Sacks sailed through high school at the top of her cla.s.s. She took a political science course at a nearby college while she was still in high school, as well as a multivariant calculus course at the local community college. She got As in both, as well as an A in every cla.s.s she took in high school. She got perfect scores on every one of her Advanced Placement pre-college courses.

The summer after her junior year in high school, her father took her on a whirlwind tour of American universities. "I think we looked at five schools in three days," she says. "It was Wesleyan, Brown, Providence College, Boston College, and Yale. Wesleyan was fun but very small. Yale was cool, but I definitely didn't fit the vibe." But Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, won her heart. It is small and exclusive, situated in the middle of a nineteenth-century neighborhood of redbrick Georgian and Colonial buildings on the top of a gently sloping hill. It might be the most beautiful college campus in the United States. She applied to Brown, with the University of Maryland as her backup. A few months later, she got a letter in the mail. She was in.

"I expected that everyone at Brown would be really rich and worldly and knowledgeable," she says. "Then I got there, and everybody seemed to be just like me-intellectually curious and kind of nervous and excited and not sure whether they'd be able to make friends. It was very rea.s.suring." The hardest part was choosing which courses to take, because she loved the sound of everything. She ended up in Introductory Chemistry, Spanish, a cla.s.s called the Evolution of Language, and Botanical Roots of Modern Medicine, which she describes as "sort of half botany cla.s.s, half looking at uses of indigenous plants as medicine and what kind of chemical theories they are based on." She was in heaven.

Did Caroline Sacks make the right choice? Most of us would say that she did. When she went on that whirlwind tour with her father, she ranked the colleges she saw, from best to worst. Brown University was number one. The University of Maryland was her backup because it was not in any way as good a school as Brown. Brown is a member of the Ivy League. It has more resources, more academically able students, more prestige, and more accomplished faculty than the University of Maryland. In the rankings of American colleges published every year by the magazine U.S. News & World Report, Brown routinely places among the top ten or twenty colleges in the United States. The University of Maryland finishes much farther back in the pack.

But let's think about Caroline's decision in the same way the Impressionists thought about the Salon. What the Impressionists understood, in their endless debates at the Cafe Guerbois, was that the choice between the Salon and a solo show wasn't a simple case of a best option and a second-best option. It was a choice between two very different options, each with its own strengths and drawbacks.

The Salon was a lot like an Ivy League school. It was the place where reputations were made. And what made it special was how selective it was. There were roughly three thousand painters of "national reputation" in France in the 1860s, and each submitted two or three of his best works to the Salon, which meant the jury was picking from a small mountain of canvases. Rejection was the norm. Getting in was a feat. "The Salon is the real field of battle," Manet said. "It's there that one must take one's measure." Of all the Impressionists, he was the one most convinced of the value of the Salon. The art critic Theodore Duret, another of the Guerbois circle, agreed. "You have still one step to take," Duret wrote to p.i.s.sarro in 1874. "That is to succeed in becoming known to the public and accepted by all the dealers and art lovers....I urge you to exhibit; you must succeed in making a noise, in defying and attracting criticism, coming face-to-face with the big public."

But the very things that made the Salon so attractive-how selective and prestigious it was-also made it problematic. The Palais was an enormous barn of a building three hundred yards long with a central aisle that was two stories high. A typical Salon might accept three or four thousand paintings, and they were hung in four tiers, starting at ground level and stretching up to the ceiling. Only paintings that met with the unanimous approval of the jury were hung "on the line," at eye level. If you were "skyed"-that is, hung closest to the ceiling-it was all but impossible for your painting to be seen. (One of Renoir's paintings was once skyed in the depotoir.) No painter could submit more than three works. The crowds were often overwhelming. The Salon was the Big Pond. But it was very hard to be anything at the Salon but a Little Fish.

p.i.s.sarro and Monet disagreed with Manet. They thought it made more sense to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond. If they were off by themselves and held their own show, they said, they wouldn't be bound by the restrictive rules of the Salon, where Olympia was considered an outrage and where the medals were won by paintings of soldiers and weeping women. They could paint whatever they wanted. And they wouldn't get lost in the crowd, because there wouldn't be a crowd. In 1873, p.i.s.sarro and Monet proposed that the Impressionists set up a collective called the Societe Anonyme Cooperative des Artistes Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs. There would be no compet.i.tion, no juries, and no medals. Every artist would be treated as an equal. Everyone but Manet was in.

