people who passed the gauntlet of getting into the top-tier school and graduating in presumably STEM. Of course those folks are smart and there are reasons you'd be blown away by them.
> The second reason is that the choice to go to Harvard is itself a smart choice.
It may be a smart choice, but not all smart people who try to make that choice get in.
> The first time I was exposed to people from top-tier universities is when I entered the industry. I was absolutely blown away by the quality difference.
I’ve worked in software engineering with Harvard, Stanford, and MIT students. The only difference I saw was during their first couple of years out of undergrad where the people who went to prestigious schools had more confidence to jump in and solve problems. After those first two-ish years, people’s abilities correlated more with who they were and not where they went to school.
> It may be a smart choice, but not all smart people who try to make that choice get in.
But not all top students in mid-tier attempted to go to Harvard. So if you were basing the "smartness" of these two populations based on this single decision alone, then the low-tier students at Harvard would be smarter because 100% of them attempted to go to Harvard, which was a smarter choice than the choice made by some of the students at mid-tier universities who chose not to apply to Harvard.
> After those first two-ish years, people’s abilities correlated more with who they were and not where they went to school.
In my experience, peoples' first few years out of college has a huge effect on their career trajectories. People I know who had high salaries out of school continue to have high salaries. People who didn't get good entry-level jobs continue to struggle (relative to the rest of the pack, they're not starving).
"I’ve worked in software engineering with Harvard, Stanford, and MIT students. The only difference I saw was during their first couple of years out of undergrad where the people who went to prestigious schools had more confidence to jump in and solve problems. After those first two-ish years, people’s abilities correlated more with who they were and not where they went to school."
Have you considered that the students whom you are working with were among the bottom quartile at their alma mater? The very best tend to take unique paths.
What specific differences did you see? I was also at a mid tier school, though I did have a scholarship, and was intimidated when I got a job working alongside an MIT grad and a PHD from Yale. The MIT grad was a very good solid guy, and the Yale guy was also solid, I'd be happy to work with or hire either again, but there was no 10x difference, maybe more like a 1.3x difference at best between the team average and the MIT guy.
In general the phds I've worked with were tbh below the average- they always seemed to be big on ideas but less so on actually implementing them and following through.
This was from my days in the finance industry, working in algo trading/hft, but I will admit I was definitely in a tier below the groups that were absolutely minting money, but these were coveted jobs.
The biggest difference was that most people were interested in something. One friend was really into robotics. He introduced me to a lot of robotics concepts and he had a plan on how to pursue a career in robotics. Personally, robotics wasn’t my cup of tea, but I ended up with a lot of exposure to the subject. Another friend wanted to study AI, specifically neural networks. This was over 10 years ago, so neural nets weren’t widely deployed like they are today. Another friend was into music, and wanted to play music all the time. Even through I wasn’t super into any of these topics, each interaction was enriching to me and expanded my mind to include new and interesting aspects of computer science and software engineering.
Regarding phds, I totally agree that they are not effective workers usually. The desire to get a phd is almost like a mild form of ocd where people get obsessed with one particular problem and are willing to dedicate ungodly amounts of time to the topic. This is usually the opposite of what you want when trying to deliver something in the commercial sphere.
A lot of ivy league kids come from upper middle class families where it is kind of expected that you set high academic goals and try to attend prestigious institutions, their parents generally take an enormous amount of interest their success and continually guide them.
I went to Harvard for 2 years, and started out strongly considering CS as a major, but eventually went into the humanities. I definitely did get discouraged. I think for me the biggest part was that their intro class at the time was for both complete novices and people who'd done the computer science AP. Meaning it was SUPER fast and super stressful. And things just continued from there. The point of taking these classes was just to flail around and try not to drown, while having more coursework than my other 3 classes combined.
If they had had an "intro for beginners" and "accelerated intro", I would have probably stayed in the program. Also if their upper-level courses weren't like 60 hours of homework per week for one class. At a certain point I realized I just simply didn't have the stamina to do 60 hours for one class and all my other classes. So it was sort of like applying to be a doctor -- you know one of the prereqs is rotations where you don't sleep for 2 days straight, and if you can't do that, then for some reason, you can't be a doctor.
I worked for JPL/NASA on contract for a few months, the place is packed with Caltech grads, but most of them performed much like any science-y person in a big bureaucracy. This probably says more about what you're trained for vs what you do -- I mean, how many working programmers need to know what Bessel functions are? The answer is 0 because those analytical jobs are inevitably farmed out to experts anyway. My own interpretation is that there's a certain (middling-high) amount of capability you have to demonstrate, and once you've done that the extra doesn't matter.
