
The Fraternity Paradox: Lower GPA, Higher Incomes - rayuela
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-06/the-fraternity-paradox-lower-gpa-higher-incomes
======
drblast
Paradox? How is this even the least bit surprising to anyone?

Does anyone seriously advocate getting a high GPA in the US anymore so that
you can out-earn your peers?

Does anyone seriously think that the leaders of companies are the studious
academic experts in their field of choice?

This is a paradox if you still pretend we live in a hierarchical meritocracy.
To a certain point and income level we do; bad grades and no social
connections won't help you.

But if you can choose entering a class of rich and powerful people or getting
a higher GPA, and your goal is financial reward? Come on now.

~~~
csdrane
"The people that get Bs work for the people that get Cs, and the people that
get As teach."

~~~
wutbrodo
For what it's worth, that hasn't been my experience at all, with the possible
exception of the As. I suppose tech is in some ways an unusually functional
industry overall, but all the leaders I've seen who weren't particularly smart
but had people skills have failed pretty miserably. The successful ones have
been almost universally the ones who are very smart (categorically as smart or
usually smarter than their underlings) _and_ had excellent people skills.

As I said, it's entirely possible that tech (or at least the quality of
company I've worked at) is something of an anomaly, but I wouldn't be so quick
to dismiss it as unrepresentative: it's not controversial at all that the
importance of intelligence is rising fairly rapidly in the modern economy and
tech may be more representative of the present and future than you'd think at
first glance.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
I've worked in finance in a finance capacity and tech in a technical capacity.
There isn't much of a difference (at least in the sub-areas I've worked).
Getting a job is different than holding it. My impression is that useless
people get culled MUCH more quickly in finance because the work is frequently
more transparent to those in a position to fire you, along with the labor
supply and demand in the two industries.

I think people are simply conflating GPA and intelligence. This is especially
true given the study is from the NE liberal arts schools who funnel into
finance regardless of their major. My math/econ double major was completely
irrelevant during my 3 month training program where the brightest person in
the room was an english lit major.

~~~
wutbrodo
> I think people are simply conflating GPA and intelligence

Yes, this is a very good point that I elided a little in my comment: I
actually just wrote a different comment on this post about me not including my
GPA on my resume because it reflected the fact that I miscalculated how much I
could take on vs my actual intelligence (I ended up with a low-3s GPA and
three degrees (all considered fairly challenging) in four years).

But I don't think that, at the population level, it's a conflation to
recognize that the _correlation_ between intelligence and GPA (ceterus
paribus) is pretty significant. The risk is in reducing the candidate to too
few features, but that's not inherent to including the feature in your overall
assessment.

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jonmc12
Reading the study
([https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2763720](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2763720))
I'm amazed it did not consider parental income. Not only does parental income
correlate strongly to child income as adults, but also to college acceptance.
Most importantly in this case, _parental income is usually used to pay
fraternity dues_.

Fraternities might give a strong sample set of students with poor parents
being separated from students who have parents with moderate to high incomes.
Not to mention the obvious cultural divisions that might keep a high
percentage of low income students from being included in many fraternities.

~~~
fred_is_fred
Are fraternity dues that onerous? At my school (which was now 15+ years ago)
living in a fraternity was roughly cost equivalent (within 10-15%) to living
in the dorms with a meal plan.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
Well for people without rich parents, the cost dorms with a meal plan is
pretty onerous, and much more expensive than renting an apartment a little
farther away. Adding 10-15% to that would limit it to the rich, the people who
don't consider the cost, or the people who see the risk as worth it.

------
Kevin_S
There are so many reasons for this.

Self-selection of confident, motivated men is a part of it.

Membership/leadership in a fraternity is all about social contracts. You come
to college with 0 or maybe a few strong social contracts, and students
fail/drop out due to lack of support all the time. Fraternities provide 30-60
strong social contracts freshman can rely on.

