University of Illinois

University of Texas

Holy Cross

Amherst College

Gettysburg College

Hunter College

No one would say that this list represents the college choices of the absolute best high school students in America. Yale and Columbia and MIT are on the list, but so are DePauw, Holy Cross, and Gettysburg College. It's a list of good schools.

Along the same lines, here are the colleges of the last twenty-five American Nobel laureates in Chemistry:

City College of New York

City College of New York

Stanford University

University of Dayton, Ohio

Rollins College, Florida

MIT

Grinnell College

MIT

McGill University

Georgia Institute of Technology

Ohio Wesleyan University

Rice University

Hope College

Brigham Young University

University of Toronto

University of Nebraska

Dartmouth College

Harvard University

Berea College

Augsburg College

University of Massachusetts

Washington State University

University of Florida

University of California, Riverside

Harvard University

To be a Nobel Prize winner, apparently, you have to be smart enough to get into a college at least as good as Notre Dame or the University of Illinois. That's all.*

This is a radical idea, isn't it? Suppose that your teenage daughter found out that she had been accepted at two universities-Harvard University and Georgetown University, in Washington, DC. Where would you want her to go? I'm guessing Harvard, because Harvard is a "better" school. Its students score a good 10 to 15 percent higher on their entrance exams.

But given what we are learning about intelligence, the idea that schools can be ranked, like runners in a race, makes no sense. Georgetown's students may not be as smart on an absolute scale as the students of Harvard. But they are all, clearly, smart enough, and future Nobel Prize winners come from schools like Georgetown as well as from schools like Harvard.

The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold. "Put people into two categories," Schwartz says. "Good enough and not good enough. The ones who are good enough get put into a hat. And those who are not good enough get rejected." Schwartz concedes that his idea has virtually no chance of being accepted. But he's absolutely right. As Hudson writes (and keep in mind that he did his research at elite all-male English boarding schools in the 1950s and 1960s), "Knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys."*

Let me give you an example of the threshold effect in action. The University of Michigan law school, like many elite US educational institutions, uses a policy of affirmative action when it comes to applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Around 10 percent of the students Michigan enrolls each fall are members of racial minorities, and if the law school did not significantly relax its entry requirements for those students-admitting them with lower undergraduate grades and lower standardized-test scores than everyone else-it estimates that percentage would be less than 3 percent. Furthermore, if we compare the grades that the minority and nonminority students get in law school, we see that the white students do better. That's not surprising: if one group has higher undergraduate grades and test scores than the other, it's almost certainly going to have higher grades in law school as well. This is one reason that affirmative action programs are so controversial. In fact, an attack on the University of Michigan's affirmative action program recently went all the way to the US Supreme Court. For many people it is troubling that an elite educational institution lets in students who are less qualified than their peers.

A few years ago, however, the University of Michigan decided to look closely at how the law school's minority students had fared after they graduated. How much money did they make? How far up in the profession did they go? How satisfied were they with their careers? What kind of social and community contributions did they make? What kind of honors had they won? They looked at everything that could conceivably be an indication of real-world success. And what they found surprised them.

"We knew that our minority students, a lot of them, were doing well," says Richard Lempert, one of the authors of the Michigan study. "I think our expectation was that we would find a half- or two-thirds-full glass, that they had not done as well as the white students but nonetheless a lot were quite successful. But we were completely surprised. We found that they were doing every bit as well. There was no place we saw any serious discrepancy."

What Lempert is saying is that by the only measure that a law school really ought to care about-how well its graduates do in the real world-minority students aren't less qualified. They're just as successful as white students. And why? Because even though the academic credentials of minority students at Michigan aren't as good as those of white students, the quality of students at the law school is high enough that they're still above the threshold. They are smart enough. Knowledge of a law student's test scores is of little help if you are faced with a classroom of clever law students.

4.

Let's take the threshold idea one step further. If intelligence matters only up to a point, then past that point, other things-things that have nothing to do with intelligence-must start to matter more. It's like basketball again: once someone is tall enough, then we start to care about speed and court sense and agility and ball-handling skills and shooting touch.

So, what might some of those other things be? Well, suppose that instead of measuring your IQ, I gave you a totally different kind of test.

Write down as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects: