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

The students in the top third at Hartwick
earn well over half of the school’s
science degrees. The bottom third end up
earning only 17.8 percent of Hartwick’s
science degrees. The students who come
into Hartwick with the poorest levels of
math ability are dropping out of math
and science in droves. This much seems
like common sense. Learning the
advanced mathematics and physics
necessary to become an engineer or
scientist is really hard—and only a
small number of students clustered at the
top of the class are smart enough to
handle the material.
Now let’s do the same analysis for
Harvard, one of the most prestigious