How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

by Paul Tough

High-school guidance counselors and college-admissions officers, lost in “a fog of wishful thinking, euphemisms, and well-intentioned egalitarianism,” encourage low-IQ, low-income students to attend colleges that are too intellectually demanding; when those students discover that they don’t possess the intelligence necessary to do the work, they drop out. Murray, the coauthor of The Bell Curve, is perhaps the country’s best-known cognitive determinist, and his thesis in Real Education is a pure expression of the cognitive hypothesis: what matters in success is IQ, which is fixed quite early in life; education is not so much about providing skills as it is about sorting people and giving those with the highest IQs the opportunity to reach their full potential. But when Bowen, McPherson, and Chingos took a close look at their data, they found that low-income students generally weren’t overreaching their abilities when they chose their colleges; many of them, in fact, were attending schools well below what their GPAs and standardized-test scores qualified them for. This phenomenon, which the authors labeled undermatching, didn’t happen much with well-off students; it was a problem that almost exclusively affected disadvantaged teenagers. In North Carolina, the state for which the researchers were able to gather the most complete data, three out of four high-income students with the GPAs and test scores needed to gain admission to one of the state’s highly selective public col...