Malcolm Gladwell tells young people: If you’re pursuing a STEM degree, “don’t go to Harvard” — you may end up at the bottom of your class and drop out
If you harbor lofty aspirations to attend an Ivy League university, you might want to rethink that, according to the author .
“If you’re aiming for a science or math degree, don’t enroll at Harvard,” Gladwell stated during a in 2019.
Gladwell clarified in a recent of the Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know podcast that applying to Harvard for a STEM degree is acceptable only if you can keep up with the top students in your major. However, for many students, attending an elite school leads to struggling, which raises the risk of dropping out and finding a dream job.
“If you want to succeed in college, you never want to be in the bottom half of your class—it’s far too challenging,” Gladwell told podcast host Minhaj. “So you should attend Harvard only if you believe you can land in the top 25% of your class there. That’s okay. But don’t go if you’ll end up at the bottom of the class. If you’re studying STEM? You’ll just drop out.”
Instead, Gladwell advises future college students to choose their second or third-choice school—somewhere they stand a chance of being among the top students in their class.
Despite Gen Z’s interest in as they grapple with fears of , STEM degrees still serve as a crucial pathway to landing white-collar jobs. A released in July on job market conditions for recent college graduates found that undergraduate majors like animal and plant sciences, earth sciences, civil engineering, and aerospace engineering have some of the lowest unemployment rates. Notably, information systems and management, along with computer science degrees, are among those with the highest unemployment rates.
Ivy League institutions remain among the top-ranked universities in the U.S. News & World Report when evaluated by graduation rates, peer reviews, and other criteria.
Big fish, little pond
Gladwell’s stance against most students attending elite universities is rooted in the , which refers to the idea that people judge their own abilities relative to the people around them, not their standing compared to the entire world. In his 2013 book David and Goliath, Gladwell also referred to this as the phenomenon.
He references data from two schools: Harvard and Hartwick College, a small liberal arts institution in upstate New York. He observed that, despite differences in size and academic rigor, both schools have similar distributions of STEM degrees when broken down by high and low SAT scores—with lower-scoring students dropping out of STEM programs at higher rates than those with higher scores. He concluded that a person’s success isn’t determined by their raw abilities, but by how they measure up against their classmates.
“Sticking with science and math isn’t just about your cognitive skills,” Gladwell said in 2019. “It’s about where you stand relative to your classmates. It’s about your class rank.”
Gladwell points out that earning a degree—more so than the school it comes from—is essential for young graduates to build confidence, motivation, and a sense of self-efficacy.
Success isn’t solely the student’s responsibility, though. Gladwell argues that the advantages of being a top student in one’s class call for a shift in how workplaces recruit new employees. He suggests that companies should even stop asking job candidates which college they attended, and instead focus on their class rank.
“When you hear an institution—like a fancy Wall Street investment bank or a university—say, ‘we only hire from top schools,’ you should respond: ‘You idiot, hire the top students from any school out there.’”