"The Millionaire Mind" and "The Millionaire Next Door" have hard data on this. (Mediocre books, BTW.) The answer is that high net worth individuals are predominantly low B students.
A possible explanation for this is simply that lower scoring yet ambitious students are forced to take bigger risks. Johnny A student has a decision tree with more safe salaried gigs on it, but fewer big payoffs.
I saw once that one of the better income predictors was having had more than one sexual partner in high school. I don't know how applicable this is in the top quarter of the income scale. But for people in general I think it illustrates the criticality of social skills over other factors.
I often heard interesting stories at college about flunk-outs. Rather than consulting for Arthur Andersen or being a PM at Microsoft, they did interesting things sooner. Like starting a cool company. Or driving a taxi. You could say it removes the band-limiter from your career possibilities.
I was at UCBoulder when Trey and Matt dropped out of their art programs and started South Park. They were more "successful" than their peers who had excellent grades.
IIRC Alfie Kohn's book What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated has a couple studies on it. I believe he says that GPA accounts for about 3% of future income potential.
Many firms have done their own internal studies though. IIRC Google undertook a big study and found no correlation between gpa and job performance. I'm sure financial firms have probably looked at the link between gpa and alpha, if only because it's so easy to measure.
A more interesting thought experiment is to ask yourself the opposite question: For students who have jobs before going to college or grad school, would you expect those who made more money to later get a higher GPA?
I'd be interested to see the analysis or references to this analysis, if anybody has any links.
I'd be even more interested to see how GPA correlates with people actually getting an interview and getting a position there.
It wasn't too long ago that Google required you to have above a 3.8 GPA to be a serious candidate. I can accept that there isn't too much difference between people in the 3.8~4.0 GPA range, but I'd expect that there would be a significant difference between someone getting a 3.8 and a 3.3 from the same school.
"Unfortunately, most of the academic research suggests that the factors Google has put the most weight on — grades and interviews — are not an especially reliable way of hiring good people. [...] Dr. Carlisle set about analyzing the two million data points the survey collected. Among the first results was confirmation that Google’s obsession with academic performance was not always correlated with success at the company."
I seem to remember there being another better article than this one that went into more detail, but I can't find it right now. If you want the real story you'd probably have to ask a high ranking ex-googler...
Are you talking Major GPA or over all? Someone who is getting C's in art appreciation is probably just a bit wiser about how they spend their time than someone who gets all A's.
I've heard, that for their honours year in an undergrad degree, people who get a 2A are more successful than people who get a first. One reason a 2A graduate gave is that it closes them out of the esoteric, idealistic academic life of chasing perfection. Also, in practice, if you aren't comfortable with your head in the clouds, being able to effortlessly hold abstract arguments in your head, you won't be attracted to it. My high school was streamed, and the "top" class was a little airy-headed.
I think another reason might be that if you aren't quite as intelligent, the thing you learn is school is how to make an effort - and that skill is more valuable than any of the subject matter. This is related to whether you believe one is born smart/dumb, or you believe that your intelligence is affected (or even, effected) by your efforts:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...
Also, for a start-up, if you are intelligent enough to work things out, but only with great effort, then you are: (1). dumb enough to identify with the problems of ordinary people (customers/users) (2). capable enough to do something about it. The reason I stress the "dumb" in (1) is because I pride myself on being a member of this group (especially when I'm frustrated by something that the really smart people genuinely think is "obvious" and "trivial" - their intelligence sets them apart so much that they are incapable of helping ordinary people).
I think there's another factor, that being extremely capable and talented relative to your peers can make it harder for you be aware of, to acknowledge, and to appreciate the unknown - that nature's imagination is greater than your imagination (Feynman).
Of course, some extraordinarily capable people don't fall prey to any of these dangers - and they really accomplish things.
Can you give an example of startup that would benefit by solving problems that are trivial to the really smart people? I can't think of one. All good technology that's designed to be suitable to "dumb" people is equally suitable to smart people (e.g. Google, Ebay, Amazon), it seems to me. Smart people like things that are intuitive and no more complicated than necessary, just like everyone else. (Or so I've heard).
You're right, but you're asking a slightly different question from me.
I agree with you about google etc, and that intuitiveness and simplicity benefit smart people as well as dumb people. Also, a smart person is sometimes a dumb person - when tired, unwell, upset or when they need to concentrate on something more demanding.
Although a smart person will benefit from it once it exists, what I'm saying is that the smart person won't be the one to do it, if it seems too easy for them, because they don't feel the frustration. In fact, if it's easy for them but hard for others, it may give them a little ego boost, which they'd like to keep.
Another aspect is smart people who do not like to acknowledge that they are sometimes dumb people... Also, a person with much intellectual effort invested in the old way is less likely to adopt the new one - and even less likely to be the one to change it. This isn't precisely smartness, but a kind of education.
- programming languages are often slow to be adopted by expert users of the old way, including those who are very smart; these people aren't the ones to create the new language in the first place.
- computerized legal systems - lawyers are smart, but reluctant to change, probably because they have so much invested in learning what they have already. Similar may be true of doctors, dentists and civil engineers.
Perhaps whenever anyone says "but that's trivial", "it seems clear to me", "that's so easy, why can't you understand", "you're stupid" that their attitude is a flag that this is something worth looking at...
Thanks for your comment, I like your point of view.
A possible explanation for this is simply that lower scoring yet ambitious students are forced to take bigger risks. Johnny A student has a decision tree with more safe salaried gigs on it, but fewer big payoffs.
I saw once that one of the better income predictors was having had more than one sexual partner in high school. I don't know how applicable this is in the top quarter of the income scale. But for people in general I think it illustrates the criticality of social skills over other factors.