
Why the average millionaire's college GPA is 2.9 [video] - champagnepapi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P09dULFUs8
======
mdxn
The average GPA of millionaires alone is obviously not enough information to
make the conclusions that this video is making. An average GPA of 2.9 is not
far off from the average college GPA of regular students, anyways (for, let's
say, the ones that graduate). For all we know (from just this statistic),
college GPA could be completely independent from who is a millionaire and who
is not. We really need information about the shape of the distributions in
order to really compare these two groups. For instance, we would, at least,
need to know that valedictorians (for the sake of simplicity, just people with
4.0s) have a lower likelihood of becoming millionaires than other groups. The
average alone does not help us enough here.

I have a few questions for the people who are really more knowledgeable about
the topic:

Is there really a lower incidence of high GPA graduates (3.8-4.0s) becoming
millionaires than those closer to the average? Is this distribution tighter
around the mean or are there clusters in certain bands of GPAs?

~~~
dlo
Here's a study you might be interested in:

[http://time.com/money/4779223/valedictorian-success-
research...](http://time.com/money/4779223/valedictorian-success-research-
barking-up-wrong/)

~~~
overcast
Why must there ALWAYS be an auto playing video at the top of every article,
that does nothing but play music, and show text.

~~~
thomyorkie
Probably appeals to people with different learning styles than you. Doesn't
take much effort for you to stop the video from playing.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
It doesn't take much effort to start a video if you should so want it. This
method has the added benefit of not annoying folks like me who seriously do
not appreciate the noise pollution.

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kyleschiller
In the original student, Karen Arnold went to great lengths to highlight this
counter-intuitive phenomenon as a gendered issue [0] in which women, who
tended to get better grades then men [0], would still end up less successful.
It's seriously regrettable that her point got lost in this rehashing.

On a side note, I don't have the data, but would expect a similar effect with
Asian-Americans, who tend to excel academically, but through socialization and
institutional barriers, may fail to hit the "highest levels of success
metrics" mentioned in this video. [1]

[0]
[https://archives.library.illinois.edu/erec/University%20Arch...](https://archives.library.illinois.edu/erec/University%20Archives/3901018/Topic%20Files/N-Z/Valedictorian%20Study.pdf)
[1] [https://www.forbes.com/sites/liyanchen/2016/01/20/how-
asian-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/liyanchen/2016/01/20/how-asian-
americans-can-break-through-the-bamboo-ceiling/#1022f1511e43)

~~~
meric
"end up less successful"

If you mean end up less successful at being old millionaires with big houses
and flashy cars, that's true. Is it important for males and females to become
that in equal numbers? Do we need old millionaires driving around with flashy
cars and big houses at all?

What about parents raising children who are upright, have morals, and
contribute to wellbeing of society? Are they less successful?

~~~
delazeur
Are you suggesting that there _isn 't_ something fundamentally inequitable
about large segments of society having a harder time obtaining material
wealth?

I agree with what I assume is your position that material wealth shouldn't be
the sole metric of success, but I _also_ think the fact that women and
minorities struggle relative to white men to obtain material wealth is a
problem we should try to solve. Those positions are not contradictory.

~~~
meric
Is that what we are? Biological-chemical constructions who accumulate metrics
of successes? Will people become more fulfilled in their lives because we give
them all material wealth?

Why not have a world where people don't think of excessive material wealth as
a metric of success _at all_ , where people care about what fulfils their own
and other's lives? In this world people don't accumulate wealth for the sake
of accumulating it in the first place, and the distribution of wealth will
also be more equal.

Your position would work directly against this vision, as an example.

~~~
manigandham
You're talking about changing human behavior, across the entire species. And
if that's the end goal, there are many more critical issues to resolve than
(material) wealth judgement.

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kyleschiller
It's worth noting that millionaires who inherited their wealth had much less
of an incentive to care about their GPA since wealth was more or less
guaranteed.

Also, children of millionaires will be able to attend top colleges even with
substandard high school GPA/SATs [0], meaning they'll tend to underperform
once there.

[0]
[https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1047409881995483800](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1047409881995483800)

------
cperciva
Something to keep in mind when looking at that statistic: The average American
millionaire is 62 years old. They went to college in the mid 1970s. Thanks to
decades of grade inflation, that 2.9 average GPA is probably the equivalent of
a 3.3 today.

~~~
5ilv3r
My GPA when I dropped out was 3.3! Where are my millions!!??

~~~
0xbear
You need to be 62 as well.

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kyleschiller
"Valedictorians often go on to be the people who support the system they
become a part of the system, they don't change or overthrow the system."

I really don't buy this explanation at all. Valedictorians might tend towards
conformity, but you don't need to be a revolutionary to hit 1M. Anyone with a
20 year career in finance, consulting or tech and reasonable savings can hit a
million dollars without doing anything crazy.

~~~
downandout
You're right that a more accurate term in this context would have been
"financially successful disruptors and entrepreneurs". $1M technically
qualifies you to be a "millionaire," even though you can get there by simply
making your mortgage payments for 30 years. However, the title makes sense for
YouTube, as most of the population views generally defines "millionaires" as
self-made people with many millions of dollars - not just those with $1M tied
up in a house or other assets earned over a long period of time.

~~~
phkahler
I think the conventional definition of millionaire in the financial world is a
person with a million dollars in investments or liquid assets. A home does not
count. Of course you may downgrade to a cheaper home (at retirement for
example) and take some of the difference in cash.

