Revenge of the Tipping Point: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Gladwell describes a Harvard-Princeton women’s rugby match that Harvard won by a wide margin. Gladwell asks why Harvard decided to add women’s rugby in 2013 and finds that it all relates to Harvard’s admission progress. Harvard’s admission has two admission tracks, one for regular students and one for ALDCs, which Gladwell defines as “Athletes, Legacies (children of alumni), Dean’s List Interest (children of rich people), and Children of faculty.” This second track makes up about 30 percent of students.

A court case in 2014 forced Harvard to divulge its system for ranking students academically on a scale of 1 (highest score) to 4 (lowest score). There was a clear pattern of legacies getting accepted more often compared to other students of similar academic scores. But what was even more pronounced was the advantage to athletes. While a “regular” student often needed a rank of 1 to get in, only a single athlete from the time period in the report had the highest academic score of 1. Indeed, for athletes, the academic score was almost irrelevant.

Gladwell believes it’s clear why favoring legacies, rich students, and children of faculty could play a role in preserving an elite institution. But the case of the athletes is more puzzling. He doesn’t find official explanations about sports providing campus unity very convincing, since many sports (like women’s rugby) barely have any spectators. Gladwell discards the official explanations and suggests that perhaps it has something to do with Magic Thirds and Kanter’s ideas about group proportions.

In the 1920s, Columbia University earned a reputation for having a high Jewish population, which scared those who wanted universities to remain strongholds of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPS). Columbia’s admissions department took steps to reduce new Jewish enrollment, and Harvard eventually took inspiration from Columbia’s efforts. Because Jewish applicants scored highly on tests, Harvard moved to more subjective admission requirements. Gladwell clarifies that their efforts were different in an important way from segregation in the South, in that they weren’t about banning all Jewish students, just about keeping the total population below a tipping point.

In more recent years, schools have faced a similar question as Asian applicants score highly on tests and become large fractions of campus populations. Gladwell compares the data from Caltech, which uses a strictly meritocratic system and has a quickly increasing population of Asian students. By contrast, Harvard shows only a modest increase in the percentage of students who are of Asian heritage, due to its more subjective admissions process that maintains similar proportions among racial groups.

Parents who want their children to go to elite schools catch on to the pattern that it’s easiest for athletes to get in. They spend vast amounts of money to train their children in sports. In many cases, however, colleges rely on the word of their coaches to vouch for athletic talent, and this opens up the possibility of fraud and bribery to get wealthy children into colleges. People who game the system in this way often focus on relatively expensive or obscure sports, like tennis, rowing, and rugby.

In 2012, the student Abigail Fisher brought a case against the University of Texas, claiming that “her” place at the university had been given to a minority student instead. It eventually made its way to the Supreme Court and became one of the first serious legal challenges to affirmative action, the admissions policy of trying to maintain a “critical mass” of students from certain minorities. But the University of Texas was reluctant to define this “critical mass” in more detail during court hearings, particularly when it came to assigning exact numbers, a pattern that matched the nebulously defined policies of other schools.

In 2022, another Supreme Court case involved affirmative action, Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. This case led to a ban on all race-based affirmative action. Gladwell interprets this ruling as being partly inspired by the court’s frustration with how vaguely universities have defined affirmative action. He notes that the way schools favor athletes and privileged students is another form of affirmative action. Reading between the lines of Harvard’s statements, he concludes that the university’s true admissions goal is a type of social engineering, where the privileged maintain a plurality and no other group rises above the Magic Third.