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 class is always a better class. 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.”
7.
“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 embarrassing,” 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 class. 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, Cézanne, Renoir, and Pissarro 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 class 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 class 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 class than the poor are in Chile, so they feel better off.
3 These statistics are derived from a paper entitled “The Role of Ethnicity in Choosing and Leaving Science in Highly Selective Institutions” 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 institution, 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 Önder’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 competitive 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 class had jobs and earnings very similar to a student who went to fifth-ranked, much more competitive Columbia and earned grades that put her slightly below the middle of the class. 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 classroom?
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 12:7–10
Chapter Four
David Boies
You wouldn’t wish dyslexia on your child. Or would you?
1.
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 passengers 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 assumption 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?
2.
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.
1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
What’s your instinctive response? I’m guessing that it is that the ball must cost 10 cents. That can’t be right, though, can it? The bat is supposed to cost
$1.00 more than the ball. So if the ball costs 10 cents, the bat must cost $1.10, and we’ve exceeded our total. The right answer must be that the ball costs 5 cents.
Here’s another question:
2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?
The setup of the question tempts you to answer 100. But it’s a trick. One hundred machines take exactly the same amount of time to make 100 widgets as 5 machines take to make 5 widgets. The right answer is 5 minutes.
These puzzles are two of the three questions that make up the world’s shortest intelligence test.1 It’s called the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). It was invented by the Yale professor Shane Frederick, and it measures your ability to understand when something is more complex than it appears—to move past impulsive answers to deeper, analytic judgments.