What makes students from elite schools special?

Originally Answered: What makes students from elite schools so special?

I was a first generation college kid and went to Swarthmore. But my answer has nothing to
do with either of those two facts: it has to do with being a social psychologist. Because
science suggests that the answer has something to do with elite school student's ability to
delay gratification.

Basically, what makes these student special is patience.

Before I speak to that, though, it is important to note that there are strong socioeconomic
factors that influence whether someone gets in to an elite school and your question
("naturally gifted or do they work hard?") ignores those. I'm going to try to answer the
question you asked but I encourage you to think hard about whether there are other
social questions that may be more important.

Back to delay of gratification. The most often-used example experiment is The Marshmallow
Test. You can read about the original Stanford marshmallow experiment or just watch these
adorable kids.

The basic premise is this: kid is left alone in a room with nothing in it but a marshmallow.
They are told they can eat the marshmallow or, if they wait until the experimenter comes
back, they'll get a second marshmallow. Then we sit back and watch to see who waits.

The elite school kids are the ones who waited.

Kids who do well on this test are described, even ten years later, as more competent. They
have higher test scores, better BMI (one determinant of physical fitness), and generally seem
to succeed better across a variety of measures. Forty years later, we can still see the
differences in the brain scans of the kids from the original experiments.

Now whether the ability to delay gratification is natural ability or hard work is up for debate.
There is some evidence that it has to do with a person's natural tendency to focus on the
"cool" parts of an environment as opposed to the "hot" ones - that is, the kids who wait are
actually able to be less tempted by the marshmallow. We also know that effort matters:
conscious effort can help people wait and it is one of the reasons that older kids tend to
perform better (they are better able to exert effort to "control" their minds).

So why does delaying gratification help people be successful?

At any given moment, you have an array of options about what you can do: for teens, it
ranges from hanging with your friends to playing video games to reading and studying.
Now, most kids do a mix of all of them and generally speaking, that diversity is healthy: it
makes kids resilient and well-rounded. But inherent in all of them is an element of patience.

In most parts of your life, being able to wait matters, even in places where people don't
traditionally think about patience as important. Think about social situations: the ability to
let someone else go before you (even when you're hungry) or to wait for the right moment
or person to get romantically involved with can have serious benefits. The ability to delay
gratification is one of the most widely applicable abilities a person has.

By why elite schools, specifically?

As Christopher VanLang's answer to What makes students from elite schools

special? pointed out, getting into an elite school is about both accomplishment and the
method by which someone becomes accomplished, and delayed gratification blends those
in a nice story.

Inherent in the delay of gratification is having something you are gratified by, a goal.
Whether it is that second marshmallow or becoming a world-class athlete or a world-class
academic, it is about having something in your life that is important enough to you that you
consistently put aside short-term pleasures in the interests of a long-term one.

Those with the ability to delay gratification did their homework instead of playing games,
stayed in and wrote college apps instead of going out on a Friday night. Not in every
moment and not in every case, but in general, they were able to put off an immediate
pleasure for an imagined pleasure in the form of a later goal.

For some kids, going to an elite college is the goal and these are the ones who aren't
actually going to do that well after school - they delayed gratification this long, but now
they are gratified and it is over.

For the best delayed gratification students, the elite school is another thing they have
to struggle through in order to get the thing they want even more. Those are the kids
who are really going to succeed beyond college.

I want to close on a side note of a recent follow-up experiment that brings back to the
larger social factors at work. In this variation, kids get one of two different conditions: either
the experimenter fulfilled a promise just before The Marshmallow Test or they broke a
promise.

Unsurprisingly, kids who just experienced a broken promise no longer trust the
experimenter and they are far more likely to immediately eat the marshmallow.
Why does this matter? Because it moves the point of the test from a notion of self-control
to something more like strategic waiting, and it says that whether or not people delay
gratification has a lot to do with what they expect to happen.

If you are a white, high SES, legacy candidate for an elite school, you have every expectation
that if you delay gratification, you will receive a greater reward.

If, on the other hand, you have no absolutely no expectation that you will have a chance to
get ahead, because of the color of your skin or your gender or previous life experience, you
do the logical thing: you take your pleasures while you can get them.

I take two things from this.

First, we face a serious challenge in higher education if we continue to make promises

that we cannot keep. If we continue to spread a message that the dominant reason to go
to college is to make more money, than as soon as that is no longer true, kids will cease
going to college. I've spoken about this extensively before on this
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEKgkK6bWsE), so won't repeat it here, but it is key
that we change the message we send about the meaning of education.

Second, we face an even more serious problem, not just in higher education but
across our society, if we do not allow delaying gratification to result in actual
gratification. If cannot provide a level playing field, in which a minority, lower SES, non-
legacy student has the reasonable expectation that delaying gratification will bring them
benefits, we will widen a gap that will tear our society apart.

In order for kids to achieve, at scale, they need to live in world in which delaying
gratification makes sense. That is on us to provide.