The group found s.p.a.ce on the Boulevard des Capucines on the top floor of a building that had just been vacated by a photographer. It was a series of small rooms with red-brown walls. The Impressionists' exhibition opened on April 15, 1874, and lasted one month. The entrance fee was one franc. There were 165 works of art on display, including three Cezannes, ten paintings by Degas, nine Monets, five p.i.s.sarros, six Renoirs, and five by Alfred Sisley-a tiny fraction of what was on the walls of the Salon across town. In their show, the Impressionists could exhibit as many canvases as they wished and hang them in a way that allowed people to actually see them. "The Impressionists were lost in the ma.s.s of Salon paintings, even when accepted," the art historians Harrison White and Cynthia White write. "With...the independent group show, they could gain the public's eye."

Thirty-five hundred people attended the show-175 on the first day alone, which was enough to bring the artists critical attention. Not all of that attention was positive: one joke told was that what the Impressionists were doing was loading a pistol with paint and firing at the canvas. But that was the second part of the Big FishaLittle Pond bargain. The Big FishaLittle Pond option might be scorned by some on the outside, but Small Ponds are welcoming places for those on the inside. They have all of the support that comes from community and friendship-and they are places where innovation and individuality are not frowned upon. "We are beginning to make ourselves a niche," a hopeful p.i.s.sarro wrote to a friend. "We have succeeded as intruders in setting up our little banner in the midst of the crowd." Their challenge was "to advance without worrying about opinion." He was right. Off by themselves, the Impressionists found a new ident.i.ty. They felt a new creative freedom, and before long, the outside world began to sit up and take notice. In the history of modern art, there has never been a more important or more famous exhibition. If you tried to buy the paintings in that warren of top-floor rooms today, it would cost you more than a billion dollars.

The lesson of the Impressionists is that there are times and places where it is better to be a Big Fish in a Little Pond than a Little Fish in a Big Pond, where the apparent disadvantage of being an outsider in a marginal world turns out not to be a disadvantage at all. p.i.s.sarro, Monet, Renoir, and Cezanne weighed prestige against visibility, selectivity against freedom, and decided the costs of the Big Pond were too great. Caroline Sacks faced the same choice. She could be a Big Fish at the University of Maryland, or a Little Fish at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. She chose the Salon over the three rooms on Boulevard des Capucines-and she ended up paying a high price.

The trouble for Caroline Sacks began in the spring of her freshman year, when she enrolled in chemistry. She was probably taking too many courses, she realizes now, and doing too many extracurricular activities. She got her grade on her third midterm exam, and her heart sank. She went to talk to the professor. "He ran me through some exercises, and he said, 'Well, you have a fundamental deficiency in some of these concepts, so what I would actually recommend is that you drop the cla.s.s, not bother with the final exam, and take the course again next fall.'" So she did what the professor suggested. She retook the course in the fall of her soph.o.m.ore year. But she barely did any better. She got a low B. She was in shock. "I had never gotten a B in an academic context before," she said. "I had never not excelled. And I was taking the cla.s.s for the second time, this time as a soph.o.m.ore, and most of the kids in the cla.s.s were first-semester freshmen. It was pretty disheartening."

