What would be your advice: Persevere or cut your losses and move on?

Parents Forum
1

Malcolm Gladwell makes this argument in his book “David and Goliath” that it may be better to be the big fish in a little pond, than a small fish in a big pond.

He cites examples of students who have dropped out of majoring in STEM because they get intimidated and lose confidence of their abilities at super selective colleges and argues that they would have gotten that degree if they had gone to a less prestigious college.

I know Gladwell’s hypothesis has been discussed here before, so this is not about whether he is right or wrong.

Instead, I was wondering what advice should parents give to such kids who are interested in majoring in STEM but find themselves in the bottom of the class at a super selective college.

A ) Stick with it and graduate even if it means they are at the bottom of the class at say a MIT/Berkeley/Stanford ? or
B) Abandon that STEM major and go for a different major as Gladwell suggests most students land up doing?

Gladwell as far as I know never makes the former case. Is that because it is futile? I keep coming to this question as I read his book and wonder why kids don’t just keep persisting? Is it because they are afraid nobody will hire them if they graduate at the bottom of the class? Is it so distasteful to find oneself at the bottom of the class, that kids do anything not to remain there, even if it means abandoning their dreams?

I have read Carol Dweck’s “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” which seems to suggest that A) might be better?

What do you think? Again not on Gladwell’s hypothesis, but what a student should do if they are already at such a college and find themselves in the situation that Gladwell cites. Persevere or cut their losses and move on?

2

What STEM major? Not all are the same.

3

You seem to be assuming that the student’s dreams haven’t changed.

But perhaps in some cases they do change. Some students may not want to spend the rest of college – and the career that follows – struggling in a field that seems ill-suited to their talents. They may change their majors because they’ve realized that they fit in better in another field than they would in STEM, and that has led them to change their dreams.

4

Nothing against Gladwell as I enjoy his books, but this really is like asking “what size pants should I wear”?

Depends on the… student. :wink:

As Marian rightly points out, the first question is whether that subject of study remains appropriate anywhere.

If so, and it is engineering or CS, those are hard subjects most places, so I don’t know if there would be much of a benefit from transfer. If a student is at a passport value school like the ones you mention, I would recommend staying in and running with the big dogs as long as you can. When the time is up and he enters the real world that Marines level training will serve well. And, as they say Cs get degrees.

5

I would persist with STEM. Considering future pay, no one is going to ask what your GPA was at “elite” college, and STEM majors do better on the pay scale once you are in the work force.

6

If the student is at one of those top schools, they should be able to grasp the material and handle the work. Plus, those schools devote plenty of resources to helping make sure the students there can handle it.

The issue to me is perhaps more of the fact that the student’s perspective is what has changed. They may be used to getting straight A’s with little effort, because some High Schools are so watered down, or more relevant, they have not had many peers also at their level. These elite schools tend to select the high achievers, some of who will freak out when they get their first B in their lifetimes.

The most important lesson that these snowflakes will learn is how to deal with getting a B.

I maintain there is no universal right answer to your question. Parents who are asked to advise their kids one way or the other should only make sure the student understands the implications of each choice.

For some kids, the need based financial aid at these schools is such a terrific advantage, that they are way better off continuing to struggle - if they are still passing - as opposed to transferring to another school altogether, or changing a major. Of course, the particular major and future plans may more of a consideration - a kid at the very bottom of his/her class in pre-med, at an elite school, might find med school acceptance chances slimming.

Some kids love the struggle, and the material they are studying, and they will get more out of it, than anything they every did in high school. Others get overwhelmed by not being the best in the pool, and struggle more.

The elite schools will be used to dealing with both these types of students, and they will have excellent advisors that can help the student decide what is best for them. A student who is struggling should take advantage of the help that is available.

7

This question reminded me of this post from a student who had to make this decision:

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvey-mudd-college/923566-to-incoming-mudders-my-story-c-o-00-warning-kinda-long.html#latest

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@intparent thanks for linking to that. It is one of the best things I have read here. Answers the OPs question solidly.

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I find Gladwell’s take vs Dweck’s take a fascinating contrast. Assuming that the student is still interested in the major, lets say engineering for instance, but is struggling with the Math/Physics/Chemistry introductory courses they would have to take in the first year, Gladwell seems to suggest that it might be better off for the student to be paired with lesser accomplished peers because that will increase their self esteem and motivate them to finish the degree.

