Why You Shouldn't Go to Harvard | Malcolm Gladwell Highlights | Google Zeitgeist

Malcolm Gladwell explains why you'd be better off going to a worse school (and why you should hire people at the top of their class, regardless of the pedigree of their institution).

Google Zeitgeist is a collection of talks by people who are changing the world. Hear entrepreneurs, CEOs, storytellers, scientists, and dreamers share their visions of how we can shape tomorrow.

Malcolm Gladwell is the author of five New York Times bestsellers — The Tipping Point, Blink,Outliers, What the Dog Saw, and David and Goliath. He is also the co-founder of Pushkin Industries, an audio content company that produces the podcasts Revisionist History, which reconsiders things both overlooked and misunderstood, and Broken Record, where he, Rick Rubin, and Bruce Headlam interview musicians across a wide range of genres. Gladwell has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list and touted as one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.

[finalbox]

This video is served best with a fresh rejection letter from Harvard.

[SensorySensitiveAdult]

I'm impressed that the whole audience is full of rolling desk chairs and nobody is swiveling. I would be spinning for sure.

[gregoryharlston]

When I was a freshman at Harvard, I cross enrolled and took a course at MIT. At MIT, this relative ranking versus absolute ranking was in full effect. The entire freshman year at MIT was pass/fail. The reason for this is that it gave freshmen an opportunity to adjust to the rigors of college life at MIT, but more importantly it gave those freshmen who were no longer top dog time to adjust to this new, painful reality. Suicides were definitely an issue.

[rvcmathguy]

I witnessed this with my son. He went from being a top student at an average high school to a below average student at an elite high school and his academic career was never the same. He totally lost confidence in his abilities and has never recovered academically.

[robertspies]

I was wise beyond my 18 years and chose not to go to Harvard.

[horkade]

However, once you're aware of this tendency, the result can be different, right? The message should be: Don't go to Harvard if you're not psychologically prepared to handle the effects of not being at the top of your class.

[wave]

Me, a community college graduate: Yea I'm too good for Harvard

[ThatOneScienceGuy]

I’m studying biology at a public college and I’m learning a ton and enjoying it. I’m tired of the elitism. I work hard and get good grades and enjoy what I learn and I’m doing it without accumulating ungodly debt.

[Tzadeck]

Richard Feynman gives advice to his students about this problem in a freshman physics review lecture at Caltech in the early 1960s--i.e., he notes that half of the students will be feeling insecure about their intelligence as they find themselves in the bottom of the class for the first time, despite being among the most talented science students in the world.

You can read it in Feynman's Tips on Physics. I imagine Malcolm would find it interesting, if he hasn't read it already.

[jrjoey]

My dad would tell me growing up “it’s better to be the head of a rat than the tail of a lion.”

[danielemondmusic]

I got a fine arts degree, moved to Brooklyn and broke my parents’ heart

[deeperdee]

Google edited out the first part of the video. In the intro, Gladwell makes a joke about himself, saying that he’s foolish for having agreed to speak at Google for free. He uses it as an example of elite institutional cognitive disorder. I guess Google didn’t like how it made them look.

[zacharythatcher]

I’ve done both (undergrad vs grad).

I can say that being at the top of the curve is incredibly liberating. The confidence given by the fact that no one will do better than you is freeing and made school a joy.

Being below the top of the curve (but still passing) was completely paralyzing. Especially when you want the degree more than anything. I was scared stiff. So many nights when I wanted to drop out. So many blank test and homework questions.

From this, I learned that school can be a uniquely oppressive environment. In my “easy” experience I always thought that effort mattered and that grading was happening fairly. In the “hard” environment I felt that I was being arbitrarily boxed out of doing what I was passionate about simply because it maybe took me two more weeks of head down studying to get the point that others were able to get to effortlessly.

Ironically, I was actually jealous of this studying experience in undergrad because I never had to study (with a few exceptions), so I felt like I was prone to forgetting all of the material more than the kids who actually had to try.

After experiencing that reality, I am now scarred by the material that I shoved into my head night after night and never want to think about it again. I’m almost uninterested at this point.

[Polyester_Avalanche]

Be a big fish in a small pond. That is the one point that has stuck with me the longest from his David & Goliath book.

[rban]

I'm just here to say that Harvard's and University of Maryland's computer science rankings are tied.

[wunkewldewd]

Wait, this is crazy. There's a way more plausible explanation.

I went to two schools. The first was fine, but not very selective. I was consistently in the top of my class in my majors (STEM). Then I went to another, more selective school. The classes were very clearly harder, and I did way worse. I've also done some free online courses from good schools, and the problem sets they do (for the same undergrad classes) are just a lot trickier. Instead of the simplest proof of understanding (that I had experienced at the first school), they deal with edge cases and things that tested much more depth.

The class difficulty scales with school selectivity, and that's why you see similar dropout rates as a function of intelligence across schools of different caliber. And this makes sense: at Harvard, it's not that the kids at the bottom of the class can actually succeed there but are comparing themselves to the top of the class and losing confidence, it's that the class is relatively very hard for them so they deal with the struggles of someone at the bottom of the class (who will realistically often have to drop it to not fail). So he's right that if someone at the bottom of a harvard class goes to U Maryland or whatever, they're more likely to finish, but that's not because of some confidence effect, it's because the classes will be easier. However, I think most people who have the option still choose to go for harvard because of networking/name recognition/etc, even with the higher risk of STEM dropout.

I was told to be the dumbest in the room. And not waste time where you’re the brightest.

[queent]

You should go to the college that feels like a good fit. My daughter instantly knew which college would work for her the minute she stepped foot on campus. So we listened to her. She had a great college career and internships and went into a great career in advertising/marketing. My son went to a state school and opened his own business with the community he found at that college. Now he has total autonomy over his work life and is doing great. The Ivys aren't for everyone and your life won't end because you don't go.

[wisnoskij]

You start out assuming the SAT scores correlate to ability at Math. That is your entire premise, "why would the bottom of the class in Harvard drop out, he is better than top of the class anywhere else".
But then you conclude with the idea that companies should ignore the institution, as only relative class rank matters. Which is completely counter to your entire premise (that Harvard is filled with super geniuses, and psychology causes some of them to drop out even when they are superior to the entire rest of the world).
What your research has "proven" is that you should hire Harvard drop outs before top of the class students from lower schools.

[blackbird]

"You can have an extraordinary experience in an ordinary place." -Dr. Cloyd Kerchner.