She had known when she was accepted to Brown that it wasn't going to be like high school. It couldn't be. She wasn't going to be the smartest girl in the cla.s.s anymore-and she'd accepted that fact. "I figured, regardless of how much I prepared, there would be kids who had been exposed to stuff I had never even heard of. So I was trying not to be naive about that." But chemistry was beyond what she had imagined. The students in her cla.s.s were compet.i.tive. "I had a lot of trouble even talking with people from those cla.s.ses," she went on. "They didn't want to share their study habits with me. They didn't want to talk about ways to better understand the stuff that we were learning, because that might give me a leg up."

In spring of her soph.o.m.ore year, she enrolled in organic chemistry-and things only got worse. She couldn't do it: "You memorize how a concept works, and then they give you a molecule you've never seen before, and they ask you to make another one you've never seen before, and you have to get from this thing to that thing. There are people who just think that way and in five minutes are done. They're the curve busters. Then there are people who through an amazing amount of hard work trained themselves to think that way. I worked so hard and I never got it down." The teacher would ask a question, and around her, hands would go up, and Sacks would sit in silence and listen to everyone else's brilliant answers. "It was just this feeling of overwhelming inadequacy."

One night she stayed up late, preparing for a review session in organic chemistry. She was miserable and angry. She didn't want to be working on organic chemistry at three in the morning, when all of that work didn't seem to be getting her anywhere. "I guess that was when I started thinking that maybe I shouldn't pursue this any further," she said. She'd had enough.

The tragic part was that Sacks loved science. As she talked about her abandonment of her first love, she mourned all the courses she would have loved to take but now never would-physiology, infectious disease, biology, math. In the summer after her soph.o.m.ore year, she agonized over her decision: "When I was growing up, it was a subject of much pride to be able to say that, you know, 'I'm a seven-year-old girl, and I love bugs! And I want to study them, and I read up on them all the time, and I draw them in my sketchbook and label all the different parts of them and talk about where they live and what they do.' Later it was 'I am so interested in people and how the human body works, and isn't this amazing?' There is definitely a sort of pride that goes along with 'I am a science girl,' and it's almost shameful for me to leave that behind and say, 'Oh, well, I am going to do something easier because I can't take the heat.' For a while, that is the only way I was looking at it, like I have completely failed. This has been my goal and I can't do it."

And it shouldn't have mattered how Sacks did in organic chemistry, should it? She never wanted to be an organic chemist. It was just a course. Lots of people find organic chemistry impossible. It's not uncommon for premed students to take organic chemistry over the summer at another college just to give themselves a full semester of practice. What's more, Sacks was taking organic chemistry at an extraordinarily compet.i.tive and academically rigorous university. If you were to rank all the students in the world who are taking organic chemistry, Sacks would probably be in the 99th percentile.

But the problem was, Sacks wasn't comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She was comparing herself to her fellow students at Brown. She was a Little Fish in one of the deepest and most compet.i.tive ponds in the country-and the experience of comparing herself to all the other brilliant fish shattered her confidence. It made her feel stupid, even though she isn't stupid at all. "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."

Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called "relative deprivation," a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer during the Second World War. Stouffer was commissioned by the U.S. Army to examine the att.i.tudes and morale of American soldiers, and he ended up studying half a million men and women, looking at everything from how soldiers viewed their commanding officers to how black soldiers felt they were being treated to how difficult soldiers found it to serve in isolated outposts.

But one set of questions Stouffer asked stood out. He quizzed both soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of the Air Force) about how good a job they thought their service did in recognizing and promoting people of ability. The answer was clear. Military Policemen had a far more positive view of their organization than did enlisted men in the Air Corps.

On the face of it, that made no sense. The Military Police had one of the worst rates of promotion in all of the armed forces. The Air Corps had one of the best. The chance of an enlisted man rising to officer status in the Air Corps was twice that of a soldier in the Military Police. So, why on earth would the Military Policemen be more satisfied? The answer, Stouffer famously explained, is that Military Policemen compared themselves only to other Military Policemen. And if you got a promotion in the Military Police, that was such a rare event that you were very happy. And if you didn't get promoted, you were in the same boat as most of your peers-so you weren't that unhappy.

