Malcolm Gladwell tells young people if they want a STEM degree, ‘don’t go to Harvard.’ You may end up at the bottom of your class and drop out
It’s better to be a big fish in a little pond, Gladwell argues in his book David and Goliath.
If you have sky-scraping dreams of attending an Ivy League university, maybe reconsider, according to author Malcolm Gladwell.
“If you want to get a science and math degree, don’t go to Harvard,” Gladwell said in a Google Zeitgeist talk in 2019.
Gladwell clarified in a recent episode of the Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know podcast the risk of applying for Harvard University to pursue a STEM degree is fine if you’re able to compete with the top students in your major. But for many students, matriculating at an elite institution means flailing, increasing the risk of dropping out and finding a 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 too hard,” Gladwell told podcast host Minhaj. “So you should go to Harvard if you think you can be in the top quarter of your class at Harvard. That’s fine. But don’t go there if you’re going to be at the bottom of class. Doing STEM? You’re just gonna drop out.”
Gladwell instead encourages prospective college students to pick their second or third choice school, somewhere they have a shot at being at the top of their class.
For all of Gen Z’s interest in pursuing trades as they navigate fears of AI displacing entry-level workers, STEM degrees remain a key ticket to secure white-collar employment. According to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York analysis released in July about job market conditions for recent college graduates, degrees in animal and plant sciences, and earth sciences, as well as civil and aerospace engineering, are among the undergraduate majors with the lowest unemployment rates. To be sure, information systems and management, and computer science degrees, ranked among majors with the highest unemployment rates.
Ivy League colleges continue to be among the top-ranked universities based on graduation rates, peer assessment, and other factors, according to U.S. News & World Report data.
Big fish, little pond
Gladwell’s opposition to most students attending an elite university is based on the relative deprivation theory, or the idea humans base our self-assessments relative to those around us, not based on our position relative to the rest of the world. In his 2013 book , Gladwell also called this the phenomenon.