Reply to Is it better to be a "Big Fish in a Small Pond" - Gladwell's Elite Cognitive Disorder

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I like Malcolm in general but think he is off in his comparison of Harvard and UMD in terms of likelihood to graduate. Reasons are: (i) an unhooked kid who isn't among the top 15% or so at UMD most likely won't have the stats to get into Harvard, and (ii) a kid who IS among the top 15% at UMD almost certainly will graduate from Harvard if admitted.' Thus, Malcolm's formula of "2% less likely to graduate for every 10 points increase in average SAT score" applies to nobody because kids of type (i) above won't be at Harvard, while kids of type (ii) above won''t fail to graduate at Harvard.[/quote]It’s not “fail to graduate” tout court, but failure to graduate in the STEM major. Harvard has a high graduation rate because it slides the less-successful students out of challenging majors into humanities majors, which have a higher curve, but worse post-graduation employment. His point is essentially that it’s better to be a biochemistry major at Maryland than an anthropology major at Harvard—and if you’re in the bottom 25% of biochemistry majors at the beginning of freshman year at Harvard, odds are you’ll wind up in anthropology. [/quote]

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