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

In the United States, there is an enormous controversy over whether colleges and professional schools should have lower admissions standards for disadvantaged minorities. Supporters of affirmative action say helping minorities get into selective schools is justified given the long history of discrimination. Opponents say that access to selective schools is so important that it ought to be done purely on academic merit. A group in the middle says that using race as the basis for preference is a mistake—and what we really should be doing is giving preference to people who are poor. What all three groups take for granted is that being able to get into a great school is such an important advantage that the small number of spaces at the top are worth fighting over. But why on earth are people convinced that places at the top are so valuable that they are worth fighting over?
    Affirmative action is practiced most aggressively in law schools, where black students are routinely offered positions in schools one tier higher than they would otherwise be able to attend. The result? According to the law professor Richard Sander, more than half of all African-American law students in the United States—51.6 percent—are in the bottom 10 percent of their law school class and almost three-quarters fall in the bottom 20 percent. 6 After reading about how hard it is to get a science degree if you’re at the bottom of your class, you’ll probably agree that those statistics are terrifying. Remember what Caroline Sacks said? Wow, other people are mastering this, even people who were as clueless as I was in the beginning, and I just can’t seem to learn to think in this manner. Sacks isn’t stupid. She’s really, really smart. But Brown University made her feel stupid—and if she truly wanted to graduate with a science degree, the best thing for her to do would have been to go down a notch to Maryland. No sane person would say that the solution to her problems would be for her to go to an even more competitive school like Stanford or MIT. Yet when it comes to affirmative action, that’s exactly what we do. We take promising students like Caroline Sacks—but who happen to be black—and offer to bump them up a notch. And why do we do that? Because we think we’re helping them .
    That doesn’t mean affirmative action is wrong. It is something done with the best of intentions, and elite schools often have resources available to help poor students that other schools do not. But this does not change the fact that—as Herbert Marsh says—the blessings of the Big Pond are mixed, and it is strange how rarely the Big Pond’s downsides are mentioned. Parents still tell their children to go to the best schools they possibly can, on the grounds that the best schools will allow them to do whatever they wish. We take it for granted that the Big Pond expands opportunities, just as we take it for granted that a smaller class is always a better class. We have a definition in our heads of what an advantage is—and the definition isn’t right. And what happens as a result? It means that we make mistakes. It means that we misread battles between underdogs and giants. It means that we underestimate how much freedom there can be in what looks like a disadvantage. It’s the Little Pond that maximizes your chances to do whatever you want.
    At the time she was applying to college, Caroline Sacks had no idea she was taking that kind of chance with the thing she loved. Now she does. At the end of our talk, I asked her what would have happened if she had chosen instead to go to the University of Maryland—to be, instead, a Big Fish in a Little Pond. She answered without hesitation: “I’d still be in science.”

The Theory of Desirable Difficulty
    I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.
    2 Corinthians 12:7–10

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    If you do a brain scan on a person with dyslexia, the images that are produced seem strange. In certain critical parts of the brain—those that deal with reading and processing