Bureaucratic behavior within a government agency has little to nothing to do with an individual’s background, intent, or otherwise; but, instead, it has to do with the brutal constraints of their environment.
I used to glorify these schools until I worked in finance, where basically everyone went to a top 5 usa school. They were quick, organized, efficient with their work, on the ball, competitive. But intellectually superior? Not really. They were definitely smart, but the traits that got them into those schools werent raw intellect.
In my experience, good habits beat genius 9 times out of 10 (maybe even 99 out of 100).
That other time, genius recreates the entire playing field and good habits are left sitting around staring at each other trying to figure out what the hell just happened.
Curious on your perspective why professionalism and good work habits beat "genius" at startups.
I would have assumed the opposite. My view of startup life was that it's about managing your money, your hiring/firing, your sales, and what you focus on.
That's about good prioritization and productivity per minute.
Assuming the good faith of the poster, he or she may have worked with (a) real genius several times, or (b) with several real geniuses.
(a) is more probable. Sustainable business start-up success of the non-banal order requires high general intelligence. It does exist. But 9 times out of 10 hard work and people skills will win.
Perceived genius (or more appropriately, assumed genius) would be more accurate.
The people who are the least scrupulous, most creative, and technically competent are very successful. Startups aren't usually successful because of sweat hard work, but realizing a combination of opportunity and reach, rather than contracting as much software development labor as possible.
Ivy Leagues’ admission process rewards students who are outgoing and do a lot of different things.
You can’t tell from a high school transcript whether someone got an A because they’re brilliant and didn’t have to study at all, or whether they got an A because they studied hard.
Most of my friends who went into ivy leagues were outgoing and did tons of extracurriculars and studied hard. My friends who were naturally brilliant either stuck to the subjects they liked, and ended up getting their doctorate at a state school, or they had had their success derailed for some other reason.
This is really interesting, because it feels like it lines up with my own experience but I'd like to see how someone else quantifies it. What do you mean by "intellectually superior"? What does "raw intellect" even mean? What are these nebulous not-intellect-but-contributing-to-GI-score traits?
I once did an online IQ test and then got interrupted by someone else after five minutes and I quit the test, my score was apparently 88. I don't trust online IQ tests, I only did it because someone annoyed me into taking it and someone annoyed me out of taking it.
I honestly think IQ scores primarily measure how much you want to score well on an IQ test. You can improve your scores by 10 points according to scientific papers just by being more motivated and not quitting, not being distracted and so on.
I don't trust online IQ tests because the scores I get on them range from 110ish to 180ish and despite my robust self-esteem I don't see a score of 160+ as especially credible. :P
Real (ie. official medical) IQ scores seem to be heavily skewed around age and speed. So the same performance would get you a super high score in a 5-year-old and a mediocre score in a 10-year-old, which is weird because the questions are explicitly trying not to test language/knowledge type stuff that would change a lot between those ages. And the same answers would get a far higher score if you bashed them out in 15 minutes than if you took 2 hours on them. I haven't gone back to re-examine it but I remember thinking that you were way better off smashing through the questions as fast as possible and getting a few right than carefully considering the questions... which is an odd way to define intelligence.
hard work can compensate for a lot when you are solving problems that have already been solved with known answers (e.g. school) . When you are solving totally novel problems with no known solutions things get much harder and you start to be able to separate high performers.
99.99% of everything is (re-)solving problems that have already been solved with known answers. It's those curly edge cases that have to involve us weirdos.
I think the only point Gladwell is making is that the Harvard test scores are higher. I.e. 50th percentile of SAT scores of Harvard students is equal to the 90th percentile at state schools and such
This is really interesting! I started my Stanford undergrad as an engineer. After my first Calculus class, I switched to American Studies because it was one of the least engineering-y majors available. Then I dropped out in my Junior year. That was over 10 years ago. Now, ironically, I work at Google as a software engineer — the only one on my team without an engineering degree, let alone without a degree at all.
I never thought of my disillusionment with engineering in the context of other students, but rather just as an absolute: "Engineering is too hard for me." Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very different result.
Having watched the Gladwell talk a couple of times now - I think your experience is really the most indicative of what he was trying to say. Many self weed themselves out of Engineering and into generic liberal arts studies - even though they were top of their high school class in STEM and specifically chose the highly selective school for STEM.
