The Fraternity Paradox: Lower GPA, Higher Incomes
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not really, no. It's a paradox if you think a single-minded concentration on grades is the right strategy to rise to the top of a meritocracy. People skills are learned, and that's one of the things organizations like fraternities will teach you.
For those who have committed to the fraternal path, sure.
Then there are those who simply find associating with the Greek community to be morally degenerate...and those who don't have the financial means to satisfy mandatory annual dues...and those who can't reconcile value.
Isn’t it obvious why GPA goes down? Social activity sky rockets.
The paperwork has been pretty much irrelevant.
I'm not even sure where my physical diploma is. I'm sure it's in a box somewhere.
EDIT: To clarify this was at a talk to a group of college students - almost exclusively geared towards prospective interns or fresh graduates.
Also this is something I was told by an employee at Google... I don't understand the downvotes. Maybe my wording was harsh... should I have said "seriously decreased chances of selection"?
It's entirely possible that this has changed, but I'd be pretty surprised. Competition for tech talent has heated up A LOT since then, and using transcripts as a blunt instrument to limit your talent pool seems like a move in the wrong direction.
It's also possible (but prob unlikely) that they treat candidates in a more case-by-case fashion, and don't ask for transcripts for certain programs that are well-known to them (I got my degrees at Cal).
[1] I overextended myself in college and ended up with three degrees and a low-3s GPA
It's also possible that they asked for transcripts and you politely declined while I felt it was a non-negotiable request.
We are told or taught that the US is a land of opportunity and meritocracy. One of our great myths is that bloodline doesn't matter. It goes back to our founders and the fact that we fought against a bloodline royalty. This is what I was taught from kindergarten onwards. That america was special and exceptional. We didn't have royalty. Doesn't matter who your father was, we are all "kings" and equal.
But you leave school and join the real world and you realize all of that was nonsense. Your success in life has more to do with who your parents are than anything else.
George Bush with a C average is far better off than the valedictorian.
Ultimately, we aren't as special or different than any other nation.
I think this fact is surprising to most americans because we are taught something entirely different from the first day of school.
Sure, access to the network of peers that comes with elite schools has long been known to be one of the biggest benefits of admission.
But it’s also things like GPA not measuring EQ, or emotional intelligence. One example, at big companies that sell software, who do you think gets paid more (not counting founder status) the most talented and elite engineers, or the the most talented and elite sales people?
Some here don’t realize it’s common for an enterprise sales rep to make more, sometimes way more, than a developer. I don’t know who has higher average GPAs but I’m guessing it’s STEM majors over business administration majors.
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.
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.
Maybe we were a weak fraternity but my opinion is that the higher earnings is due mainly to being above average socially.
But the article says sorority members had no income benefit. There must be another factor at play. The author did say the lower age of sororities could be a factor b/c networks are less established, but surely that would mean there is no corresponding benefit for men in new fraternities, which I doubt is the case. Either way, they should do a comparison that accounts for age of org and study the effect at women's colleges next (especially women's colleges that turn co-ed, since that would be equivalent to their subject here).
Think of a history class, where a big part of your grade might be a research paper only tangentially tied to the core of the course. Putting a bit less effort into it--the average GPA gap seems like the difference between an A and a B+ at many schools--doesn't necessarily mean you're less informed about that area of history.
And knowing how much effort is worthwhile to put into a task given deadlines, other pressures, etc. is an extremely valuable skill in business and life in general.
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.
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.
Probably because the word "fraternity" already captures all of the features that overlap with gangs without bringing in a whole load of irrelevant connotations?
As for 'irrelevant connotations', I know you are saying that because of the implied violent and illegal behavior that takes place in a gang, but from the outside, it doesn't exactly appear that frats are immune to that either. It's actually quite amazing how cohesive the organizations can be once a woman accuses one of their members of sexual assault.
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.
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.
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.
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...) there is less opportunity or incentive to use those connections to give career favors to sorority sisters.
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
... 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.
I know for a fact that this happens excessively at a very big, well know and well respected company. Huge levels of corruption and under the table payments for outsourcing/contract labor.