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Well, that is kind of the point. On average, apparently, the 4.0 high school students are making more, and I would be willing to predict that more 4.0 high school students have huge savings than 2.0 students. Statistics never talk about individual cases, they simply represent the big picture. If you think that makes the study useless, then fine. You are more interested in individual cases. Other people like to see, with quantitative back-up, how people fare overall. If the correlation is weak, the percentage of people trailing out in the tail end of the curve, so to speak, will be higher.</p>
<p>Don’t act like the study claimed more than it did. Of course a lot of people get more serious about doing well after high school. Many don’t. All the study is saying is whether it is because of motivation, organizational habits, intelligence, or some combination of these and more, people that do well in high school on average do better later in life than those that don’t. No more, no less.</p>
<p>If you think that is a trivial result, then OK. To a large degree I do too, and all I get from the study (and perhaps all it intended to accomplish) was to verify that seemingly obvious result and to have the gap quantified to the 12-14% range it reported, which is less trivial. After all, if a person with a middling GPA is thinking about spending $250,000 on college, they might take this result as an indication that they will be better off skipping college and start earning money right away. Or that they should go to a much cheaper school. But at least it is information to be considered.</p>