Wondering What Happened to Your Class Valedictorian? Not Much, Research Shows | Hacker News Reader

Wondering What Happened to Your Class Valedictorian? Not Much, Research Shows

time.com

19 pointsbane7 comments

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... )

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.

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...

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?

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

Did you both go to the same univerisity? That probably matters more than high school rank

He Stanford. I MIT

Reply on news.ycombinator.com