What happens to high school valedictorians?
- Thread starter AC_Exotic
- Start date
I remember a few of my prof's in law school broke it down as follows:
The "A" students become judges
The "B" students become lawyers at top firms
The "C" students work at lower tier firms
The "D" students drop out, start businesses and become millionaires hiring the B & C students and bribing the A students.
The "A" students become judges
The "B" students become lawyers at top firms
The "C" students work at lower tier firms
The "D" students drop out, start businesses and become millionaires hiring the B & C students and bribing the A students.
More and more I think they become victims of the professional college system. They get recruited by people like David "highest number of national merit scholars of any public unitverity" Boren. Told how special they are and funneled in to liberal arts program to pursue their "passions" and provide a source of funding through scholarships, government grants and student loans. They end up with master degrees in art history and theory of music with $100,000 in student debt with no job prospects.
Man, do I have some issues with that.
Changing the world and becoming a millionaire is how everyone should define success?
Intelligent people who thrive in structure are somehow not living up to their potential?
Innovative people who find structure stifling are valuable and I applaud their accomplishments - many of them have benefited me greatly. But they don't carry with them the secrets to a successful life any more than the middle class software engineer working a 40 hr/wk gig.
Given that the video is published by Money magazine I realize it's trying to show that entrepreneurship is really not tied closely to academic performance.
Substituting 'success' for entrepreneurship is where I take issue with the video basically.
Another scatter-shoot thought I have (and not much time to flesh it out) is that the academic system is not that hard to game with a little work, and for some it doesn't take much work. What I observed from other valedictorians and salutatorians while at OSU was a spectrum of people with varying degrees of ability to actually work hard and work well under pressure. What came easy in high school and enabled achievement and accolades was no longer so easy... Some adapted well and some did not.