"Contrast him with the Air Corps man of the same education and longevity," Stouffer wrote. His chance of getting promoted to officer was greater than 50 percent. "If he had earned a [promotion], so had the majority of his fellows in the branch, and his achievement was less conspicuous than in the MP's. If he had failed to earn a rating while the majority had succeeded, he had more reason to feel a sense of personal frustration, which could be expressed as criticism of the promotion system."

Stouffer's point is that we form our impressions not globally, by placing ourselves in the broadest possible context, but locally-by comparing ourselves to people "in the same boat as ourselves." Our sense of how deprived we are is relative. This is one of those observations that is both obvious and (upon exploration) deeply profound, and it explains all kinds of otherwise puzzling observations. Which do you think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Canada? or countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain, whose citizens describe themselves as not very happy at all? Answer: the so-called happy countries. It's the same phenomenon as in the Military Police and the Air Corps. If you are depressed in a place where most people are pretty unhappy, you compare yourself to those around you and you don't feel all that bad. But can you imagine how difficult it must be to be depressed in a country where everyone else has a big smile on their face?2 Caroline Sacks's decision to evaluate herself, then, by looking around her organic chemistry cla.s.sroom was not some strange and irrational behavior. It is what human beings do. We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school-except, perhaps, those at the very top of the cla.s.s-are going to face a burden that they would not face in a less compet.i.tive atmosphere. Citizens of happy countries have higher suicide rates than citizens of unhappy countries, because they look at the smiling faces around them and the contrast is too great. Students at "great" schools look at the brilliant students around them, and how do you think they feel?

The phenomenon of relative deprivation applied to education is called-appropriately enough-the "Big FishaLittle Pond Effect." The more elite an educational inst.i.tution is, the worse students feel about their own academic abilities. Students who would be at the top of their cla.s.s at a good school can easily fall to the bottom of a really good school. Students who would feel that they have mastered a subject at a good school can have the feeling that they are falling farther and farther behind in a really good school. And that feeling-as subjective and ridiculous and irrational as it may be-matters. How you feel about your abilities-your academic "self-concept"-in the context of your cla.s.sroom shapes your willingness to tackle challenges and finish difficult tasks. It's a crucial element in your motivation and confidence.

The Big FishaLittle Pond theory was pioneered by the psychologist Herbert Marsh, and to Marsh, most parents and students make their school choices for the wrong reasons. "A lot of people think that going to an academically selective school is going to be good," he said. "That's just not true. The reality is that it is going to be mixed." He went on: "When I was living in Sydney, there were a small number of selective public schools that were even more prestigious than the elite private schools. The tests to get into them were incredibly compet.i.tive. So the Sydney Morning Herald-the big newspaper there-would always call me up whenever they were holding their entrance examinations. It would happen every year, and there was always this pressure to say something new. So finally I just said-and maybe I shouldn't have-well, if you want to see the positive effects of elite schools on self-concept, you are measuring the wrong person. You should be measuring the parents."

What happened to Caroline Sacks is all too common. More than half of all American students who start out in science, technology, and math programs (or STEM, as they are known) drop out after their first or second year. Even though a science degree is just about the most valuable a.s.set a young person can have in the modern economy, large numbers of would-be STEM majors end up switching into the arts, where academic standards are less demanding and the coursework less compet.i.tive. That's the major reason that there is such a shortage of qualified American-educated scientists and engineers in the United States.

To get a sense of who is dropping out-and why-let's take a look at the science enrollment of a school in upstate New York called Hartwick College. It's a small liberal arts college of the sort that is common in the American Northeast.

Here are all the Hartwick STEM majors divided into three groups-top third, middle third, and bottom third-according to their test scores in mathematics. The scores are from the SAT, the exam used by many American colleges as an admissions test. The mathematics section of the test is out of 800 points.3 STEM majors Top Third Middle Third Bottom Third Math SAT 569 472 407 If we take the SAT as a guide, there's a pretty big difference in raw math ability between the best and the poorest students at Hartwick.

