Small pond can be best choice

I’d like to tell you about a young man, who is a family friend, named Kyle. Kyle barely made it through high school – he never showed much aptitude for science or math, nor did he seem to particularly care. When Kyle graduated from high school, he headed for Montana State University, which is not on anybody’s list of top colleges.

But Kyle discovered that he really enjoys physiology and, in particular, the human brain. Kyle started working hard, doing extra projects, and eventually graduated summa cum laude in only three years with a double-major in cellular biology and neuroscience. Kyle is now waiting to apply for medical school, based on the timing of his MCATs. But, in the meantime, he will be spending the next year doing a post-graduate fellowship at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

Kyle is the perfect example of the “Big Fish-Little Pond Effect” identified by psychologist Herbert Marsh, and expounded on brilliantly by Malcolm Gladwell in “David and Goliath.” Had Kyle sought out a bigger pond-say, an elite institution like an Ivy League school-it is highly unlikely that he would have been given the opportunity to discover his new talent and passion, or that he would have a chance to make up the ground other kids covered in high school.

For contrast, Gladwell profiles a young man he called “Stephen.” Stephen was the opposite of Kyle in high school-4.0 GPA, taking college-level math as a freshman, earning a nearly perfect score on his SAT. He ended up going to Harvard for physics.

Guess what he’s doing now? After being frustrated by a quantum mechanics class his junior year, he ended up in law school, and is now a tax lawyer.

Because that’s what the world needs more of-tax lawyers.

I think we’ve done some of our students a huge disservice in the last 15 years. It seems to me that the overwhelming message to high school students is “your next step must be college.” I think at some places that message is so strong as to imply “if you don’t go to college, you are a failure.” And then, within that, is the subculture that says “if you don’t go to an elite college, you are a failure.”

Not much pressure there, for an 18-year old.

The thing is, matriculation to an elite college is not, as one would assume, an automatically good thing. Given the choice between an Ivy League school or a strong state college, it is not simply safe to assume that the Ivy League school is the right choice, even if you only consider the small subset of kids who are qualified to attend an Ivy League school.

The numbers Gladwell cites are eye-popping. In a world in which a science degree is the equivalent of a gold key to a young person, less than half of all students who enter college seeking a STEM degree (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) end up finishing that degree. And, to make matters even more challenging, Mitchell Chang of the University of California, has established that for every 10-point increase in a school’s average SAT score, the odds of completing a STEM degree drop by 2 points (3 points for minorities). In other words, choosing the School of Mines (SAT 1320) instead of Colorado State (SAT 1142) drops your odds of getting that oh-so-valuable degree from 50 percent to 14 percent. Perhaps more telling, when you look at publication records of post-graduates, it is clear that it is better to be a top student at a middle-of-the-road school than it is to be a middle-of-the-road student at a top school.

The “Big Pond” has advantages, to be sure, but it should never be assumed that the “Big Pond” is automatically better than the “Little Pond.” If you are thinking about college for yourself, or for a child, I would urge you to read Chapter 3 of “David and Goliath.” In fact, I would go so far as to say that chapter should be required reading for high school guidance counselors.

At any rate, Congratulations, Class of 2016, and Godspeed!

Michael Alcorn is a teacher and writer who lives in Arvada with his wife and three children. His novels are available at MichaelJAlcorn.com.

 

 

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