Updated Sept. 28, 2013 7:59 p.m. ET
… One of the longest chapters addresses the question of how high-school students choose colleges. The protagonist is a woman with the pseudonym of Caroline Sacks, who was at the top of her class in high school and had loved science ever since she drew pictures of insects as a child. She was admitted to Brown University and the University of Maryland; she went to Brown, her first choice of all the colleges she visited, with the goal of a science degree.
Ms. Sacks ran into trouble early on in her science courses and hit a wall in organic chemistry. There were students in her classes who seemed to effortlessly grasp concepts she struggled with, and she got discouragingly low grades. She switched her major and looks back with regret, saying that if she’d gone to Maryland, “I’d still be in science.”
In this conclusion she may be right. Mr. Gladwell reports data showing that, no matter what kind of college students attend, those who start a science major in the top third of the ability range of students at their own college (judged by their SAT scores) are much more likely to graduate with a science degree than those in the bottom third—the odds are about 55% versus 15%.
This is a classic “fish and ponds” problem. Being the Little Fish in the Big Pond can be daunting. “It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want,” Mr. Gladwell concludes. Ms. Sacks should have gone to Maryland instead of Brown—she would have been a Big Fish, avoided discouraging competition and stayed in science.
This argument exemplifies one of Mr. Gladwell’s stock maneuvers. We might call it “the fallacy of the unexamined premise.” He starts this discussion by saying that “a science degree is just about the most valuable asset a young person can have in the modern economy.” And if you would be a weak student at an elite university or a strong student at a lower-ranked school, the literature says that you are more likely to get that science degree at the lower-ranked school. Therefore you should ignore conventional wisdom and pick the lower-ranked school over the higher one.
The problems here are many: Degrees from different kinds of schools are not assets of identical value, as Mr. Gladwell baldly implies when he writes that students at Harvard University and at a mid-ranked liberal-arts college are “studying the same textbooks and wrestling with the same concepts and trying to master the same problem sets.” As anyone with experience at both sorts of institutions knows, this is false. All of the things that Mr. Gladwell says are the same are in fact different, and the market knows this. To be sure, not every Ivy League science graduate is a genius, and many will be outperformed in science jobs and careers by the graduates of state universities and small colleges. But on average, an employer should bet on the Ivy Leaguer.
As for Ms. Sacks, why should she have lowered her sights only as far as Maryland? Even there she might have struggled. A science degree would have been hers even more surely if she had gone to her local community college, where she had already gotten a couple of As in courses she took during high school. But would she have learned as much? And would that degree have much real value?
Perhaps tough competition gives students a more realistic view of their own strengths and weaknesses. An accurate sense of one’s own ability could help the process of acquiring expertise. I loved computer programming in high school, so I majored in computer science in college, but by graduation it was clear that I was no standout. Accepting that fact freed me to switch to psychology, where I have had some success. Finding your skills may trump following your passion.
Indeed, Mr. Gladwell never really explains why being a small fish is an “undesirable difficulty,” rather than the kind of desirable difficulty like dyslexia that led David Boies to greatness. Shouldn’t Caroline Sacks be on her way to a Nobel Prize by now? Aside from the end result – Mr. Boies won, Ms. Sacks lost – we have no guide to which difficulties are desirable and which are not. Losing a parent at an early age is a desirable difficulty because it is common among eminent achievers in a variety of fields, argues Mr. Gladwell at one point. But in later criticizing California’s infamous three-strikes law for its devastating effects on families, he says that “for a child, losing a father to prison is an undesirable difficulty.” The idea that difficulty is good when it helps you and bad when it doesn’t is no great insight. …
—Mr. Chabris is a psychology professor at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and the co-author of “The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us.”
http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304713704579093090254007968