Now let's look at the portion of all science degrees at Hartwick that are earned by each of those three groups.

STEM degrees Top Third Middle Third Bottom Third Percent 55.0 27.1 17.8 The students in the top third at Hartwick earn well over half of the school's science degrees. The bottom third end up earning only 17.8 percent of Hartwick's science degrees. The students who come into Hartwick with the poorest levels of math ability are dropping out of math and science in droves. This much seems like common sense. Learning the advanced mathematics and physics necessary to become an engineer or scientist is really hard-and only a small number of students cl.u.s.tered at the top of the cla.s.s are smart enough to handle the material.

Now let's do the same a.n.a.lysis for Harvard, one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

STEM majors Top Third Middle Third Bottom Third Math SAT 753 674 581 Harvard students, not surprisingly, score far higher on the math SAT than their counterparts at Hartwick. In fact, the students in Harvard's bottom third have higher scores than the best students at Hartwick. If getting a science degree is about how smart you are, then virtually everyone at Harvard should end up with a degree-right? At least on paper, there is no one at Harvard who lacks the intellectual firepower to master the coursework. Well, let's take a look at the portion of degrees that are earned by each group.

STEM degrees Top Third Middle Third Bottom Third Percent 53.4 31.2 15.4 Isn't that strange? The students in the bottom third of the Harvard cla.s.s drop out of math and science just as much as their counterparts in upstate New York. Harvard has the same distribution of science degrees as Hartwick.

Think about this for a moment. We have a group of high achievers at Hartwick. Let's call them the Hartwick All-Stars. And we've got another group of lower achievers at Harvard. Let's call them the Harvard Dregs. Each is studying the same textbooks and wrestling with the same concepts and trying to master the same problem sets in courses like advanced calculus and organic chemistry, and according to test scores, they are of roughly equal academic ability. But the overwhelming majority of Hartwick All-Stars get what they want and end up as engineers or biologists. Meanwhile, the Harvard Dregs-who go to the far more prestigious school-are so demoralized by their experience that many of them drop out of science entirely and transfer to some nonscience major. The Harvard Dregs are Little Fish in a Very Big and Scary Pond. The Hartwick All-Stars are Big Fish in a Very Welcoming Small Pond. What matters, in determining the likelihood of getting a science degree, is not just how smart you are. It's how smart you feel relative to the other people in your cla.s.sroom.

By the way, this pattern holds true for virtually any school you look at-regardless of its academic quality. The sociologists Rogers Elliott and Christopher Strenta ran these same numbers for eleven different liberal arts colleges across the United States. Take a look for yourself: School Top Third Math SAT Middle Third Math SAT Bottom Third Math SAT 1. Harvard University 53.4% 753 31.2% 674 15.4% 581 2. Dartmouth College 57.3% 729 29.8% 656 12.9% 546 3. Williams College 45.6% 697 34.7% 631 19.7% 547 4. Colgate University 53.6% 697 31.4% 626 15.0% 534 5. University of Richmond 51.0% 696 34.7% 624 14.4% 534 6. Bucknell University 57.3% 688 24.0% 601 18.8% 494 7. Kenyon College 62.1% 678 22.6% 583 15.4% 485 8. Occidental College 49.0% 663 32.4% 573 18.6% 492 9. Kalamazoo College 51.8% 633 27.3% 551 20.8% 479 10. Ohio Wesleyan 54.9% 591 33.9% 514 11.2% 431 11. Hartwick College 55.0% 569 27.1% 472 17.8% 407 Let's go back, then, and reconstruct what Caroline Sacks's thinking should have been when faced with the choice between Brown and the University of Maryland. By going to Brown, she would benefit from the prestige of the university. She might 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 cla.s.sic 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 Mitch.e.l.l 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 a.s.sured 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 cla.s.s, 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 onder 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 onder 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 onder's a.n.a.lysis 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 onder divided up the graduates of each of those programs according to where they ranked in their cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s. 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. 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 cla.s.s. 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 compet.i.tive graduate programs in the world, and to finish their studies in the top half of their cla.s.s. 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 inst.i.tutions 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 onder call "nonatop 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 Nonatop 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 nonatop 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 onder 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 inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tuted what was known as the "happy-bottom-quarter" policy. In one of his first memos after taking office, he wrote: "Any cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.sroom 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 cla.s.smates. If someone is going to be cannon fodder in the cla.s.sroom, 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. 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 s.p.a.ces 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s, 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 compet.i.tive 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 b.u.mp 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 cla.s.s is always a better cla.s.s. 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."

