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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, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday February 28 2018, @09:08PM (3 children)
I'm guessing you wanted to go there and didn't get in because your verbal and non-STEM scores weren't so good.
But I'm going to agree with MIT on this one: Good verbal skills and a wide range of knowledge definitely helps people working in technology. Some of the examples of why it matters:
- You need to be able to understand why you're building the thing you're being asked to build, in order to design it properly.
- You need to be able to make suggestions of why something else you could build might be better.
- You need to be able to explain what you've built to STEM colleagues who are going to need to use it.
- You also need to be able to explain your work to people with little-to-no STEM background.
- If you start getting to the point where you're supervising or mentoring other people, you need to be skilled at reading moods and handling their psychology well.
- If you start getting further up in the hierarchies, you'll need to develop good schmoozing skills. I know you probably don't like that, but welcome to how management works.
And if you look at the really celebrated scientists out there, you'll notice they can speak and write well. Because it's part of the job.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28 2018, @09:26PM
Very bad.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 28 2018, @10:36PM (1 child)
"And if you look at the really celebrated scientists out there, you'll notice they can speak and write well."
There's a heavy dose of selection bias there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 01 2018, @08:29AM
> There's a heavy dose of selection bias there.
Right. The scientists who can speak and write well are selected for those traits from the pool of scientists who are smart ambitious and lucky enough.
That's exactly the point.