Given all the trash Gladwell has spouted as truth over the years, it's hard to take him seriously. Even if sometimes what he says has merit, it's hard to know when to believe him and when not to.
I especially cringe at the idea that Gladwell is saying it's statistically better to do something, when he has a known history of deliberately misinterpreting data and massaging numbers to get the result he wants.
While I think people should be much more accepting of 2nd- and 3rd-tier schools as options than they often are, kids should absolutely push themselves for the best-ranked school they can get into (assuming they also have a solid program for whatever field/major they're interested in). Not only is it beneficial to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are, there are also second-order effects to attending an elite university, like making connections that can help you along with your career later. Not to mention that if a recruiter sees two recent-grad resumes that are identical except for the name of the school, they're going to pick the candidate that went to the "better" school.
Certainly you don't want to set yourself up for failure; if that elite school is going to be such a struggle that you're eventually going to be washed out, that's probably not a good outcome, and a lower-tier school would have been a better choice. But, absent that, I think it's good advice to attend the best school you can get into.
I especially cringe at the idea that Gladwell is saying it's statistically better to do something, when he has a known history of deliberately misinterpreting data and massaging numbers to get the result he wants.
While I think people should be much more accepting of 2nd- and 3rd-tier schools as options than they often are, kids should absolutely push themselves for the best-ranked school they can get into (assuming they also have a solid program for whatever field/major they're interested in). Not only is it beneficial to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are, there are also second-order effects to attending an elite university, like making connections that can help you along with your career later. Not to mention that if a recruiter sees two recent-grad resumes that are identical except for the name of the school, they're going to pick the candidate that went to the "better" school.
Certainly you don't want to set yourself up for failure; if that elite school is going to be such a struggle that you're eventually going to be washed out, that's probably not a good outcome, and a lower-tier school would have been a better choice. But, absent that, I think it's good advice to attend the best school you can get into.