Many consider Pickett's Charge to be the fulcrum of the civil war. For most of the war, Lee's Confederate army successfully played defense against the Union army. However, when Lee shifted from defense to offense it changed the tide of the war. The offensive campaign came to a head at Gettysburg, where the Union army had gained a superior defensive position. At the culmination of the battle, Lee ordered a frontal assault into the heart of the Union defenses. Even though Pickett's brigade was only able to reach the outermost Union defenses, he still lost over half of his troops. After three days of battle, Gettysburg resulted in the greatest carnage of any Civil War battle and the Confederate army suffered the brunt of those casualties. Lee's army never recovered from the loss.
Ries and Trout have taken the lessons of military strategy and applied them to corporate marketing. They chronicle a myriad of companies that repeat Lee's mistake of launching a frontal assault against a well defended opponent. The end result is corporate carnage. Companies that hold an inferior position in the marketplace should not launch a frontal attack against a well defended opponent. Instead, they should choose their battles lines carefully so as to gain the tactical advantage at the point of attack.
This same metaphorical military lesson can be applied to college readiness. As with other competitive situations, military strategy can be used to characterize the competition involved in college admissions. Just like General Lee, school systems continue to launch students from underprivileged families headlong into battle against students enjoying a superior defensive position. The battlefields are the standardized tests that both systematically favor students from wealthy families and systematically label underprivileged schools and students as subpar (Duncan & Brooks-Dunn). Is it any wonder that the carnage among our nation's "dropout factories" rivals that of Pickett's Charge?
For many people, it makes intuitive sense to insist that underperforming schools work harder, work smarter, or face closure. And after 10 years of No Child Left Behind and almost 30 years since a Nation at Risk, students from underprivileged families have indeed significantly improved their academic outcomes. Despite these improvements, underprivileged students still have lost ground on college entrance rates to wealthier students. Wealthy students are now four times more likely to attend a competitive college than poor students; whereas, forty years ago wealthy students were only two times more likely to attend a competitive school than poor students (Bastedo & Jaquette, Table 3). In battle, those in a superior defensive position grow stronger over time, and those engaged in frontal assault grow weaker.
Ries and Trout offer a ray of hope for people who are outmatched on the battlefield: change the battlefield by outflanking your opponent. They describe how Apple Computer did just that to IBM with the Macintosh computer in 1984. Apple invented a new market for graphical personal computers, which took rivals years to replicate. However, Apple fumbled its lead and was near death in the mid 1990s. The pursuit is as important as the initial victory. Fortunately, Apple recovered by again changing the battlefields. This time they reinvented the marketplace for music players, cell phones, and tablet computers. They are now one of the world's largest companies.
In the battle for higher education, the state of Texas has also changed the battlefield. Students who graduate in the top 10% of their high school class are automatically admitted to the Texas university of their choice, regardless of their test scores. Critics have protested that students from underprivileged schools couldn't possibly compete in the college classroom against their better matched rivals. However, despite the critics, underprivileged students have shown that not only can they outcompete their lower ranked rivals in the classroom, but also in overall graduation rates as well (Niu & Tienda, Figure 3). It seems that being a big fish in a small pond is a better way to prepare for college than being a small fish in a big pond. As an added bonus, students from underprivileged schools are much more likely to major in STEM fields than their lower ranked rivals. Therefore, focusing on class rank not only can increase the diversity of college graduates (Bastedo & Jaquette, Figures 4 & 5), but also seems like a sound strategy for increasing the diversity of STEM fields.
The standardization of the standards-based movement has solidified the homogenization of the population at our nation's competitive colleges as mostly white middle- to upper-income students (Dickerson & Jacobs). The resulting carnage perpetuated on underprivileged black and Hispanic students has made it difficult for them to succeed even in noncompetitive colleges. To achieve the national goal of diversifying the ranks of our college graduates, administrators need to rethink how they can diversify the college admissions process. Relying primarily on tests that favor wealthy students perpetuates the fallacy that those tests are good predictors of college performance. As we have seen, something as simple as shifting the entrance criteria to class rank can have huge effects on diversification, while maintaining or exceeding success rates. I wonder what other high risk-high reward ideas can create opportunities for underprivileged youth to compete from their areas of strength and outflank their wealthier peers for entrance to competitive colleges.
It seems like the analogy of "market warfare" could apply to other things as well: one relevant thing for me (and for you) is grants for research. Some very successful scientists are in a well-defended position, so new or less successful scientists, in order to gain an advantage, need to take the Ries and Trout approach of finding a way to outflank the very successful scientists. What other things might this analogy work well with?
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