Fraternities also (by way of current major makeup) select for certain majors.
I was a highly involved business major, and recruited many other business
majors into our chapter. We had 1 art major member.

The mission is to make you a better person. Most buy into that and do it. This
leads to higher income.

~~~
jermaustin1
I feel the most important aspect of fraternities is than that you gain a
network of peers you can call upon in the future to advance your career.

~~~
watty
Were you in a fraternity? I'm not saying you're wrong but I can't think of a
single fraternity member who has their job due to some other fraternity
member.

Maybe we were a weak fraternity but my opinion is that the higher earnings is
due mainly to being above average socially.

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bllguo
My impression is that GPA isn't really that important beyond your first job,
unless you're trying to get in grad school. And like the article says, in many
cases it's who you know, not what you learn. Baffling that this is still
surprising enough to be labeled a "paradox" and to be the subject of articles.

~~~
libria
I thought it was virtually common knowledge that higher GPA was generally
correlated with higher income. Is there a recent study that shows the reverse?

~~~
bllguo
Sure, in general, but the key factor here is "fraternity." Of course people
who have low GPAs, and are also not doing anything else like joining a frat or
making social connections, will have lower incomes in the aggregate. They're
spending their time doing things that won't help them get higher incomes
(though they may still be worthwhile endeavors - not necessarily a waste of
time; income isn't everything).

This is how I see it. Once you reach a certain GPA threshold, making social
connections is a more valuable use of your time than trying for higher grades.
Unless you are one of the few people for whom GPA actually matters.

------
kolbe
I read though the article and the comments, and no one seems to think it's due
to fraternities essentially being gangs. They act collectively to help
everyone within the faction succeed while other people tend to be part of much
smaller and less cohesive networks.

Much like humans beating out neanderthals who were individually more
intelligent and stronger, but couldn't organize as well, frats bind
allegiances in ways that casual friends rarely will go to the same lengths
for.

~~~
leggomylibro
Well, that's how a lot of colleges in the US and UK have historically worked.
In the UK it was more explicit; if you were an aristocratic sort, you would
send your children to a private boarding school where they would meet and
befriend the children of your Peers of the Realm, and since Britain was a
global empire back in those days, often the children of a similar upper class
of people overseas. Prestigious universities functioned as an extension of
that into young adulthood.

In the US today, it's less about class and more about money. It's not that
your child grows up among the children of nobility, so much as the children of
people who can and will spend 5 (or even sometimes 6!) figures a year on their
kids' education and future. Things like 'legacy admissions' and a difficult-
to-navigate application process keep prestigious institutions largely full of
the well-off, and again, since these really are world-class educational
institutions, that includes well-off individuals from around the world. I
think that Greek organizations are just one common part of the system that
persists more visibly after graduation, but it's really about getting to know
broad network of as many powerful people as possible.

That sort of dynamic in education really stymies social mobility in general,
though. It's like opportunity hoarding.

~~~
QAPereo
It’s still about class to an extent: source I was a legacy at PA Andover.
Class is still an issue, but the definition has changed to include the
acceptably upwardly mobile. The core is still some version of family
continuity though.

------
jwcacces
The paradox is that some people still believe that higher GPAs produce higher
incomes...

------
basseq
The article (and study) makes a leap that doesn't appear to be supported in
the data. Namely, that the social capital (“connections”) built in a
fraternity are the reason for higher income.

I would propose an alternate hypothesis: that men who seek out and/or have
been a part of a fraternity are better at building _unrelated_ social capital
that _does_ affect income. Or, put another way, that men who build a network
of fraternity brothers are going to be better at building professional
networks as well. While the former may bolster the latter, and while the two
may not be mutually-exclusive sets, the career benefit comes from the latter.

------
pascalxus
I think it all comes down to EQ. People who go into fraternities, on average
tend to be more social, and have higher EQ. EQ is the ability to create
desired social and professional outcomes: they know what to say, how to say it
and who to say it too. It's not easily learned.

