Author Malcolm Gladwell is urging prospective STEM students to carefully consider where they pursue higher education, arguing that attending an elite institution like Harvard isn’t always the best path to success. Gladwell first publicly voiced this opinion in a 2019 Google Zeitgeist talk, and recently reiterated it on the Hasan Minhaj Doesn’t Know podcast.
His core argument centers on the concept of “relative deprivation,” or the idea that an individual’s sense of well-being and achievement is determined not by their absolute abilities, but by how they compare to their peers. Gladwell explained that students who uncover themselves in the bottom half of their class at a highly selective university are at a significant disadvantage, facing increased difficulty and a higher risk of dropping out.
“If you’re interested in succeeding in an educational institution, you never want to be in the bottom half of your class. It’s too hard,” Gladwell told podcast host Hasan Minhaj. “So Make sure to go to Harvard if you feel you can be in the top quarter of your class at Harvard. That’s fine. But don’t go there if you’re going to be at the bottom of class. Doing STEM? You’re just gonna drop out.”
Gladwell advocates for students to choose a college where they are more likely to excel, even if it means attending a less prestigious institution. He frames this as a “big fish, little pond” scenario, where students can thrive by being among the top performers in their field. This idea was explored in his 2013 book, David and Goliath, where he examined how relative advantage can be more significant than raw talent.
His analysis stems from observations made while comparing data from Harvard and Hartwick College, a smaller liberal arts school in New York. Gladwell found that both institutions exhibited similar distributions of STEM degree attainment based on SAT scores, but students with lower scores were more likely to drop out of STEM programs. This led him to conclude that success in these fields is heavily influenced by a student’s relative ranking within their class, rather than their inherent cognitive ability. “Persistence in science and math is not simply a function of your cognitive ability,” he said in 2019. “It’s a function of your relative standing in your class. It’s a function of your class rank.”
While Gladwell’s advice focuses on individual student success, he also suggests that employers should rethink their hiring practices. He believes that focusing solely on the prestige of a candidate’s alma mater is a mistake, and that companies should instead prioritize a candidate’s class rank. “When you hear some institution…say, ‘we only hire from the top schools,’ you should say: ‘You moron, hire from the top students from any school under the sun.’”
Despite Gladwell’s cautions about Harvard specifically for STEM fields, a recent analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, released in July 2025, indicated that STEM degrees generally remain valuable in the job market. The analysis showed that degrees in animal and plant sciences, earth sciences, civil engineering, and aerospace engineering had some of the lowest unemployment rates among recent college graduates. However, degrees in information systems and management, and computer science, experienced comparatively higher unemployment rates.
Ivy League institutions, including Harvard, continue to rank highly in terms of graduation rates and peer assessment, according to data from U.S. News & World Report.
