Free Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell Page A

smart
enough
.
    The idea that IQ has a threshold, I realize, goes against our intuition. We think that, say, Nobel Prize winners in science must have the highest IQ scores imaginable; that they must be the kinds of people who got perfect scores on their entrance examinations to college, won every scholarship available, and had such stellar academic records in high school that they were scooped up by the top universities in the country.
    But take a look at the following list of where the last twenty-five Americans to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine got their undergraduate degrees, starting in 2007.
    Antioch College
    Brown University
    UC Berkeley
    University of Washington
    Columbia University
    Case Institute of Technology
    MIT
    Caltech
    Harvard University
    Hamilton College
    Columbia University
    University of North Carolina
    DePauw University
    University of Pennsylvania
    University of Minnesota
    University of Notre Dame
    Johns Hopkins University
    Yale University
    Union College, Kentucky
    University of Illinois
    University of Texas
    Holy Cross
    Amherst College
    Gettysburg College
    Hunter College
    No one would say that this list represents the college choices of the absolute best high school students in America. Yale and Columbia and MIT are on the list, but so are DePauw, Holy Cross, and Gettysburg College. It’s a list of
good
schools.
    Along the same lines, here are the colleges of the last twenty-five American Nobel laureates in Chemistry:
    City College of New York
    City College of New York
    Stanford University
    University of Dayton, Ohio
    Rollins College, Florida
    MIT
    Grinnell College
    MIT
    McGill University
    Georgia Institute of Technology
    Ohio Wesleyan University
    Rice University
    Hope College
    Brigham Young University
    University of Toronto
    University of Nebraska
    Dartmouth College
    Harvard University
    Berea College
    Augsburg College
    University of Massachusetts
    Washington State University
    University of Florida
    University of California, Riverside
    Harvard University
    To be a Nobel Prize winner, apparently, you have to be smart enough to get into a college at least as good as Notre Dame or the University of Illinois. That’s all. *
    This is a radical idea, isn’t it? Suppose that your teenage daughter found out that she had been accepted at two universities—Harvard University and Georgetown University, in Washington, DC. Where would you want her to go? I’m guessing Harvard, because Harvard is a “better” school. Its students score a good 10 to 15 percent higher on their entrance exams.
    But given what we are learning about intelligence, the idea that schools can be ranked, like runners in a race, makes no sense. Georgetown’s students may not be as smart on an absolute scale as the students of Harvard. But they are all, clearly, smart enough, and future Nobel Prize winners come from schools like Georgetown as well as from schools like Harvard.
    The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold. “Put people into two categories,” Schwartz says. “Good enough and not good enough. The ones who are good enough get put into a hat. And those who are not good enough get rejected.” Schwartz concedes that his idea has virtually no chance of being accepted. But he’s absolutely right. As Hudson writes (and keep in mind that he did his research at elite all-male English boarding schools in the 1950s and 1960s), “Knowledge of a boy’s IQ is of little help
if you are faced with a formful of clever boys
.” *
    Let me give you an example of the threshold effect in action. The University of Michigan law school, like many elite US educational institutions, uses a policy of affirmative action when it comes to applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Around 10 percent of the students Michigan enrolls each fall are members of racial minorities, and if the law school did not significantly relax its