<p>@RedEyeJedi - You overstate the case considerably. No one said performing well in high school is a precursor to a successful life. The original study simply said that performing well in high school, on average, led to somewhat higher earnings in the next decade or so afterwards. Your anecdotal example means nothing, because no one claimed it was a 100% correlation or anything close to that. If you know statistics, you are probably familiar with a normal curve. For anything, even the most scientific (as opposed to sociological) circumstance, that means that even inputs at the low probability end of the curve have “successful” outcomes a certain percentage of the time. So it doesn’t go against what the research predicts, you just beat the odds.</p>
<p>I am also not sure who said intelligence was the only factor involved. In fact, I know I said, and I think others said or implied the same, that there are many factors, but intelligence certainly is an important one. The person said it was a function of intelligence, which doesn’t rule out other factors in the functional equation. It is obviously a multivariate equation, with the weighting on certain variables changing with the stage of life, if you buy the research.</p>