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

(Walker Publishing, 2006), which has a marvelous description of the world of the Salon; Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists (Harper Collins, 2006); and Harrison White and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (Wiley & Sons, 1965), 150.
    The first academic paper to raise the issue of relative deprivation with respect to school choice was James Davis’s “The Campus as Frog Pond: An Application of the Theory of Relative Deprivation to Career Decisions of College Men,” The American Journal of Sociology 72, no. 1 (July 1966). Davis concludes:
    At the level of the individual, [my findings] challenge the notion that getting into the “best possible” school is the most efficient route to occupational mobility. Counselors and parents might well consider the drawbacks as well as the advantages of sending a boy to a “fine” college, if, when doing so, it is fairly certain he will end up in the bottom ranks of his graduating class. The aphorism “It is better to be a big frog in a small pond than a small frog in a big pond” is not perfect advice, but it is not trivial.
    Stouffer’s study (coauthored with Edward A. Suchman, Leland C. DeVinney, Shirley A. Star, and Robin M. Williams Jr.) appears in The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life, vol. 1 of Studies in Social Psychology in World War II (Princeton University Press, 1949), 251.
    For studies of so-called happy countries, see Mary Daly, Andrew Oswald, Daniel Wilson, and Stephen Wu, “Dark Contrasts: The Paradox of High Rates of Suicide in Happy Places,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 80 (December 2011), and Carol Graham, Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires (Oxford University Press, 2009).
    Herbert Marsh teaches in the Department of Education at Oxford University. His academic output over the course of his career has been extraordinary. On the subject of “Big Fish/Little Pond” alone, he has written countless papers. A good place to start is H. Marsh, M. Seaton, et al., “The Big-Fish-Little-Pond-Effect Stands Up to Critical Scrutiny: Implications for Theory, Methodology, and Future Research,” Educational Psychology Review 20 (2008): 319–50.
    For statistics on STEM programs, see Rogers Elliott, A. Christopher Strenta, et al., “The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions,” Research in Higher Education 37, no. 6 (December 1996), and Mitchell Chang, Oscar Cerna, et al., “The Contradictory Roles of Institutional Status in Retaining Underrepresented Minorities in Biomedical and Behavioral Science Majors,” The Review of Higher Education 31, no. 4 (summer 2008).
    John P. Conley and Ali Sina Önder’s breakdown of research papers appears in “An Empirical Guide to Hiring Assistant Professors in Economics,” Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers Series, May 28, 2013.
    The reference to Fred Glimp’s “happy-bottom-quarter” policy comes from Jerome Karabel’s fascinating book The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Mariner Books, 2006), 291. Karabel comments:
    Would it be better, [Glimp] implied, if the students at the bottom were content to be there? Thus the renowned (some would say notorious) Harvard admission practice known as the “happy-bottom-quarter policy” was born.…Glimp’s goal was to identify “the right bottom-quarter students—men who have the perspective, ego strength, or extracurricular outlets for maintaining their self-respect (or whatever) while making the most of their opportunities at a C-level.”
    The question of affirmative action is worth discussing in some detail. Take a look at the following table from the work of Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor, Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It (Basic Books, 2012). It shows where African-Americans rank in their law school classes compared with white students. The class ranks run from 1 to 10, with 1 being the bottom tenth of the class and 10 being the top.
    Rank
Black
White
Other
 
1.
51.6
5.6
14.8
2.
19.8
7.2
20.0
 
3.
11.1
9.2
13.4
 
4.
4.0
10.2
11.5
 
5.
5.6
10.6
8.9
 
6.
1.6
11.0
8.2
 
7.
1.6
11.5
6.2
 
8.
2.4
11.2
6.9
 
9.
0.8
11.8
4.9
 
10.
1.6
11.7
5.2
 
    There are a lot of numbers in this table, but only two rows really matter—the