The Wrong Route to Success

I‘ve been thinking a lot about Clifford Saper lately. For those who don’t know, Dr. Clifford Saper, MD, PhD, is the James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology at Harvard University and head of the department of neurology at Beth Deaconess Medical Center. He is one of the 100 most-cited neurologists in America.

Clifford also happens to have been a very bright, if slightly nerdy, high school (and Hebrew school) friend of mine. We both applied to the University of Chicago; we were both accepted; I went, he didn’t. His parents decided, if memory serves, that the cost of a private university was too high and that he could receive an excellent science education at the University of Illinois.

His parents would seem to have been right. Clifford did not suffer in any way professionally by not having attended the University of Chicago. Admittedly, a named professorship at Harvard does not quite carry the cachet of being a Mishpacha columnist. But somehow I doubt Clifford would have envied me too much had I been successful in reestablishing contact on a recent visit to Boston.

Dr. Saper’s experience turns out to be consistent with every study of the subject. To take one example: Boston Latin is the most selective high school in Boston, and its graduates generally score very high on the SATs and other standardized tests. But when Boston Latin graduates are compared to those who applied to the school, with comparable grades and test scores, but were not accepted, the latter group did just as well on the SATs. Harvard professor Albert-Laszlo Barabasi summarized the results in The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success. “Boston Latin kids do perform better when compared to their counterparts. What the data tells us, however, is that the difference is not because the school enhances their performance. It is because high achievers continue to excel no matter what education a school offers.”