Nobel Prize Winners' undergraduate colleges

We think that say, Nobel Prize winners in science must have the highest IQ scores imaginable; that they must be the kinds of people who got perfect scores on their entrance examinations to college, won every scholarship available, and had such stellar academic records in high school that they were scooped up by the top universities in the country.

But take a look at the following list of where the last twenty-five Americans to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine got their undergraduate degrees, starting in 2007.

Antioch College
Brown University
UC Berkeley
University of Washington
Columbia University
Case Institute of Technology
MIT
Caltech
Harvard University
Hamilton College
Columbia University
University of North Carolina
DePauw University
University of Pennsylvania
University of Minnesota
University of Notre Dame
John Hopkins University
Yale University
Union College, Kentucky
University of Illinois
University of Texas
Holy Cross
Amherst College
Gettysburg College
Hunter College

No one would say that this list represents the college choices of the absolute best high school students in America. Yale and Columbia and MIT are on the list, but so are DePauw, Holy Cross, and Gettysburg College. It is a list of good schools.

Along the same line, here are the colleges of the last twenty-five American Nobel laureates in Chemistry:

City College of NY
City College of NY
Stanford University
University of Dayton, Ohio
Rollins College, Florida
MIT
Grinnell College
MIT
McGill University
Georgia Institute of Technology
Ohio Wesleyan University
Rice University
Hope College
Brigham Young University
University of Toronto
University of Nebraska
Dartmouth College
Harvard University
Berea College
Augsburg College
University of Massachusetts
Washington State University
University of Florida
University of California, Riverside
Harvard University

To be a Nobel Prize winner, apparently, you have to be smart enough to get into a college at least as good as Notre Dame or the University of Illinois. That's all.
(Just to be clear: it is still the case that Harvard produces more Nobel Prize winners than any other school. Just look at those lists, Harvard appears on both of them, a total of three times. A school like Holy Cross appears just once. But wouldn't you expect schools like Harvard to win more Nobels than they do? Harvard is, after all, the richest. most prestigious school in history and has its pick of the most brilliant undergraduates the world ever.)

The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admission process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold."Put people into two categories," Schwartz says, "Good enough and not good enough. The ones who are good enough get put into a hat. And those who are not good enough get rejected."

In 2008, 27,462 of the most highly qualified high school seniors in the world applied to Harvard University. Of these students, 2,500 of them scored a perfect 800 on the SAT critical reading test and 3,300 had a perfect score on the SAT math exam. More than 3,300 were ranked first in their high school class. How many did Harvard accept? About 1,600, which is to say that they rejected 93 out of every 100 applicants. Is it really possible to say that one student is Harvard material and another isn't, when both have identical-and perfect-academic records? Of course not. Schwartz is right. They should just have a lottery.

Source: http://luxurygogreen.blogspot.com/2010/08/nobel-prize-winners-undergraduate.html