And perhaps not all have the mental fortitude to stick with it in the background like you did - which is a net loss for society.
anecdote: I took Multivariate calculus and differential equations while in high school at the University of Nevada. I was easily the top student in my classes. I had to retake them at Stanford (figuring out how to transfer the credit was too complicated). Despite having "taken" the "same" material before and the fact that the average grade in the class was probably a B or B+, I was below the median in the class on the exams and got worse grades in the classes at Stanford. Of course this is anecdotal, and the University of Nevada is not that great of a school, but no doubt my GPA would have been much higher at a school like that...
I think that's sort of what he's talking about. Had you not had the experience of calculus and diff eq at a university and your only exposure to it was at Stanford with middling grades - perhaps it'd probably lead to more existential questions of whether you really wanted to do STEM in the first place.
Right, I quickly made peace with being a mediocre student at Stanford (and, still ended up getting into MIT for a physics PhD, where I was also a mediocre student but by then I didn't care :) ). I think the people who probably suffer the most at are probably premeds, where it really might be easier to get into med school by going to an "easier" school.
In the grand scheme of things, I was probably pretty good at math as I got through a rigorous Mech E program. But I struggled with the more math intensive classes (Fluids/Navier-Stokes) and I'm pretty sure I could have dealt with an undergrad in physics/math--much less a grad program--about as well as I could have flown by flapping my arms in the air. But things ended up fine.
Should be mentioned that classes within the same school can vary from year to year, completely depends on the person at charge. The first time I took Calculus 3, I got a D. IIRC, the fail rate was over 50%, and average grade was a weak C.
Two years later, I re-took the class to improve my grade. Ended up with a B - and the class average was round B at that time, with only around 15% of class failing the final exam.
Hah, no, I took 51H and suffered through it for some reason, but just took normal 52 and 53. (And I think I slept at your place when I was visiting MIT as a prospective grad student).
> Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very different result.
Thomas Sowell, in Inside American Education, argues that promoting students to more difficult colleges while ignoring SATs is not doing those students any favor. A firehose-pedagogy accepted by those with SAT scores 200-300 points higher can completely demoralize someone who could have done perfectly well at a moderately-paced school. However, the competition to practice AA leads, he argues, those more advanced schools to ignore SAT scores in admission for the schools' benefits, but not the benefit of the students so admitted.
> Taking Calculus at not-Stanford may have led to a very different result.
I doubt it. As my professor used to say, math is math. Plus, intro-level undergrad math courses are pretty standardized across the US. Similar textbooks, similar problem sets, and similar past exams.
There's nothing wrong to feel calculus is hard even if you're the top of your high school class. Most people hit a wall at certain abstraction level. Malcolm wrote in his book about smart people simply not being able to grok organic chemistry. Some of my smart classmates could not really understand the concept of limit intuitively. Some of them dropped out of abstract algebra course. I myself dropped out of model theory as I couldn't get why I should even bother with the course. None of these failures prevent people from finding success in other areas.
Unfortunately many ostensibly good schools also have notoriously poorly taught introductory math and science courses.
Stanford's introductory CS sequence has a good reputation however. Consider this course (for example) which teaches students bare-metal programming (and real-world interfacing) on a raspberry pi: https://cs107e.github.io/schedule/
Advanced freshman math, the kind for the top few students, varies extremely widely. As far as I can tell, if you made it all the way through the series at Harvard or Stanford, then you are an excellent student regardless of whether you get a good grade. I’m sure a couple other schools are like that. Many schools that you might expect to have similar classes don’t.
Sadly the universities with courses like this seem to me mediocre at advertising that, no, if you are not specifically very very good at math (and very very good at following a very fast paced course and you don’t have a strong background), then that’s not the class for you and you should be in the other honors math class.
Do you have any actual empirical evidence? In my undergrad, even different STEM departments (e.g., math, EE) had differing rigor and workload based on the average scores they required of admissions. Almost all grading was done relative to other students anyway, so even with the exact same course, things would be very different.
As an example, we had to prove all continuous functions on a closed interval are monotonically continuous on that interval, in Calculus I. Which we had in our first semester with no choice. I doubt this level of rigor is at all common.
I used limit as an example. It could be other concepts, simple or sophisticated.
I don’t think it’s about how professors teach, but about that people simply can’t get some abstractions. Have you seen kids in high school who can’t do algebra even if you find the best teachers for them?
