The book is also a $29 investment that could save you thousands of dollars if you happen to be a parent wondering how you'll pay the bill for your bright kid who wants to go to Harvard (or Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Brown or any of the elite private universities). The current tuition at Harvard is $38,891, and the estimated total cost, including room, board, fees and books, is $59,950. Even though she was probably in the top 1 percent of all students in the world who take organic chemistry, the fact that she compared poorly to the students in her particular class weighed so heavily that she decided to drop science. In a less-demanding school, the top third of students had an average math SAT score of 569 while the bottom third had an average score of 407. The important fact here is that students in the top third of the less-demanding school would have been in the bottom third at Harvard, but the distribution of science degrees is identical at both schools - those in the bottom third exited science much more frequently than those in the top third. [...] if the bright girl who loved science had chosen to go to a less-demanding school, she might still love science and have a science degree, simply because she would have been measuring herself against a less competitive group. Gladwell cites other research on Ph.D.