~~~
madengr
The home does count, as you can either put the money into rent, investment
accounts, or a mortgage. I'd consider a house more liquid than retirement
accounts.

I still owe $170k on my mortgage but have $1M in net worth. It's all in
retirement accounts; all on paper and subject to markets. I surely don't feel
wealthy. I'm 45 and hopefully I can get it to $2M - $4M by late 60's. I still
don't consider that rich since people woefully underestimate retirement needs.

I'm stating the Dave Ramsey steps to see if I can get the mortgage payed off
over 4 years, and get $160k saved for 2x kids college.

------
bedhead
Rich guy here. 2.9 undergrad gpa from a mediocre school. Academics were never
my thing. Grit gets you farther than anything else in life.

~~~
ditonal
But poor grades indicate a lack of grit.

~~~
manigandham
Only in the imposed system of judgement of academics, not your own pursuits.

Many people with poor school histories succeed fantastically when working on
their own projects and passions.

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everdev
I'm a millionaire with a 2.8 GPA through college. For me, I was fine trying
hard at things I was good at and didn't spend much time on things that were
hard. To get a good GPA, you either have to be great at everything or willing
to work hard at everything. To start a successful business, you need to work
hard at the small amount of things you're good at. And a little luck along the
way helps too. I've always thought it would be nice if school's worked similar
to businesses in that you could get a far more concentrated education if you
wanted. Or, your grades could be the average of your top 5 classes.

~~~
dpkonofa
What do you do for a living? Did you come from a wealthy family or did you
earn your millions? I think your point makes a lot of sense but I also think
that "a little luck along the way helps" more than most people think.

~~~
everdev
I ran a web agency, 2008-2014. Parents were middle class. I had a unique
strength of being able to explain technical solutions in an easy way to
CMOs/CEOs and give them ideas of what value the technology could provide that
they hadn't thought of before. I also understood what would make my clients
successful and how to design a tech project to align with those goals.
Everything else I think I was pretty average at, but there seemed to be a lot
of value in bridging the knowledge gap between C-level execs and programmers.
I just kept doing that until the money wasn't fulfilling anymore.

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thaumasiotes
Question: given two distributions X_1 and X_2 with mean μ_1 and μ_2, standard
deviations σ_1 and σ_2, and correlation r, what is the average value of X_1
among data points for which X_2 exceeds (μ_2 + 2σ_2)?

You would only expect millionaires to have very high GPAs if being a
millionaire didn't require anything else.

~~~
uiri
_You would only expect millionaires to have very high GPAs if being a
millionaire didn 't require anything else._

Slightly more accurately, you would only expect millionaires to have very high
GPAs if being a millionaire involves no variables that are independent of GPA.
For example, let's say that SAT scores and GPA are highly correlated. If the
government runs a program whereby they give $1M to everyone who gets a perfect
SAT score after they graduate from college, then the mean GPA of millionaires
would skew much higher despite the dependent variable being SAT scores rather
than GPA.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> If the government runs a program whereby they give $1M to everyone who gets
> a perfect SAT score after they graduate from college, then the mean GPA of
> millionaires would skew much higher

I don't know. It seems like the GPA of people with a perfect SAT score might
fall if they knew about that program.

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madengr
Reminds me of a T shirt I saw 25 years ago: limit ENGR_GPA -> 0 = Business
Major

A 2.9 in STEM is not a 2.9 in non-STEM.

Ha ha, you can still get it:

[https://teespring.com/shop/engineeringlimitequation#pid=226&...](https://teespring.com/shop/engineeringlimitequation#pid=226&cid=5858&sid=front)

~~~
bitwize
This fits nicely with my observation that people who major in Management
Information Systems are the ones who couldn't cut it in Computer Science
because of all the math.

~~~
glenr
Can confirm - failed 1st year university maths, concentrated mostly on nothing
too "computer sciencey" for the rest of my undergrad IT degree.

~~~
bitwize
Did you have the big colorful picture books about what computers are for and
how they work?

~~~
glenr
Books? Didn't need them. And computers just work, no need to know their inner
workings. /s

------
hristov
Is that even true? I have met some rich people and they, in general, do not
like to talk about how much money they have or what their grades were.

I don't even know how anybody would conduct a study like this. How do you get
a sample size that is representative of the average millionaire? I guarantee
you will not be able to get all millionaires to complete your survey, and you
won't even be able to get a list of all the millionaires in america.

So you will necessarily have a survey of only a subset of millionaires, most
likely a very small subset, and how could you possibly know if this subset is
average at all?

The youtube presenter does cite a scientific study, but that is a different
study that surveyed valedictorians. Valedictorians are much easier to track
down, as being a valedictorian is a public award that gets big mention in
every yearbook.

So, no I am not sure this is true. I suspect this might be one of these
completely made up factoids that become famous and travel widely because they
seem true and people kind of just want them to be true. Something like Malcom
Gladwells's 10 000 hours rule.

Of course it is possible that this is true, or the true average is another
mediocre number. I would not be surprised, but even if this is the case there
are many other possible explanations other than rule breaking.

As an aside I have to say that we must be a little careful about worshiping
rule breaking rich people. Rule breaking can be very beneficial to society if
it bring about more wealth. But it can also be very harmful to human beings
and downright evil. The rules being broken may be the laws of the land or
moral rules we all feel are important. In that case I do not think being a
rule breaker is an excuse.