1. How do you even express the idea of continuity if not through limits? (Sure, there's the topological definition and the epsilon-delta criterion but those are merely an abstraction or a different way of phrasing the same idea.)
2. The key difference between the rationals and the reals is that the latter are Cauchy-complete. How do you even define (in an intuitive way) what that means without referring to limits?
3. The reals are typically constructed as (equivalence classes of) Cauchy sequences, i.e. by their very definition they are the limits of their Cauchy sequences.
i think, for the purpose of introducing the continuity of the reals, for the purpose of introducing limits, one could skip any discussion that involves constructing the rationals or building the reals from them, at least to start.
instead go directly from integers to reals by introducing countable vs. uncountable infinities.
sure. and despite all the trouble people have, their definition is quite simple. the crux of the problem is understanding continuity. if you truly understand the continuity of the reals (which is the "real" invention), limits can be derived almost effortlessly.
in most calculus teaching, continuity is quickly stated and then there's a bunch of rules and these seemingly contradictory discussions involving delta and epsilon. they're not contradictory if continuity is understood and internalized.
Do you prefer the Dedekind cut construction of the real numbers over the identification of Cauchy sequences of rational numbers with common limit? In ZFC, they coincide, but in constructive mathematics, one can build a model wherein they differ (see https://mathoverflow.net/questions/128569/a-model-where-dede... ).
I think a contributing factor for organic chemistry is not everyone teaches the mindset needed to do well. Good teachers will help students explicitly build a heuristic mental model for what the electrons might do in a particular bonding environment. Not everyone thinks naturally that way, but I think it’s a lot more effective than the raw pattern matching approach many people seem to bring to organic chemistry
I feel like Stanford is a little different. Despite being as selective as Harvardm Harvard has a very unique international reputation as the world's best university (or at least america's best university for the oxbridge lovers)
Anecdotally, degrees from the Ivy Leagues are not nearly as indicative of intelligence and aptitude as they used to be. They still function as great signals for prestige and networking ability, but they no longer translate to "this person must be a genius, they went to Harvard/Yale".
The source of my anecdote are the discussions I've had with the the recruiters at my company. They've also told me that Harvard/Yale graduates are way more likely to be prima donnas and leave the company after a short time in order to advance somewhere else.
Ivy's aren't the top schools for stem. MIT/Stanford/CMU are where the stem geniuses want to be, and after that the top public schools are probably more desirable than ivys because they're so much cheaper. I went to UIUC cs over uchicago and northwestern because of the price differential. By far the largest value ad ivys provide is networking with the soon to be rich and powerful. Seems like aspiring stem students realize that's not as important in their field.
This isn't true, it's a strange assumption often perpetuated online. Looking at cross-admit numbers actually published by Stanford's Faculty Senate, for example, Stanford's biggest overlap is with Harvard, Yale, MIT, and Princeton, in that order. It's a matter of pedigree - for undergrad, where grad school subject-specific rankings do not matter, there are an high concentration of very good STEM students at HYP; Harvard likely has the biggest concentration of excellent STEM students out of any university in America based on Olympiad winner matriculants and grad school outcomes, other than MIT. HYPSM lose virtually no students to universities other than between themselves, looking at the cross-admit numbers.
Schools like CMU, Berkeley, UIUC, etc. have different overlaps.
edit: This is just cold, hard data. Undergrads do not choose CMU/Berkeley/UIUC and whatnot over Harvard, Yale, or Princeton. Despite higher grad school rankings.
Are you counting stanford and MIT as ivy? If so then sure, but at least based off my experience, cs students that were accepted to ivy as well as stanford/mit/cmu always choose stanford/mit/cmu.
I'd love to see your data about whether students choose ivy vs. top state. I wasn't aware that existed so was just speaking from my experience knowing > 10 people choose U of I over ivys, including harvard.
"must be a genius"? Did people ever think this? While I went to university many decades ago, the whole "he went to Harvard, he must be a genius" would have seemed like a bad TV sitcom trope, when I was young. And still today.
Are students at top tier schools like that smarter than the average bear? Sure. Geniuses? I guess a few are, but most of them are just pretty smart + hard working + reasonably disciplined. Which is a pretty good combination that will help most people in their life.
Sometimes I get the feeling that some people expect that if they meet someone who went to an ivy/stanford/mit/chicago and that someone doesn't blow them away with their uber-genius greatness, that those schools' reputations must be total BS. IMO, that's unreasonable.