Dweck on the other seems to suggest that ultimately success will come to the person, who takes on hard challenges and pushes themselves to learn at the highest level possible even if the initial steps in that learning journey are extremely tough. Gladwell doesn’t seem to advocate this approach. Maybe he is pragmatic and Dweck is idealistic?

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@intparent That was an awesome post!! He seems to advocate the Dweck view. I loved how he phrased it.

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To the best of my knowledge, Dweck has never taken calculus. (This is the impression I have formed from reading about her background and biographical material available online, as well as reading her popular book.) I would be wary of taking advice about STEM majors from someone who has not taken calculus, or projecting advice on the basis of Dweck’s theories. Incidentally, if anyone can provide me with links to Dweck’s research papers that can be accessed through university libraries (i.e., not behind a pay-wall that someone at a university can’t get past without paying), I would be interested in that.

That being said, I think that persistence will help a great deal, in some cases. The example of Stonewall Jackson comes to mind. There is a story that when he was a pre-college student, he was being asked in class about an algebra question, and he answered, "I don’t know. I’m still on the ‘rule of three,’ " which is a category of proportionality problem. When asked about the rule of three, Jackson had it down cold. At West Point, he started out near the bottom of his class, if not at the very bottom. He gradually worked his way up over the years.

STEM subjects are difficult for many people, and the knowledge is cumulative. In general, one can’t do well in later college courses without having mastered the earlier ones.

I don’t suppose that many students at “top” schools are giving up on STEM careers due to B grades. There is an impression on CC that the Ivies do not give C, D, and F grades, but in STEM they do. The students may be finding that STEM does not suit them. If they are really struggling, then the fact that the courses tend to be faster paced and deeper at the more challenging colleges, combined with the cumulative nature of STEM, may make it hard to catch up. On top of that, while a student at a large public research university may take 6 years to graduate (thus allowing time to understand topics that were not understood at first, and to repeat courses) at the Ivies it tends to be much harder to do that–at least from what I have seen, they tend to want the students out in 4 years, to free places for the next groups.

If the student is really committed to STEM, a transfer to a different college might be a better solution. If the student finds out that he/she is not really interested in STEM at the college level, that is okay.

12

To add, with regard to STEM: Take a look at Dummit & Foote’s abstract algebra book. Take all the time you want. (For some reason, I am tempted to add “cackle!” here, though that is usually unlike me. :slight_smile: )

One more thing I should add: The reason that you won’t see too many C, D, and F grades on Ivy transcripts is that the students tend to be advised to drop the class, or else they decide to do that themselves–not that those grades are not given, especially in the first half of the semester.

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@QuantMech

And others who compare Dweck and Gladwell – there’s a HUGE GLARING DIFFERENCE between them.

Gladwell reads a lot and talks to people and then makes things up based on that.

Dweck has done decades of hard research to back up her claims, at Barnard, Yale, Columbia and Stanford. Hard, peer-reviewed, ground-breaking research, carefully constructed studies, masses of data collected, sophisticated statistical analyses, etc.

For decades.

Gladwell reads the research of OTHERS, interviews them for quotes, and then decides some story that seems great! And catchy! And Exciting! Making often great leaps in logic along the way. He adds to that a great skillset of storytelling and a huge amount of self-confidence and glib wordplay.

But his work is not based on anything more than reading stuff and spewing. His ideas aren’t tested.

Dweck’s ideas are tested over decades and are backed with data.

14

@denydenzig - If the STEM field is in engineering, you might be able to use the ASEE Profiles to determine the number of kids that drop out over a four year time period.

http://profiles.asee.org

For example, for Stanford, if you search by Undergraduate Enrollments by Class, you will see that for 2016 there were 947 and 942 declared engineering majors in the Freshman and Sophomore years. This figure declines to 694 for the junior class, a 27 percent decline.

http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/7255/screen/20?school_name=Stanford+University

Compare these figures to Rice in which there a 400 sophomores and 366 juniors, a difference of less than 10 percent.

http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/7278/screen/20?school_name=William+Marsh+Rice+University

With the website, you can also go back in time to see what the differences are over a longer sampling of time.

The larger the difference between the sophomore and junior class, the more kids are likely leaving STEM and moving on to other fields. If you are toward the low end of the academic range, you might consider a school with relatively consistent enrollment between sophomore and junior years.

15

It’s also likely that there aren’t all that many low grades on those transcripts in the first place, because a lot of those students are coming out of very challenging high schools and are able to do the work, even in tough STEM classes.