"I was a very enthusiastic student growing up, and I really liked learning and I liked school, and I was good at it," Stephen Randolph began.7 He is a tall young man with carefully combed dark brown hair and neatly pressed khakis. "I took high school algebra starting in fourth grade. Then I did algebra two in fifth grade and geometry in sixth grade. By the time I got to middle school, I was going to high school for math and for biology, chemistry, and Advanced Placement U.S. history. I also went to a local college starting in fifth grade, taking some math, but I did other science in fifth grade as well. I actually think by the time I graduated high school, I had more than enough credits to immediately get a bachelor's degree from the University of Georgia. I'm pretty certain of that."

Every day from first grade until the end of high school, Randolph wore a tie to school. "It's kind of embarra.s.sing," he said, "kind of crazy. But I did it. I forget how it started. I just wanted to wear a tie one day in first grade and then I just kept doing it. I was a nerd, I guess."

Randolph was valedictorian of his high school cla.s.s. His college admission-test scores were nearly perfect. He was accepted by both Harvard and MIT and chose Harvard. In the first week of school, he walked through Harvard Yard and marveled at his good fortune. "It occurred to me that everyone here was a student who got into Harvard. Which was a crazy thought, but it was like, oh, yeah, all these people are interesting and smart and amazing and this is going to be a great experience. I was so enthusiastic."

His story was almost word for word the same as Caroline Sacks's, and hearing it a second time made it plain how remarkable the achievement of the Impressionists really was. They were artistic geniuses. But they were also possessed of a rare wisdom about the world. They were capable of looking at what the rest of us thought of as a great advantage, and seeing it for what it really was. Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir, and p.i.s.sarro would have gone to their second choice.

So what happened to Stephen Randolph at Harvard? I think you can guess the answer. In his third year, he took quantum mechanics. "I didn't do well," he admitted. "I think I might have gotten a B-minus." It was the lowest grade he'd ever received. "My perception was that either I wasn't good at it or I wasn't good enough at it. Maybe I felt that I had to be the best at it or be a genius at it for it to make sense for me to continue. Some people seemed to get it more quickly than I did-and you tend to focus on those people and not the ones who are just as lost as you are.

"I was excited by the material," he continued. "But I was humbled by the experience-humbled as in, you sit in the cla.s.s and you don't understand and you feel like, 'I will never be able to understand this!' And you do problem sets and you understand a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but you always think that the other people in your cla.s.s understand it a lot better. I think one of the things about Harvard is that there's just so many smart people there that it's hard to feel smart there." He decided he couldn't go on.

"You know, there's something about solving a math problem that's very satisfying," Randolph said at one point, and an almost wistful look came over his face. "You start with a problem that you may not know how to solve, but you know there are certain rules you can follow and certain approaches you can take, and often during this process, the intermediate result is more complex than what you started with, and then the final result is simple. And there's a certain joy in making that journey." Randolph went to the school he wanted. But did he get the education he wanted? "I think I'm generally pleased with the way things turned out," he said. Then he laughed, a little ruefully. "At least that's what I tell myself."

At the end of his third year in college, Randolph decided to take the entrance exam for law school. After graduating, he took a job with a law firm in Manhattan. Harvard cost the world a physicist and gave the world another lawyer. "I do tax law," Randolph said. "It's funny. There are a fair number of math and physics majors who end up in tax law."

