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

may be somewhat different today.
4 This is a crucial enough point that it
is worth spelling out in more detail.
Chang and his coauthors looked at a
sample of several thousand first-year
college students and measured which
factors played the biggest role in a
student’s likelihood of dropping out of
science. The most important factor?
How academically able the university’s
students were. “For every 10-point
increase in the average SAT score of an
entering cohort of freshmen at a given
institution, the likelihood of retention
decreased by two percentage points,”
the authors write. Interestingly, if you
look just at students who are members of
ethnic minorities, the numbers are even