Grit (32 page)

Notably, the
particular
pursuits to which students had devoted themselves in high school didn’t matter—whether it was tennis, student government, or debate team. The key was that students had signed up for
something
, signed up
again
the following year, and during that time had made some kind of
progress
.

I learned about the Personal Qualities Project a few years after I started studying grit. When I got my hands on the original study report, I read it cover to cover, put it down for a moment, and then started again on page one.

That night, I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I lay awake thinking:
Holy smokes! What Willingham calls “follow-through” sounds a lot like grit!

Immediately—desperately—I wanted to see if I could replicate his findings.

One motive was practical.

Like any self-report questionnaire, the Grit Scale is ridiculously fakeable. In research studies, participants have no real incentive to lie, but it’s hard to imagine using the Grit Scale in a high-stakes setting where, in fact, there’s something to gain by pretending that “I finish whatever I begin.” Quantifying grit as Willingham had done was a measurement strategy that could not easily be gamed. Not, at least, without outright lying. In Willingham’s own words: “Looking for clear
signs of
productive follow-through is a useful way to mine the student’s track record.”

But the more important goal was to see whether follow-through would predict the same showing-up-instead-of-dropping-out outcomes that are the hallmark of grit.

For the support of a new longitudinal study, I turned to the largest philanthropic funder in education: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

I soon learned that the foundation is especially interested in why college students drop out in such large numbers. At present, the dropout rate for two- and four-year colleges in the United States is among the highest in the world. Escalating tuitions and the byzantine labyrinth of financial aid in this country are two contributing factors. Woefully inadequate academic preparation is another. Still, students with similar financial circumstances and identical SAT scores drop out
at very different rates. Predicting who will persist through college and earn their degree and who won’t is among the most stubborn problems in all of social science. Nobody has a very satisfying answer.

In a meeting with Bill and Melinda Gates, I had an opportunity to explain my perspective in person. Learning to follow through on something hard in high school, I said, seemed the best-possible preparation for doing the same thing later in life.

In that conversation, I learned that Bill himself has long appreciated the importance of competencies other than talent. Back in the days when he had a more direct role in hiring software programmers at Microsoft, for instance, he said he’d give applicants a programming task he knew would require hours and hours of tedious troubleshooting. This wasn’t an IQ test, or a test of programming skills. Rather, it was a test of a person’s ability to muscle through, press on, get to the finish line. Bill only hired programmers who finished what they began.

With generous support from the Gates Foundation, I recruited 1,200 seniors and, just as Willingham had done, asked them to name their extracurricular activities (if they
had
any), when they’d participated in them, and how they’d distinguished themselves doing them, if at all. Around the lab, while we were doing this study, we began calling this measure what it looks like:
the Grit Grid.

Directions: Please list activities in which you spent a significant amount of time outside of class. They can be any kind of pursuit, including sports, extracurricular activities, volunteer activities, research/academic activities, paid work, or hobbies. If you do not have a second or third activity, please leave those rows blank:

Following Willingham’s lead, my research team calculated Grit Grid scores by quantifying multiyear commitment and advancement in up to two activities.

Specifically, each activity students did for two years or more earned a grit point; activities students did for only one year earned no points and weren’t scored further. Activities that students pursued for
multiple
years and in which they could point to some kind of advancement (for example, member of the student government one year and
treasurer the next) each earned a second point. Finally, when advancement could reasonably be deemed “high” versus just “moderate” (president of the student body, MVP of the basketball team, employee of the month), we awarded a third grit point.

In sum, students could score anywhere from zero on the Grit Grid (if they’d participated in no multiyear commitments at all) to six points (if they pursued two different multiyear commitments and, in both, demonstrated high achievement).

As expected, we found that students with higher Grit Grid scores rated themselves higher in grit, and so did their teachers.

Then we waited.

After graduating from high school, students in our sample ended up at dozens of colleges throughout the country. After two years, only 34 percent of the 1,200 students in our study were enrolled in a two- or four-year college. Just as we expected, the odds of staying in school depended heavily on Grit Grid scores: 69 percent of students who scored 6 out of 6 on the Grit Grid were still in college. In contrast, just 16 percent of students who scored 0 out 6 were still on track to get their college degrees.

