
Wondering What Happened to Your Class Valedictorian? Not Much, Research Shows - bane
http://time.com/money/4779223/valedictorian-success-research-barking-up-wrong/?xid=frommoney_soc_socialflow_twitter_money
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gwern
I would question the statistics here without more details. As a simple matter
of course, you would expect very few valedictorians to do anything impressive
because few people ever do anything impressive; in a population of 320 million
people (more if you consider competition with foreign countries), 'impressive'
typically means something like being in the top 0.001% or higher. For
something like a Nobel, winning it means you are literally 1 in a few million
people. (Quick, what's the name of the 200th best chess player or tennis
player or mathematician?) While on the other hand, every year of every high
school in the USA produces a valedictorian (or more than one); if a million
kids graduate high school every year with an average class size of 200, then
there would be 5000+ valedictorians every year. Are there 5000+ famous
impressive people every single year without fail with 100% turnover? No, not
really.

It gets worse because high schools aren't equally selective. There's probably
plenty of tiny little high schools out in the Midwest or in other rural areas
where 'valedictorian' means being the best-graded out of 20 or 50 kids, while
on the other hand, at a magnet high school like Stuyvesant, half the school
might be valedictorian level if they had gone elsewhere (but they can't all be
the lone Stuy valedictorian).

Unless you've taken these into account, the rest of the discussion of grades
selecting for Conscientiousness and conformity etc, while plausible, sound
like just so many Just So stories.

(I have a similar issue with analyses of Hunter College Elementary School
which speculate at great length about why its alumnis appear to be so
disappointing, when as far as I can tell, the underperformance is exactly what
one would expect from the unreliability of early-childhood IQ tests plus base
rates: [https://www.gwern.net/Statistical%20notes#genius-
revisited-o...](https://www.gwern.net/Statistical%20notes#genius-revisited-on-
the-value-of-high-iq-elementary-schools) )

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Fezzik
I would just say the metric of "changing the world" the author is using is
simply a bad metric. As you say, almost no one changes the world. The
interesting part, to me, is that Valedictorians end up doing pretty darn well:
"Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6,
and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little
debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent
are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs."

In short, being a Valedictorian in high-school is a great predictor of future
success. The only perspective from which Valedictorians are not successful,
given the data set, is from a holier-than-though mindset. Garbling that
message by saying not every Valedictorian has moved mountains is... silly.

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gmarx
On the other hand I pretty well fit the implied description of someone who
would go on to be very successful and yet I did not. I'm doing okay. I took my
shots and they didn't work out.

My class valedictorian, in a bizarre coincidence, lives next door to me (even
though we moved across the country and didn't plan it). He is a very rich ex
VC who now has a decently successful startup going.

So as much as I would like to use this article to prop up my ego...

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iamacynic
wait... you're literally living next door to him yet you think he's operating
on some next-level of success compared to you? do you rent his guest house or
something?

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gmarx
He owns two houses which he has merged into a compound like situation. I rent
next door in a tiny house that was likely created as grad student housing.
Most places rich people live also have more modest homes intermixed

