Every advanced nation has a small group of people who have the potential to accelerate scientific progress and foster the advances in living that go with it. People are eligible for that group not because of their personalities or virtues. They are eligible because they have exceptionally high cognitive ability in science, technology, engineering or mathematics—STEM.
“Exceptionally high cognitive ability” doesn’t mean the top percentile but something far more demanding. Consider the top percentile of basketball ability. A member of the starting lineup of any U.S. men’s college basketball team is almost certainly in the top percentile of basketball ability among American males. So is LeBron James. That’s how wide the top percentile is. Every starter in the National Basketball Association is almost certainly in the top hundredth of the top percentile—the top 10,000th.
The same may be said of every major professional sport. We are watching those far into the top 10,000th of ability competing against each other and still seeing significant differences in performance at that level.
What’s true of sports is true in almost every realm of human endeavor for which we have good measures. We have known this quantitatively since the 1920s, when demographer James Lotka set out to measure the contributions of scientists to the technical literature in chemistry at a time when (unlike today) authorship of a technical paper was reserved for the researchers who actually did the work.
Lotka discovered that of all the chemists and physicists who had published articles, 58% had published only one each. Nine percent of them had produced half of the publications. Keep in mind that then, as now, people who become chemists or physicists are already in the top few percentiles of ability. Only a small subset of them published even one article. We are again looking at a tiny fraction of the top percentile who dominate their fields. Since Lotka did his work, this pattern has been found in a wide variety of disciplines and measures of productivity, and it continues to be found in the most recent data.
We also have numbers expressed in terms of IQ. In the 1970s, Johns Hopkins psychologist Julian Stanley established the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth by administering the SAT to 12- and 13-year-olds. Some 2,000 of the participants have been followed throughout their careers.
Measures of productivity varied substantially within the top percentile, equivalent to an IQ of 135 or higher. Those in the top quartile of the top 1%, equivalent to IQs of 142 and higher, were more than twice as likely to earn a doctorate or be awarded a patent as those in the bottom quartile and more than four times as likely to publish an article on a STEM topic in a refereed journal. There was no plateau. Greater measured cognitive ability was correlated with greater adult accomplishment throughout the range.
These results suggest that we should be thinking in terms of at least the top half of the top percentile of ability when defining the set of people who have the potential to make major contributions in a STEM field. The U.S. has around 130 million people of prime working age: 25 to 54. For any given talent, therefore, about 650,000 are in the top half of the top percentile of ability. That’s a lot of people.
The task is to identify those with STEM talent when they are young. The good news is that standardized tests expressly designed to measure cognitive ability are an efficient way to do so. They are accurate, inexpensive, resistant to coaching and demonstrably unbiased against minorities, women or the poor. Those conclusions about the best cognitive tests are among the most exhaustively examined and replicated findings in all social science.
The bad news is that admissions offices of elite universities ignore this evidence. They use “holistic” admissions algorithms that treat tested cognitive ability as just one of many desirable traits. That isn’t necessarily an educational disaster for the next generation of brilliant performers in the social sciences, humanities and nonacademic majors. They can develop their potential in an ordinary college or even without college. The STEM fields are different, for two reasons.
First, the raw cognitive demands are greater in STEM than other disciplines. People who are merely in the top few percentiles of overall cognitive ability don’t face insuperable obstacles in rising to the top of non-STEM fields given enough determination and hard work. Nothing in their college courses is impossible for them to learn if they try hard enough. That’s not true in STEM. Much of the advanced math required for performance at the top of STEM fields is literally impossible to learn for anyone without math ability deep into the top percentile. Determination and hard work can’t compensate.
Second, realizing excellence in STEM usually requires access to technically complex training and expensive equipment. The most brilliant STEM students also profit from the most brilliant professors. An ordinary history teacher can teach a brilliant history student. It takes a brilliant mathematician to push a brilliant math student to new heights. The most advanced courses, expensive equipment and best-in-their-fields STEM professors are resources that only a few dozen elite universities possess.
It should be one of the nation’s highest educational priorities to get its most brilliant STEM students into those elite universities. Until a few years ago, the California Institute of Technology was the model. Caltech admitted from the top down based on evidence of exceptional talent and then put its students through a demanding curriculum that only those with zeal and a capacity for hard labor—the other requirements for great achievement—could survive. The record of achievement among Caltech graduates and faculty speaks for itself—46 Nobel Laureates, 66 awarded National Medals of Science and 75 elected to the National Academy of Sciences, all generated by a school that enrolls only about 1,000 undergraduates and 1,400 graduate students at a time.
Caltech might have gone wobbly. It suspended standardized-test requirements in undergraduate admission for four years starting in 2020, and its website boasts that “holistic review is the cornerstone of our admissions process” and this month Caltech announced that “in a historic milestone,” its freshman class will be majority female. But we still have the example of the old Caltech that every elite STEM department should emulate: require evidence of exceptional academic ability in the applications, admit those of top ability regardless of race, sex or social skills, holistic review be damned, and then push those students to their limits.
Doing so would play havoc with the DEI ideal student body. Based on the known distribution of math talent at the highest level and sex differences in occupational preferences, the students in these elite STEM departments will be more than 90% Asian or white and more than 80% male. But some things are more important than having the correct demographic mix. Finding and developing one of our rarest and most precious human resources is one of them.
Mr. Murray is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950.”
