David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

and I can’t do it.” And it shouldn’t have mattered how Sacks did in organic chemistry, should it? She never wanted to be an orga ...

percentile. But the problem was, Sacks wasn’t comparing herself to all the students in the world taking Organic Chemistry. She w ...

5. Caroline Sacks was experiencing what is called “relative deprivation,” a term coined by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer durin ...

asked stood out. He quizzed both soldiers serving in the Military Police and those serving in the Air Corps (the forerunner of t ...

the Military Policemen be more satisfied? The answer, Stouffer famously explained, is that Military Policemen compared themselve ...

branch, and his achievement was less conspicuous than in the MP’s. If he had failed to earn a rating while the majority had succ ...

think, for example, has a higher suicide rate: countries whose citizens declare themselves to be very happy, such as Switzerland ...

their face?^2 Caroline Sacks’s decision to evaluate herself, then, by looking around her organic chemistry classroom was not som ...

schools look at the brilliant students around them, and how do you think they feel? The phenomenon of relative deprivation appli ...

as it may be—matters. How you feel about your abilities—your academic “self-concept”—in the context of your classroom shapes you ...

were a small number of selective public schools that were even more prestigious than the elite private schools. The tests to get ...

6. What happened to Caroline Sacks is all too common. More than half of all American students who start out in science, technolo ...

educated scientists and engineers in the United States. To get a sense of who is dropping out —and why—let’s take a look at the ...

800 points.^3 STEM majors Top Third Middle Third Bottom Third Math SAT 569 472 407 If we take the SAT as a guide, there’s a pret ...

The students in the top third at Hartwick earn well over half of the school’s science degrees. The bottom third end up earning o ...

universities in the world. STEM majors Top Third Middle Third Bottom Third Math SAT 753 674 581 Harvard students, not surprising ...

the portion of degrees that are earned by each group. STEM degrees Top Third Middle Third Bottom Third Percent 53.4 31.2 15.4 Is ...

call them the Harvard Dregs. Each is studying the same textbooks and wrestling with the same concepts and trying to master the s ...

Big Fish in a Very Welcoming Small Pond. What matters, in determining the likelihood of getting a science degree, is not just ho ...

University 53.4% 753 31.2% 674 15.4% Dartmouth College 57.3% 729 29.8% 656 12.9% 3. Williams College 45.6% 697 34.7% 631 19.7% ...