If you have big dreams of attending an Ivy League college, you might want to reconsider, says author Malcolm Gladwell.
“If you want to get a degree in science and math, don’t go to Harvard,” Gladwell said in a 2019 Google Zeitgeist talk.
Gladwell clarified in a recent episode Hassan Minhaj doesn’t know Podcast Applying to Harvard for a STEM degree is an acceptable risk if you can compete with the top students in your field. But for many students, attending an elite institution means failure, increasing the risk of dropping out and landing your dream job.
“If you’re interested in succeeding in an educational institution, you never want to be in the bottom half of your class. It’s just too hard,” Gladwell told podcast host Minhaj. “So, if you think you’re going to be at the top of your class at Harvard, you should go to Harvard. That’s great. But if you want to be at the bottom of your class, don’t go there. Study STEM? You’re just going to drop out.”
Instead, Gladwell encourages prospective college students to choose their second or third choice school, where they have the opportunity to be at the top of their class.
While Gen Z is keen to pursue trades amid fears that artificial intelligence will replace entry-level workers, a STEM degree remains a key ticket to securing white-collar employment. Degrees in animal and plant sciences, earth sciences, and civil and aerospace engineering are among the undergraduate majors with the lowest unemployment rates, according to an analysis of job market conditions for recent college graduates released in July by the New York Federal Reserve Bank. To be sure, information systems and management and computer science degrees have some of the highest unemployment rates.
The Ivy League schools continue to rank among the top universities based on graduation rates, peer evaluations and other factors, according to U.S. News & World Report.
Big fish, small pond
Gladwell’s objection to most students attending elite colleges is the theory of relative deprivation, the idea that humans base their self-evaluation in relation to those around them rather than on our status relative to the rest of the world. In his 2013 book david and goliathGladwell also calls this phenomenon “a big fish in a small pond.”
He cited data from two universities: Harvard University and Hartwick College, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. He found that despite differences in size and rigor between the two schools, the two schools had a similar distribution of STEM degrees based on high and low SAT scores, with lower-scoring students dropping out of STEM courses at higher rates than higher-scoring students. He concluded that a person’s success is not based on their raw skills, but on how well they perform compared to their peers.
“Persistence in science and math is not just a function of your cognitive ability. It’s also a function of your relative standing in the class. It’s a function of your class rank,” Gladwell said in 2019.
Gladwell noted that earning a degree — and not just the institution from which it was earned — is key to building confidence, motivation and self-efficacy in young graduates.
However, success is not just about the students. Gladwell believes the benefits students gain from being at the top of their class require a paradigm shift in how workplaces select new employees. Workplaces should even take the approach of not even asking prospective employees what college they graduated from, but only where they ranked among their classmates, he said.
“When you hear some institution, some great Wall Street investment bank, some university say, ‘We only recruit from the top schools,’ you should say: ‘You idiot, recruit from the top students from any school in the world.'”
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