In a separate study, we applied the same Grit Grid scoring system to the college
extracurriculars of novice teachers. The results were strikingly similar. Teachers who, in college, had demonstrated productive follow-through in a few extracurricular commitments were more likely to stay in teaching and, furthermore, were more effective in producing academic gains in their students. In contrast, persistence and effectiveness in teaching had absolutely no measurable relationship with teachers’ SAT scores, their college GPAs, or interviewer ratings of their leadership potential.

Considered together, the evidence I’ve presented so far could be interpreted in two different ways. I’ve been arguing that extracurricular
activities are a way for young people to practice, and therefore develop passion and perseverance, for long-term goals. But it’s also possible that following through with extracurriculars is something only gritty people do. These explanations aren’t mutually exclusive: it’s entirely possible that
both
factors—cultivation and selection—are at play.

My best guess is that following through on our commitments while we grow up both
requires
grit and, at the same time,
builds
it.

One reason I think so is that, in general, the situations to which people gravitate tend to enhance the very characteristics that brought us there in the first place. This theory of personality development has been dubbed the
corresponsive principle
by Brent Roberts, the foremost authority on what leads to enduring changes in how people think, feel, and act in different situations.

When Brent was a psychology graduate student at Berkeley, the prevailing view was that, after childhood, personalities are more or less “
set like plaster.” Brent and other personality researchers have since collected enough longitudinal data—following, literally,
thousands
of people across years and decades—to show that personalities do, in fact,
change after childhood.

Brent and other personality researchers have found that a key process in personality development involves situations and personality traits reciprocally “calling” each other. The corresponsive principle suggests that the very traits that steer us toward certain life situations are the very same traits that those situations encourage, reinforce, and amplify. In this relationship there is the possibility of virtuous and vicious cycles.

For instance, in one study, Brent and his collaborators followed a thousand adolescents in New Zealand as they entered adulthood and found jobs. Over the years, hostile adolescents ended up in lower-prestige jobs and reported difficulties paying their bills. These conditions, in turn, led to
increases
in levels of hostility, which further eroded their employment prospects. By contrast, more agreeable adolescents
entered a virtuous cycle of psychological development. These “nice kids” secured higher-status jobs offering greater financial security—outcomes that
enhanced
their
tendency toward sociability.

So far, there hasn’t been a corresponsive principle study of grit.

Let me speculate, though. Left to her own devices, a little girl who, after failing to open a box of raisins and saying to herself, “This is too hard! I quit!” might enter a vicious cycle that reinforces giving up. She might learn to give up one thing after another, each time missing the opportunity to enter the virtuous cycle of struggle, followed by progress, followed by confidence to try something even harder.

But what about a little girl whose mother takes her to ballet, even though it’s hard? Even though the little girl doesn’t really
feel
like putting on her leotard at that moment, because she’s a little tired. Even though, at the last practice, her ballet teacher scolded her for holding her arms the wrong way, which clearly stung a bit. What if that little girl was nudged to try and try again and, at one practice, experienced the satisfaction of a breakthrough? Might that victory encourage the little girl to practice
other
difficult things? Might she learn to welcome challenge?

The year after Warren Willingham published the Personal Qualities Project, Bill Fitzsimmons became the dean of admissions at Harvard.

Two years later, when I applied to Harvard, it was Bill who reviewed my application. I know because, at some point as an undergraduate, I found myself involved in a community service project with Bill. “Oh, Miss School Spirit!” he exclaimed when we were introduced. And then he ticked off, with remarkable accuracy, the various activities I’d pursued in high school.

I recently called Bill to ask what he thought about extracurricular follow-through. Not surprisingly, he was intimately familiar with Willingham’s research.

“I have it here somewhere,” he said, seemingly scanning his bookshelf. “
It’s never far from reach.”

Okay, so did he agree with Willingham’s conclusions? Did Harvard admissions really care about anything other than SAT scores and high school grades?

I wanted to know, because Willingham’s opinion, at the time he published his findings, was that college admissions offices weren’t weighing follow-through in extracurriculars as heavily as his research suggested they ought to be.