Elite Institution Cognitive Disorder

In this 2013 talk at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, Malcolm Gladwell sets out to explain why, at almost every university in the United States, college students drop out of STEM majors at an alarmingly consistent rate. While Gladwell references data on STEM education throughout the talk, he frames his engagement with the statistics in the manner of a detective story to lend compelling narrative tension to his presentation. He examines student STEM degree attainment statistics at several universities, from Harvard to Hartwick, to advance his insight that earning a STEM degree appears to be a function of a student’s class rank and not primarily a function of a student’s cognitive abilities (e.g., standardized tests scores). To make this counterintuitive finding more palatable, Gladwell contextualizes his analysis of the data with a concept psychologists call “relative deprivation,” which suggests that individuals generally assess their own abilities and aptitudes in comparison to those around them rather than on a global scale. Even highly-gifted STEM students at great schools, as Gladwell points out, are prone to feeling like they aren’t cut out for STEM if they find themselves scoring in the bottom half of their class, and so they often leave STEM fields. Viewed through the lens of relative deprivation, STEM degree attainment trends is, Gladwell argues, “a matter not only of how smart you are, but of how smart you feel relative to your immediate peers.” He ultimately contends that students (STEM and otherwise) who wish to pursue their passions should opt to attend a college where they are most likely to excel rather than go to the most prestigious college they get accepted to. Discussing Gladwell’s talk with students makes for a very fruitful discussion, as the topic is relevant to their college experience and the presentation offers a clear model for how to interpret data while also telling a story about the people, places, and institutions that surround that data.

Keywords:  Data Storytelling    STEM Education    Persuading with Data  

MLA Citation: Gladwell, Malcolm. ‘Elite Institution Cognitive Disorder.’ Google Zeitgeist Conference. Mountain View, CA, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UEwbRWFZVc&t=1058s