The smartest undergrads in the county are still at your HYPSM universities.
However, the median intelligence at these schools has definitely dropped drastically as these schools are putting less of an emphasis on SAT scores and the like.
This has been obvious since 1865. We only have a United States because self-educated Abraham Lincoln picked up the pieces left by elite New Englanders like Buchanan and the justices who decided Dred Scott.
Of Buchanan and the nine justices involved in Dred Scott, only one was a New Englander and he was one of the two dissenters. Both dissenters were educated in New England but only one from the majority. On the other hand, the list includes five Southerners, two Pennsylvanians and three from Dickinson College.
* James Buchanan - Pennsylvania, educated at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania
Majority from Dred Scott:
* Roger B. Taney - Maryland, Dickinson
* James Moore Wayne - Georgia, educated at what later became Princeton in New Jersey
* John Catron - Tennessee, self-educated
* Peter V. Daniel - Virginia, one year at Princeton, then self-educated
* Samuel Nelson - New York, Middlebury College in Vermont
* Robert Cooper Grier - Pennsylvania, Dickinson
* John Archibald Campbell - Georgia/Alabama, University of Georgia
Dissenters in Dred Scott:
* John McLean - Ohio, Harvard
* Benjamin Robbins Curtis - Massachusetts, Harvard
Ivys have always prioritized diversity over merit. The diversity they valued used to be wealth and power instead of just merit, now they've expanded that to include cultural diversity too. But make no mistake, these universities were never just looking to accept the smartest students.
View from the faculty POV: I taught mathematics as an Assistant Professor at Harvard for five years (2000-2005), and this advice seems wrong. It’s very generic and abstract, whereas the actual mathematics department (students, faculty, preceptors) at Harvard at any point in time is made up of real people, most of whom are really interesting fun and genuine math loving human beings. I guided dozens of students in seminars, interesting math research projects, and much more, and many of them really benefited from the environment and went on to truly love mathematics as a long term career.
If you can get beyond the clickbait title - I think what you'll find is that Gladwell is really talking about the very real STEM people, most of who are really interesting fun and genuine math loving human beings - who were weeded out in Freshman Calc BC or Differential Equations because the bar is so tremendously high if everything is graded on a curve at a extremely selective university - before you had a chance to meet them.
I agree, even as OP. Malcom Gladwell's writings on elite universities have gone viral, and even though some good points are sometimes made, many are just stretching the truth for clicks.
As for the general grade inflation problem: It is confusing that Harvard's grade distribution is so different than schools with similarly strong student bodies like Princeton, Columbia, UChicago, Berkeley, etc. Especially very, very large portion of students are legacy / recruited athletes / very wealthy donor parents. According to the affirmative action lawsuit, over 10% of the student body alone was on the "Dean's interest list," a very elite group of autoadmits, for example.
No, its because 10-20 years after you graduate, no one asks you for your GPA at Harvard but they certainly think you are a genius just because you went there (you could graduate with a 2.0 GPA). As opposed to average state school guy with a 4.0 GPA. Many years after you graduate, you regularly get asked where you went to school but rarely asked "what was your GPA". This isn't even mentioning the type of whiz kids or socially powerful people you can befriend at these type of institutions. Steve Ballmer is smart but if he didn't meet Bill Gates, i doubt he would ever have become a multi billionare.
Harvard and Yale have 10x horrible negative character connotations compared to MIT or UChicago, and it gets worse all the time.
McNamara (Vietnam), Kissinger (illegal bombing of Laos), Clinton (impeached), Bush (WMD lies), Ted Cruz and other senators who literally can't pass 7th grade science. I can continue for an hour.
For even the "elite", character connotations take a back seat to "ability and drive", which neither of those people mentioned are lacking. To the average person, most of them probably don't even know too much about who Henry Kissinger was or what he did, the see Harvard and think "ohhh smart"
Whether to go to an Ivy or not depends on what you're looking for.
I went to Iowa State for undergrad and then did a masters at Princeton immediately afterwards. I greatly appreciate both schools.
At Iowa State, most of my classes were easy. But I pushed myself with the sheer quantity of classes I took. I was super involved in extracurriculars and still went out multiple nights per week. I was one class short of a double major and I spent a semester abroad. My only regret is not spending 2 semesters abroad. It was an incredible time.
