In the 1960s, psychologist Julian Stanley realized that if you took the best-testing seventh graders from around the country and gave them standard college entry exams, those kids would score, on average, about as well as the typical college-bound high school senior. However, the seventh graders who scored as well or better than high schoolers, Stanley found, had off-the-charts aptitude in quantitative, logical, and spatial reasoning. In other words, they were gifted.

In the 1970s, Stanley and his team launched a full-scale study, identifying many of America’s gifted kids and tracking them throughout their lives.

The study, called the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), never ended and is now more than 50 years in the making. It has followed more than 5,000 kids from middle school into adulthood. The study’s first two groups of participants, about 1,650 people, were identified as being in the top 1% of mathematical reasoning ability. When researchers checked in on them four decades later, 4.1% had earned tenure at a major research university, 2.3% were top executives at name-brand or Fortune 500 companies, and together they had secured 681 patents. Needless to say, a lot has changed with how students are today compared to 50 years ago.

Stanley died in 2005, but the study continues at Vanderbilt University, where psychologist David Lubinski helped bring it in 1998. Lubinski, now a professor emeritus, and Camilla P. Benbow, dean of Vanderbilt’s Peabody College, still co-direct it.

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