1 I've changed her name and identifying details.

2 This example is from the work of the economist Mary Daly, who has written widely on this phenomenon. Here's another example, this one from Carol Graham's Happiness Around the World: The Paradox of Happy Peasants and Miserable Millionaires. Who do you think is happier: a poor person in Chile or a poor person in Honduras? Logic would say Chile. Chile is a modern developed economy. The poor in Chile make somewhere close to twice the amount of money that the poor in Honduras do, which means that they can live in nicer homes and eat better food and afford more material comforts. But if you compare the happiness scores of the poor in both countries, Hondurans trump Chileans handily. Why? Because Hondurans care only about how other Hondurans are doing. Graham states, "Because average country income levels do not matter to happiness, but relative distances from the average do, the poor Honduran is happier because their distance from mean income is smaller." And in Honduras, the poor are much closer in wealth to the middle cla.s.s than the poor are in Chile, so they feel better off.

3 These statistics are derived from a paper ent.i.tled "The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Inst.i.tutions" by the sociologists Rogers Elliott and A. Christopher Strenta et al. The SAT scores are from the early 1990s, and may be somewhat different today.

4 This is a crucial enough point that it is worth spelling out in more detail. Chang and his coauthors looked at a sample of several thousand first-year college students and measured which factors played the biggest role in a student's likelihood of dropping out of science. The most important factor? How academically able the university's students were. "For every 10-point increase in the average SAT score of an entering cohort of freshmen at a given inst.i.tution, the likelihood of retention decreased by two percentage points," the authors write. Interestingly, if you look just at students who are members of ethnic minorities, the numbers are even higher. Every 10-point increase in SAT score causes retention to fall by three percentage points. "Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major," they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don't.

5 A small point of clarification: Conley and onder's chart isn't a list of the total number of publications by each economist. Rather, it is a weighted number-getting a paper accepted by one of the most prestigious journals (The American Economic Review or Econometrica) counts more than getting a paper published in a less compet.i.tive journal. In other words, their numbers aren't measuring just how many articles an academic can turn out. They are measuring how many high-quality articles an academic can get published.

6 The law professor Richard Sander is the leading proponent of the Big Pond case against affirmative action. He has written with Stuart Taylor a fascinating book on the subject called Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It's Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won't Admit It. I've provided a summary of some of Sander's argument in the notes at the back of this book.

For example, one of the questions Sander looks at is this. It is harder for a minority student to become a lawyer if he or she goes to a better school. That's clear. But what if that difficulty is offset by the fact that a degree from a better school is worth more? Not true, Sander and Taylor argue. Getting great grades at a good school is about the same-and maybe even better-than getting good grades at a great school. They write: A student who went to thirtieth-ranked Fordham and ended up in the top fifth of her cla.s.s had jobs and earnings very similar to a student who went to fifth-ranked, much more compet.i.tive Columbia and earned grades that put her slightly below the middle of the cla.s.s. I found that in most cases like this, the Fordham student had the edge in the job market.

This should not be surprising. Why should black students behave any differently from anyone else who is forced to learn from the least advantageous position in the cla.s.sroom?

Sander's arguments are controversial. Some of his findings have been disputed by other social scientists who interpret the data differently. On a general level, though, what he says about the perils of the Big Pond is something that many psychologists, going back as far as Stouffer's work in the Second World War, would consider to be common sense.

7 "Stephen Randolph" is a pseudonym.

Part Two

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 12:7a10

Chapter Four.

David Boies

You wouldn't wish dyslexia on your child. Or would you?

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 words-dyslexics have less gray matter. They don't have as many brain cells in those regions as they should. As the fetus develops inside the womb, neurons are supposed to travel to the appropriate areas of the brain, taking their places like pieces on a chessboard. But for some reason, the neurons of dyslexics sometimes get lost along the way. They end up in the wrong place. The brain has something called the ventricular system, which functions as the brain's entry and exit point. Some people with reading disorders have neurons lining their ventricles, like pa.s.sengers stranded in an airport.