Princeton also did not disappoint. The Graduate School is for sure the most intellectually rich environment I've ever been in. Academically, it was far more demanding, and pushed me to a much deeper level of engagement with my studies. I also know that Princeton would have been a way too intense environment for me at 18. At 22, it was what I was looking for.
I also went to NYU for another masters program, which was in many ways even more different from the first two universities. Some people just go there to be at university in NYC, but it's a sprawling school with tons to offer and feels physically and socially much more integrated with the real world than campus-centric universities.
I don't think there's a one size fits all answer for whether to go to Harvard or any other school.
This seems to be a pretty pragmatic approach - it avoids spending a lot of high tuition dollars and effort on the freshman/sophomore generic weeder courses and focuses the high return on effort/investment upper level courses that are specific to your area of study.
I wish I could say it was my plan all along, but it just kind of happened.
But yes, from a credential standpoint, a masters program can upgrade your prestige, for sure. Although it would be important to note that there are social aspects of the Ivy League in undergrad experience that aren't the same in grad school (and vice versa), if that's what someone is looking for.
> The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels inadequate and drops the degree.
In the context of grade inflation, this sounds like Harvard is actually one of the better choices and that grade inflation is a desirable property of an elite university
It depends, but probably not as much as you would think.
With a grade curve that high, a B usually means one of the following:
1. Tough weeder course.
2. The person does not really understand the material, especially for upper division courses.
3. Something personal (illness, family issues, personal issues, etc.).
For folks who care about grades, like hiring officials or graduate admissions folks, they typically know about the grade inflation.
It might be a benefit in law school admissions that mostly use a strict formula with gpa as part of that formula.
Anyway, if someone is choosing Harvard over another school due to GPA inflation, then I have a feeling that they won’t gain that much at Harvard or the other school(s) that admitted them. That seems to be optimizing for something fairly minor in the scheme of things.
I went to a mid tier undergrad and was easily among the smartest. I went to mit for grad school and was… still among the smartest although the bar was much higher. Luck factors into a lot of things. But the top decile of every school is probably great. The bottom decile is probably totally uninterested in learning.
It’s the median that’s interesting. My undergrad median was deeply disappointing. Couldn’t write a simple paper. Literally did not understand how to construct an argument.
Having worked with many top tier graduates from many top schools, I think we need to dispense with the idea that academic performance is determined by intelligence.
In my experience it was highly correlated with work ethic, many top tier graduates would come in with a push to work exceptionally hard. Sometimes they’d come in with an attititude that they’d “made it” and not work hard enough.
I don't think that is what science agrees with. IQ correlates pretty strongly with educational achievement. You can disagree with IQ all you but one thing it pretty surely doesn't measure is work ethic.
I went to a top tier high school and a top tier university. At a top tier university, in STEM at least, the fraction of students who had both high IQ and could work incredibly hard was noticeable. The fraction of STEM people who could get an A without working hard was low to nonexistent.
I went to an Ivy League (recently, graduated in last 5 years). This describes me to a T. Started out in CS, dropped to a libarts major because I felt like I couldn't keep up with my peers.
I still work in SWE, and began doing it in HS when I was 17.
Partner and I discuss frequently that I would have been better off somewhere else.
I know loads of SWEs who dropped out of CS degrees outright or changed majors and graduated with a liberal arts degree (I myself am a SWE but a liberal arts grad; I never took a single CS course but worked as a sysadmin for the I/O department at my school). I can't think of a single one of them that regrets dropping out or switching. It certainly doesn't seem to have hurt their career opportunities or their compensation.
The only thing I've found that they do regret is spending the tuition money and walking away without a degree.
I've heard this as a reason why HBCU's are so great. Basically a lot of African American's come from schools that don't prepare them as well for science and math as their peers who went to more expensive elite schools. They have to work twice as hard because they're playing catch up and thus many transfer out of math/science/pre-chem and into less rigorous subjects.
This is one theory as to why HBCU's do such a better job at preparing the next generation of black scientists, engineers, doctors, and lawyers then other comparable schools.
You don't go to Harvard for an education, you go there for the network you will build. Grades mean nothing when you are friends with a guy who's Dad owns billion dollar companies.
I agree - I think that the employers in STEM themselves have figured it out and combine convenience of proximity/quality of STEM as the decision point/size of recruitable pool. In fact the secret hack is probably to figure out the university recruiting schedules of your target companies and work backwards. [0]
I do think society in general and finance/medicine/law (which are harder to analyze based on test scores/leetcode and have more fuzzy needs for network effects) still uses legacy measurement techniques for "worthiness".
