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

are plentiful and highly paid. That’s a
very large risk to take for the prestige of
an Ivy League school.
Let me give you one more example of
the Big Pond in action. It might be even
more striking. Suppose you are a
university looking to hire the best young
academics coming out of graduate
school. What should your hiring strategy
be? Should you hire only graduates from
the most elite graduate schools? Or
should you hire students who finished at
the top of their class, regardless of what
school they went to?
Most universities follow the first
strategy. They even make a boast out of
it: We hire only graduates of the very
top schools. But I hope that by this point