While an image of the brain is being made, a patient performs a task, and then a neuroscientist looks to see what parts of the brain have been activated in response to that task. If you ask a dyslexic to read when he or she is having a brain scan, the parts that are supposed to light up might not light up at all. The scan looks like an aerial photo of a city during a blackout. Dyslexics use a lot more of the right hemisphere of their brains during reading than normal readers do. The right hemisphere is the conceptual side. That's the wrong half of the brain for a precise and rigorous task like reading. Sometimes when a dyslexic reads, every step will be delayed, as if the different parts of the brain responsible for reading were communicating via a weak connection. One of the ways to test for the presence of dyslexia in a small child is to have him engage in "rapid automatized naming." Show him one color after another-a red dot, then a green dot, then a blue dot, then a yellow dot-and check his response. See the color. Recognize the color. Attach a name to the color. Say the name. That's automatic in most of us. It's not in someone with a reading disorder; somewhere along the way, the links between those four steps start to break down. Ask a four-year-old: Can you say the word "banana" without the buh? Or say, Listen to the following three sounds: cuh, ah, and tuh. Can you combine them into "cat"? Or take "cat," "hat," and "dark." Which one of those words doesn't rhyme? Easy questions for most four-year-olds. Really hard questions for dyslexics. Many people used to think that what defines dyslexics is that they get words backwards-"cat" would be "tac," or something like that-making it sound like dyslexia is a problem in the way the words are seen. But it is much more profound than that. Dyslexia is a problem in the way people hear and manipulate sounds. The difference between bah and dah is a subtlety in the first 40 milliseconds of the syllable. Human language is based on the a.s.sumption that we can pick up that 40-millisecond difference, and the difference between the bah sound and the dah sound can be the difference between getting something right and getting something catastrophically wrong. Can you imagine the consequences of having a brain so sluggish that when it comes to putting together the building blocks of words, those crucial 40 milliseconds simply go by too quickly?

"If you have no concept of the sounds of language-if you take away a letter, if you take away a sound, and you don't know what to do, then it's really hard to map the sounds to the written counterparts," Nadine Gaab, a dyslexia researcher at Harvard, explained. "It may take you a while to learn to read. You read really slowly, which then impairs your reading fluency, which then impairs your reading comprehension, because you're so slow that by the time you're at the end of the sentence, you've forgotten what the beginning of the sentence was. So it leads to all these problems in middle school or high school. Then it starts affecting all other subjects in school. You can't read. How are you going to do on math tests that have a lot of writing in them? Or how do you take an exam in social studies if it takes you two hours to read what they want from you?

"Usually you get a diagnosis at eight or nine," she went on. "And we find that by that point, there are already a lot of serious psychological implications, because by that time, you've been struggling for three years. Maybe you were the cool kid on the playground when you were four. Then you entered kindergarten and all your peers suddenly started reading, and you can't figure it out. So you get frustrated. Your peers may think you're stupid. Your parents may think you're lazy. You have very low self-esteem, which leads to an increased rate of depression. Kids with dyslexia are more likely to end up in the juvenile system, because they act up. It's because they can't figure things out. It's so important in our society to read."

You wouldn't wish dyslexia on your child. Or would you?

So far in David and Goliath, we've looked at the ways in which we are often misled about the nature of advantages. Now it is time to turn our attention to the other side of the ledger. What do we mean when we call something a disadvantage? Conventional wisdom holds that a disadvantage is something that ought to be avoided-that it is a setback or a difficulty that leaves you worse off than you would be otherwise. But that is not always the case. In the next few chapters, I want to explore the idea that there are such things as "desirable difficulties." That concept was conceived by Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork, two psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles, and it is a beautiful and haunting way of understanding how underdogs come to excel.

Consider, for example, the following puzzle.