The report identified the following universities as having the most graduates become employees at major tech companies, along with the number of employees.
University of Washington (16,786 employees)
University of California–Berkeley (13,260 employees)
Stanford University (12,973 employees)
University of Texas–Austin (11,049 employees)
University of Southern California (9,071 employees)
Arizona State University–Tempe (8,320 employees)
Carnegie Mellon University (8,274 employees)
Georgia Institute of Technology (7,961 employees)
University of California–Los Angeles (7,829 employees)
University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign (7,671 employees)
Even with that definition it may still be irrational as a student, or at least short-sighted. The further you get in your career, the less it matters which school you went to.
Employers may be interested in your schooling if you're fresh out of school, but after that, they're much more interested in your work experience.
I went to community college and then transferred to an fairly inexpensive 4-year college. In my first job I got a huge amount of work experience and leveled-up to the senior software developer title.
Maybe an employer after that first job would look at me suspiciously for my choice of schools, but they really shouldn't.
> Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions.
Do good employers recruit from Maryland? Will you find FAANG and all the investment banks there? How tight is the Maryland alumni network?
I didn't go to a school anywhere near as prestigious as Harvard, but I did go to one with a strong reputation and it means that there is a strong community and good employers recruit from there.
I had a choice between University of Maryland and a much more prestigious institution. It should have been a no brained because of the tuition alone but I struggled with it at the time. Being around people who care about things besides school was super healthy for me and I’m so thankful I made the right choice. (Go Terps!)
The top scorers for my university's entrance exams had the option to go for the CSE course. I had the option to go for the CSE course as well, but ultimately I decided to go for the IT course which was below the CSE course in terms of desirability. The course material was almost the same, placements opportunities were the same, and I would have had to work much harder to get good grades in CSE because all the top scorers would be in it.
In my IT batch, even when I didn't study a lot, there were semesters where I got academic awards. And with my remaining free time, I was able to focus on things I was interested in. No stress. I don't have any regrets, but I just wonder how my life would have turned out had I taken CSE. I would have most definitely landed somewhere else, doing something else in life. Better or worse, I don't know.
Apply a rule of thumb to outliers generally isn't appropriate. While it might be true that generally success rises 2% for every 10 SAT points, that doesn't necessarily mean it applies to Harvard and U Maryland. Especially due to grade inflation. 15 years ago, flagship state schools still harshly curved science/engineering classes to weed people out. While Harvard give you a gentleman's B+.
My kid is attending a flagship state school now. His school still very much uses a harsh curve to weed out. A B- keeps you on the track to success in your major.
If he decides to go to grad school, he'll be screwed even though he's been on the plus side of the curve in all of his classes so far.
Grad admissions committees vary quite a lot from program to program, in terms of how they value different admissions criteria. if your kid is interested in research don’t let grades faze them. Demonstrated ability to think independently and write clearly is much more important IMO, at least for PhD work
I wouldn't say someone should choose the University of MD over Harvard, since many potential employers would not know how to map a 4.0 MD GPA onto a Harvard scale. If you're between Harvard and Penn, and Penn gave you a great scholarship, that's a bit easier. Maybe for UC Berkeley even. But if you get too far out of the ballpark people will (1) assume you didn't get into any top-notch schools, and (2) not know how to compare your success at a lower-ranked school to moderate success of your peers at top-rated schools.
Full disclosure: I went to the top-rated college I got into, and purposely chose not to go to the top-ranked law school that I got into. The difference wasn't huge (UCLA vs Michigan), but it did mean I wasn't in the top-10. But I saved a bunch in tuition, and that allowed me to have the flexibility to leave the law several years later and bootstrap a startup. OTOH, maybe I would have had an amazing legal career had I gone to Michigan!
Pair it with the idea that the primary filtering signal of top tier schools is in the admission, not the graduation.
Something like 99% of Harvard end up graduating, so simply having a Harvard degree doesn't tell me much more about you than simply having an admission letter. If you were admitted, then it's almost certain that you'll get a degree.
So, if instead you hold onto your admission letter, as proof of ability, and then go to a lower tier school where you can be more certain to be one of the biggest fish in the pond, you get the best of both worlds. Hell, even include a list of "universities admitted to" on you resume to signal the brand name to employers that aren't smart enough to realize the brand doesn't matter much anymore.
Then again, why would you want to work for an employer that still puts stock in college brand names over individual ability?