There are, however, probably still students who went to weaker high schools who show up at college thinking STEM classes are easy, because in high school everything was easy for them. (This effect can be experienced in foreign language classes as well.) Students like this can have a rude awakening. I just don’t think there as many of these folks at Ivies and similar colleges as there used to be, especially with the spread of AP.

16

The one thing I do wonder though is how the “slog thru it” strategy would affect a student’s chances for grad school. For example the Harvey Mudd student quoted earlier graduated with a 2.65 GPA. How would this affect his chances of getting into grad school, if he is interested in it?
Not sure how STEM graduate programs view this issue though. Does anybody know?

17

I think this a bit unfair. This is a graduate level textbook in math, I believe, so even math majors will take years to be able to understand the material. Somehow people get very intimated by mathematical symbols, but I think given the proper background many more people can understand Dummit & Foote than you would expect (to be fair I haven’t looked at the book but I imagine it’s not much harder than the other abstract algebra books I’ve looked at.)

I think a lot of this is people struggling with getting B’s, or an extreme, people getting A’s but not being the smartest person in the room. This is definitely something I’ve had to deal with.

18

@denydenzig: STEM grad schools know that schools like Mudd and Caltech (Swarthmore, Reed, UChicago, and MIT to an extent as well) are famously tough and would adjust accordingly.

But a 2.65 GPA still wouldn’t cut it.

But it’s not like you would be able to get in to a STEM grad program as a history major even with a 4.0 anyway, so what type of grad school does he have in mind?

For industry (software, for instance), a 2.65 CS major who can code is still far more employable than a 4.0 history who can’t.

19

I would observe that in college a lot of students find out that engaging in a particular academic discipline at a high level is not what they thought it would be. They therefore adjust their academic focus to something more inline with their interests and talents. This happens in all fields of endeavor.

In the first place, I think that posing this question in terms of “STEM” or “not-STEM” is bogus. There is a tremendous difference between, say, metals engineering and biology. A certain number of students of the Almighty STEM are going to find out that their true interests lie elsewhere, whether within or without the Temple of STEM. Not because they are “failures,” but because it takes time to explore fields that are not available in HS, and to become acquainted with what study in many fields is actually like.

Let us not deny that tons of students enter college with the idea of majoring in “engineering” with A) only a very shaky idea of what that can encompass, or B) intense parental and cultural pressure, or C) having been convinced that it is the most obvious, and perhaps the only, way to ensure a decent paycheck upon graduation. Some of them, perfectly capable, are not going to love it. Some of them are going to find out that they don’t have the same level of talent as the real stars in their department. (This happens in every field, including–gasp–the humanities.)

My thought would be that is a student finds that their true interests and talents are leading them away from their HS choices, they should follow them, while attempting to keep their options open. If a student is struggling in their chosen field, they need to examine whether they are working hard enough, or well. If the student is genuinely working well and hard, and still loves the field, go for it. If they can’t summon up the interest to put in the required work, then it is likely a mismatch, and that mismatch would continue at any school and into their future career.

20

Dustyfeathers, would you please provide me links to the papers based on decades of research by Dweck? I have looked a bit at the online collections that my university can link to (for free), and the pickings are pretty slim. But if I am overlooking lots of papers, I would be interested in reading them.

To denydenzig: My university will not admit a student to a graduate program in my field if the undergrad GPA is below 3.0, except on a probationary basis. I am not sure whether teaching assistantships are available to a student who is admitted on a probationary basis–the student may have to pay for the first year, or at least the first semester by himself or herself. We would occasionally take a chance on such a student. It depends on the rest of the applicant pool and the particular composition of the admissions committee that year. But it would be an uphill struggle. The student might be able to get into a STEM Masters program at a university that does not have a Ph.D. program in that field, do well there, and then apply for a Ph.D. when the Masters degree was nearly complete. I think very highly of Harvey Mudd. It’s just that it won’t get a student much additional traction, if coming out with a 2.65. On the other hand, a 2.65 from Upper Southwestern University of South Dakota at Hoople (to borrow partly from C.P.E. Bach) is unlikely to be able to follow either route to a Ph.D., barring very exceptional circumstances.

Hunt: I have quite limited experience, but can tell you that a student who took junior level college math classes at Ohio State and did very well in them ran into difficulty with one of the more challenging, yet entry-level math classes at Yale, and had to drop it.