Tweet This
It’s high school graduation season, which means plenty of bright-eyed high achievers will be giving valedictory addresses about how they their classmates should dream big and reach for the stars. While it’s logical to assume that these valedictorians are best positioned to excel after graduation, research shows otherwise.
In an excerpt from his book, Barking Up The Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong, Eric Barker writes for Time about the reality that while those who graduate at the top of their high school class do well, research shows they don’t tend to rise to the pinnacle of their chosen fields or be responsible for disruptive innovations and paradigm shifts within society.
“So why are the number ones in high school so rarely the number ones in real life? There are two reasons. First, schools reward students who consistently do what they are told. Academic grades correlate only loosely with intelligence (standardized tests are better at measuring IQ). Grades are, however, an excellent predictor of self-discipline, conscientiousness, and the ability to comply with rules. The second reason is that schools reward being a generalist. There is little recognition of student passion or expertise,” Barker writes.
High academic achievers do well within the box, but they don’t tend to climb out of it.
The research from Harvard and Boston College Barker cites is supported by anecdata from my own experience. Over the Memorial Day weekend, Barker’s article came up in conversation at a BBQ. There were a surprising number of former valedictorians in attendance and all attested to the fact that their drive to perform, please and seek rewards in the form of grades or accolades instead of taking more risks or focusing on singular passions had been detrimental to their own career paths. Given that the majority of valedictorians are women, it comes as no surprise that the complainants were female. While Barker’s piece doesn’t break this phenomenon down by gender, previous research from Meredith College shows that female valedictorians are already more likely to be focused on academic and career futures in fields that are less rewarding of individual achievement and carry less risk of failure — where you may excel, but rarely stand out. As a piece from the New York Times notes:
“When stacked up against the boys, the female valedictorians tended to choose less selective colleges and plan careers in lower-paying occupations. While the girls were more likely to major in the humanities and social sciences, the boys were more likely to plan to major in math, computer science and engineering.”
It’s not wrong to choose a less employable major or work in an unglamorous field, even in an age where STEM education and learning to code are held up as keys that will unlock the kingdom for the next generation of students-turned-workers. What matters is the why behind the choice.
In 2014, I penned a piece urging college students to study less and socialize more if they wanted to set themselves up to be interesting individuals able to navigate a future world outside academia. All of the points in that piece still hold true. What I’d add to that today is encouragement for high academic achievers (especially young women) to interrogate the impetus for their quest for the A. To be well-rounded or a generalist is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. The world needs competent professionals who get things done every bit as much as it needs hyper-focused wunderkind disruptors who take big risks. What matters is whether you come to your choice from a place of self-knowledge or whether you’ve been conditioned to be a model student and have never questioned whether the achievements you’re focused on reaching are truly meaningful to the life you want to be living. And, unlike an AP exam, no one is scoring your answer to that question.