I did consider the possibility that one could say "I got into Harvard but went to X because..."
This could have made sense before Harvard's financial aid became so generous, but now they give loads of aid to middle- and low-income students.
It would sound a bit weird to keep saying "I got into Harvard...", likely for the same reason you mention at the end. Who wants to be an eliteness snob? Unfortunately there are many such people in the world, which is part of the reason their cachet persists.
I have known multiple Stanford students who still bring up the fact that they "also got into Harvard." It seems that if you get into Harvard, you should just go. The brand name is too powerful.
But GPAs have almost no value, and people don’t go to such schools for grades. It’s all about networking and prestige, and wanting to be around accomplished or ambitious people.
Disclaimer: I don’t necessarily agree with these views, just summarising what I’ve seen.
My Mom went to an Prestigious University, when my Mom went back to work after the kids got old enough to take care of themselves (to some extent..), that degree opened doors. She was explicitly told, hey great university when she went for an interview. We had a friend in our peer group didn't go to state school like us but another "Prestigious University", he was a history major (we were engineers), but he never had trouble finding work.
I know someone who graduated summa cum laude at Harvard. I'm not usually one for ranking people by intellect, but she's not one of the smartest people I know by a long shot.
Meticulous? Sure. Does she present herself as if she's a Harvard grad with the economic status that usually entails? Absolutely. But I know several people who graduated from a small directional university who are absolutely smarter than she is. Same with grads I know from Cornell, Penn, and Yale. Maybe the mystical "school where everyone is actually super-intelligent" exists somewhere, but if so, I don't know the name of it.
Unless your professors are so lazy that they're grading on a bell curve, there's no need to be afraid of any class. Test scores and project grades are based on rote knowledge and level of effort, not innate talent... and Harvard educators are usually vastly superior to those of "lesser" schools.
Agree. I have worked with developers from well known prestigious universities from all over the world. And they were not smarter than other people I have worked with from less known universities. Just more in debt :)
Is this more about ivy league schools being the most prestigious or is it about finance and law fields causing a brain drain of the smartest people in the country?
I could make more money right NOW with a BS in gender studies from Harvard, than I ever could all things being equal with my CS BS from a no name public university.
Anyone who takes this advice is indeed self selecting and I suppose that's good, because anyone who can't see that obviously shouldn't go to harvard in the first place!
This is awful advice. Go to the highest ranked university[1] you can get into and afford because for the rest of your life, people will assume a lot about you based on that choice. It will open more doors than you expect. Your friends will be smarter and more successful too.
[1] Not literally THE highest ranked. There’s reasons to go to UPenn instead of Harvard, but if you get into Harvard and go to a state school instead, you might be screwing up.
On the flipside, nowadays the school matters more than the degree. Saying you "went to Harvard" is far more prestigious than having a bachelors degree from some forgettable school. And most employers don't care about whether or not you have a specific degree from any school, they care about whether you have any degree from a prestigious school.
I'd wait a few years on Chicago -- my impression is that they've been undergoing some pretty profound cultural shifts regarding admissions and grading, i.e. their rigor is getting more performative and less real (and it was always at least a little performative, or at least, rooted in being just a little gratuitously mean).
EDIT: Not coincidentally, it was an admin brought in from Yale who got this ball rolling.
Why You Shouldn't Go to Harvard
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7J-wCHDJYmo&t=12s
Acclaimed author Malcolm Gladwell has some advice for teenagers looking into college.
"If you want to get a science and math degree, don't go to Harvard," he says. Harvard is filled with the smartest people in the world, and perversely that makes it a dispiriting place to go to school.
At Harvard, the lower tier students are as smart as the top tier students at an average school. However, the lower tier students get just as discouraged at Harvard as the lower tier students at an average school. The result: They don't get their degrees in math or science. The problem is that even a smart kid struggles to keep up when competing with the uber smart. As a result, the kid feels inadequate and drops the degree.
This is crazy, because as Gladwell points out, a science and math degree is the "most valuable commodity any graduate can have in today's economy." He says that "as as a rule of thumb, your odds of successfully getting a math degree fall by two percentage points for every ten point increase in the average SAT score of your peers."
So, if you're a kid and you have a choice between, Harvard and the University of Maryland, go with Maryland because its SAT scores are 150 points lower on average. That means you have a 30% better chance at getting your degree. However, most people will still choose Harvard, even knowing this, says Gladwell. Why? Because we have an irrational attachment to certain prestigious institutions.