Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Malcolm Gladwell on Choosing A College

Episode Date: February 25, 2020

Millions of high school students are trying to decide where to spend the next four years of their lives. For them, and their parents, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell offers a word of advice.     Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

stop wasting your nights on a mattress that doesn't get you experience the most comfortable mattress in the world the sleep number smart bed at the touch of a button you can personalize your comfort choose firmer or softer adjust cooler to warmer and right now save up to twenty five hundred dollars during our massive labor day event hurry into your local sleep number store today Because we have your number. With a Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. What makes for a good college? Academics, environment, athletics, average salary of the graduating class.

There are all kinds of metrics we could point to, but just because an institute of higher learning is a good college doesn't necessarily mean it's the right fit for someone. Why am I talking about college? Well, for one thing, it's an investment. And it's that time of year again when millions of high school seniors are wrestling with the decision of where to spend the next four years of their lives. A few years ago at a Motley Fool investing conference, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell spoke in front of a live audience and offered a suggestion for how students can make the choice that works for them. If you're choosing a college, do you want to go to the best college you can get into?

Everyone says you should. But there's reams and reams and reams of educational data to suggest actually that's not a good strategy at all. With some exceptions, you shouldn't go to the best school you can get into. You should go to the school where your chances of finishing in the top third of your class are greatest. the psychological costs of being at the bottom of any class, particularly if you're in a competitive field like science, math, or engineering, are so overwhelming that it's too risky. If you really want to get a science degree, you should go somewhere where you can feel smart.

So Carolyn Sachs is a girl who was really good at science, got into Brown, went, because everyone said that's the best school you should get into. got to Brown, dropped out of science because she looked around at the other brilliant kids in her class and thought she couldn't do it and realized belatedly that she was just in this absurdly elite environment.

By any real-world measure, she was good at science and had she gone to her safety, University of Maryland, she would today have the most valuable commodity in the marketplace, a science degree. So that's a case where, again, our obsession with a certain kind of advantage,

in this case, prestige, which completely distorts our rationality. No matter where they are planning to be this fall, good luck to all the high school seniors out there. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.