David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

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 likelihood of someone completing a STEM degree—all things being equal—rises by 2 percentage points for every 10-point decrease in the university’s average SAT score. 4 The smarter 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 careers. 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 Önder 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 respects. The top journals accept only the best and most creative research and economists rate one another according 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 Önder 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 almost 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 Önder’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 programs in the world: Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and the University of Chicago. Conley and Önder 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 graduate was published in the first six years of his or her academic 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
Stanford
3.43
1.58
1.02
0.67
0.50
0.33
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 percentile 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 achievement.
    But then the puzzles start.