High EQ leads to higher performance appraisals and better performance in
interviews. Interviews tend to be extremely subjective in nature, dependent
mostly on your ability to say what an interviewer wants to hear.

------
sudosteph
The GPA vs Income thing is not really the interesting thing in this article.

The REALLY interesting thing was that there was no corresponding benefit for
women who joined sororities. The author kind of hand-waved over this with
statements such as:

> One reason for this may be that women are more likely to form social bonds
> with other women outside of these structures.

Which honestly doesn't make a ton of sense. If they're saying that the bonds
formed in sororities are less intense than those of fraternities b/c women
socialize outside them, they really need something to back that claim up. The
few women I know who did join sororities were very much dedicated to their
"sisters" and it pretty much controlled their social life.

If they're saying that men need same-sex friendships to get positive career
effects, and that women are more likely to already get those with or without a
sorority, that's also not logical. Especially if you consider they studied the
impact of fraternities over a time that includes dates from when the college
was men-only and claim the fraternity effect was consistent. If "same sex
social bonds" was really the driving factor, then men from non-fraternities
should have seen the same effect back when the school was single-sex, since
all of them would have more (and nearly exclusively) same-sex friendships.

Their other reasoning is: > sororities hadn’t been around for long enough to
provide the same networking opportunities as the more established fraternities
at the former men's college he and his co-authors studied.

This one seems easy to falsify as well. Simply compare the salary outcomes
from men in newer / less-established fraternities (I assume those pop up from
time to time?) to those in older ones, and compare both of those to sororities
with age of organization considered to see the difference. If age of
fraternity is irrelevant, then it should be irrelevant to sororities as well.

I'm of the opinion that fraternities are a good way to make connections with
people who don't mind doing favors for other fraternity members, including
hiring/promoting/vouching for them over non-members for jobs. Since women are
less likely to be in positions of power where they can do "favors' like that
in the first place, and because studies show that women are judged more
harshly for promoting diversity (aka hiring other women - see:
[https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-
penalized-f...](https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-
for-promoting-diversity)) there is less opportunity or incentive to use those
connections to give career favors to sorority sisters.

------
creatrixcordis
who cares, if you know your shit, you walk in the interview and make them feel
stupid, make them feel like you have a monopoly on knowledge, like it oozes
out of you and drips to the floor and if they don't lick it off they might
miss something, lol, then they would be stupid to pass on you, then they will
surely want you on their team. but you can only do that if you really learn or
you can bs to a professional level

there are many ways into the castle, some people walk in the front door, some
take the back door, some sneak through the side gate and some ride on the
shoulders of others..., some fuck the manager or blow the boss, or maybe play
golf at the same golf club or are in the same motorcycle club, or fuck the
same prostitute and catch each other at the door and have an understanding, or
have the same drug dealer

if you are sitting on the sideline keeping score, you might end up hungry
while someone eats your bread.

it doesn't matter what color the cat is, as long as it catches mice. but my
moms favorite quote was machiavelli's maxim, the end always justifies the
means

i guess the question is, if you would be in their shoes? you would read this
article and say, damn right!

i still think in a lot of corporate environments, money is definitely being
made on the side by the decision makers when it comes time to pick an
outsourcing firm, or award a contract to a contracting company, you know, you
jack me off and i will jack you off later kinda thing, gotta grease the wheels
of the company politics once in a while or else you might get caught not
working

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _if you walk in the interview and make them feel stupid_

... then you won't get hired, because nobody wants to hire an asshole with
such poor social skills that they can't talk to someone without talking down
to them.

~~~
creatrixcordis
how is showing your mental prowess talking down to "them"?, that is what
interviews are for, you probably don't want to work for anyone who can't stand
in a room with someone smarter then them, remember everyone is different, you
will only feel stupid for a little while or in a state of lacking something,
but in some cultures this behavior would be taken as a direct insult, i agree
with you there, but hopefully you don't live in those countries, where
everything is personal and macho...

