A new study links doing one's homework, being interested and behaving responsibly in high school to better academic and career success as many as 50 years later. This effect, reported in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, holds true even after accounting for parental income, IQ and other factors known to influence achievement, researchers report.
The study analyzed decades of data collected by the American Institutes for Research beginning in 1960 and continuing to the present. The original data set included more than 370,000 students. High school participants were originally tested on academic, cognitive and behavioral characteristics in 1960 and also responded to follow-up surveys in later years. The new analysis looked at the initial student tests and their responses 11 years and 50 years later.
Of the 1,952 participants randomly selected from those who responded to surveys 50 years later, "those who showed more interest in high school and had higher writing skills reported earning higher incomes," said Spengler, who led the study. "They also tended to have higher occupational prestige than their peers when they showed responsible behaviors as a student." This was in addition to the gains associated with IQ, family income and personality traits such as conscientiousness, she said.
https://phys.org/news/2018-02-links-responsible-behavior-high-school.html
[Also Covered By]:
Behavior in high school predicts income and occupational success later in life
American Psychological Association
[Source]: University of Illinois
The paper "How you behave in school predicts life success above and beyond family background, broad traits, and cognitive ability" is available online and from the U. of I. News Bureau. DOI
Has your experience been as described ??
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28 2018, @07:32PM (8 children)
I thought we were all supposed to drop out of high school to get rich.
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Wednesday February 28 2018, @08:03PM (1 child)
Shows that you then had to drop out responsibly and politely, with a well-written F-U-All letter.
That's gonna be tough for the current generation to do, unless a 4-misspelled words Instagram post with a Grumpy Cat Meme, an eggplant emoji (gun emoji optional), turns out to be considered polite and responsible communication 50 years from now.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday February 28 2018, @08:54PM
Well, also consider the audience.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 01 2018, @01:04AM (5 children)
Our school system is an abomination and favors rote memorization over actual understanding of the material. You won't automatically get rich if you drop-out, but it's also a fallacy that our society automatically assumes that anyone not 'educated' in a high school must be uneducated; it depends entirely on the person and how motivated they are to learn using alternate methods.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 01 2018, @08:00AM (2 children)
It was my impression that our schools are in place to teach subordination. Take orders gracefully. Be a sheep.
But the wolves get fed.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 01 2018, @10:01AM (1 child)
Well, all that, but important part is: If you learn to not lose your head, be patient and endure everything, while functioning and delivering on school's demands, then it means you have a perseverance, discipline and flexibility, as well as tolerance to stress. Now, all you need to have for outstanding success is that all of the previously said hasn't numbed you into lack of criticism and low-profile type behavior habit. That is a final test. But even if you become and remain a mediocre, you'll still be ahead of majority and score a well paying job at those who came out unscathed.
Besides, memorizing and subordination are vastly underrated.
Understanding without memorizing is just entertainment, memorizing without understanding is mere recording, only memorizing and understanding is knowledge. Preferably, school needs to give you ability to access your internal "recordings", analyze them, understand their meaning, and expand them with your understanding, so that you can not only reproduce the original, but also explain it.
All non-trivial human endeavors are based on subordination. There is no good leader who never had been a subordinate. (Memorized) memories of an former subordinate is what gives a leader an in-depth insight into how organization functions, what it can, and what it cannot do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @12:57PM
No one advocates never memorizing anything; you'd have nothing to work with if you did such a thing. The point is that schools currently focus far too much (almost entirely) on rote memorization.
But schools should never teach people to have a slave mentality, as they tend to do now. People should always be able to use their critical thinking skills and question authority.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 01 2018, @07:17PM (1 child)
So what you are saying is that the school system is very reflective of both the interview process and work in general?
I think that is the best way to prepare students for their future life.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 04 2018, @01:00PM
Well, it doesn't make for a very healthy society at all when most people have almost no critical thinking skills whatsoever. Who knows how much innovations we are missing out on by having such a disastrous school system, or how much better our political system would be if people could think for themselves. Maybe instead of forcing people to adapt to draconian workplaces, we should fix the workplaces.