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

Look at the 80th percentile column. Schools like MIT and Stanford and Harvard accept somewhere around two dozen PhD students a year, so if you are in the 80th percentile, you are roughly fifth or sixth in your class. These are also extraordinary students. But look at how few papers the 80th percentile publishes! A fraction of the number of the very best students. And by the way, look at the last column—the 55th percentile, the students who are just above average. They are brilliant enough to make it into one of the most competitive graduate programs in the world, and to finish their studies in the top half of their class. And yet they barely publish anything at all. As professional economists, they can only be considered disappointments.
    Next let’s look at the graduates of mediocre schools. I say “mediocre” only because that’s what someone from one of those seven elite schools would call them. In the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings of graduate schools, these are the institutions that are buried somewhere near the bottom of the list. I’ve selected three for comparison purposes. The first is my own alma mater, the University of Toronto (out of a sense of school spirit!). The second is Boston University. The third is what Conley and Önder call “non–top 30,” which is simply an average of all the schools at the very, very bottom of the list.
     
99th
95th
90th
85th
80th
75th
70th
65th
60th
55th
Univ. of Toronto
3.13
1.85
0.80
0.61
0.29
0.19
0.15
0.10
0.07
0.05
Boston Univ.
1.59
0.49
0.21
0.08
0.05
0.02
0.02
0.01
0.00
0.00
Non–top 30
1.05
0.31
0.12
0.06
0.04
0.02
0.01
0.01
0.00
0.00
    Do you see what is so fascinating? The very best students at a non–top 30 school—that is, a school so far down the list that someone from the Ivy League would grimace at the thought of even setting foot there—have a publication number of 1.05, substantially better than everyone except the very best students at Harvard, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, and Chicago. Are you better off hiring a Big Fish from a Tiny, Tiny Pond than even a Middle-Sized Fish from a Big Pond? Absolutely.
    Conley and Önder struggle to explain their own findings. 5 “To get to Harvard,” they write,
    an applicant has to have great grades, perfect test scores, strong and credible recommendations, and know how to package all this to stand out to the admissions committee. Thus, successful candidates must be hardworking, intelligent, well-trained as undergraduates, savvy and ambitious. Why is it that the majority of these successful applicants, who were winners and did all the right things up to the time they applied to graduate school, become so unimpressive after they are trained? Are we failing the students, or are the students failing us?
    The answer, of course, is neither. No one is failing anyone. It’s just that the very thing that makes elite schools such wonderful places for those at the top makes them very difficult places for everyone else. This is just another version of what happened to Caroline Sacks. The Big Pond takes really bright students and demoralizes them.
    By the way, do you know what elite institution has recognized this very fact about the dangers of the Big Pond for nearly fifty years? Harvard! In the 1960s, Fred Glimp took over as director of admissions and instituted what was known as the “happy-bottom-quarter” policy. In one of his first memos after taking office, he wrote: “Any class, no matter how able, will always have a bottom quarter. What are the effects of the psychology of feeling average, even in a very able group? Are there identifiable types with the psychological or what-not tolerance to be ‘happy’ or to make the most of education while in the bottom quarter?” He knew exactly how demoralizing the Big Pond was to everyone but the best. To Glimp’s mind, his job was to find students who were tough enough and had enough achievements outside the classroom to be able to survive the stress of being Very Small Fish in Harvard’s Very Large Pond. Thus did Harvard begin the practice (which continues to this day) of letting in substantial numbers of gifted athletes who have academic qualifications well below the rest of their classmates. If someone is going to be cannon fodder in the classroom, the theory goes, it’s probably best if that person has an alternative avenue of fulfillment on the football field.
    Exactly the same logic applies to the debate over affirmative action.