> I disagree. Citation not needed. Common sense and critical reasoning will suffice here.

I'm not so sure about that. I'm ~3 decades away from high school. Looking at the academic top 10% of our class, all of us have advanced graduate degrees so academic success in high school led to similar success in university.

Today in that group a handful are unemployed (not retired, just unemployed) and the rest of us have solid successful but uneventful careers.

The wildly successful ones (mansions, yachts, all that) were all in the lower 50% of our class academically. They were (and are) good at hustling and sales and started many businesses and are today very rich.