Something I’ve long thought, that the qualities that make a val/sal aren’t usually the ones that make someone a world changer. I think colleges know it, too.
Valedictorian is a concept of the past. Valedictorians are rule followers while world-changers are rule setters. I don’t think we have valedictorian in our school but only top 5% or 10%. The top x% academically aren’t exactly the x% that go to the top schools. So, good luck to whoever strive to be valedictorians.
At our son’s school, the valedictorian is the student who gives the valedictory speech at graduation, not the top student. At high schools were we live, there can be several valedictorians per class which becomes meaningless IMO and just shows what a race it is. I feel for these kids.
My school doesn’t calculate ranking, and there is no valedictorian or salutatorian. We do acknowledge Cum Laude, but even through there, it is not clear who is val/sal. The graduation speech is given by two students who are voted for by the student body, and can be anywhere in the ranking of the class.
We see people out here every year (parents and kids) who are gnashing their teeth over making val or sal. I think they see it as a golden ticket. Just found out last week that the val from D2’s class dropped out of his highly ranked LAC after sophomore year. I thought when I heard it, “Maybe he’s figured out that there is more to life than classrooms & studying.” So this article resonated when I saw it.
Seems like a completely useless study to me. You take a tiny sample of the vals and compare their results to a tiny sliver of the population (those that “change the world, run the world, or impress the world” – what does that even mean?). I bet if you included the entire student body of those 81 schools you’d find that ZERO students “changed the world” even though there were more than two orders-of-magnitude more of them.
What did the study actually find? That 95% of the vals studied graduated from college, 90% were in professional careers, 40% are in the “highest tier jobs”, and “the majority have good lives”. How does that compare to the rest of the student body of those schools?
The main conclusion of the article is basically sneering, “they’re all b*tt kissers”.
The Val and Sal at my public magnet are strictly chosen according to being the top ranked academically as #1 and #2.
Funny part is that the val and sal ratings aren’t considered nearly as big of a deal as being a Westinghouse/Siemens/Intel semi-finalist/finalist or earning a similar type national academic competition. Most of even the top 25% who ended up attending an Ivy/peer elite didn’t really care.
A reason why when a younger HS classmate got an ulcer from being obsessed with graduating as Val, vast majority of us were wondering what she was thinking. And from what I’ve heard from one of her friends, she ended up being really pissed off when she ended up as a Sal despite being accepted to Yale EA.
Incidentally, the Val of my graduating class attended Harvard and ended up becoming a non-profit lawyer with a political/charitable advocacy organization after attending YLS while the sal of my graduating class and good buddy graduated MIT with BS/MS in EE within 4 years and after working for a bit as an EE in Europe, came back to do his EE PhD at MIT and is now the head of a Boston area tech firm.
I’ve always wondered about that. Our Val was a brilliant non-conformist who went on to great success. Our Sal, absolutely a hardworking conformist, not so much career success. I don’t think she even pursued a career after college. I think the idea of comformists vs. non-conformist may have bearing. I was third so spent time watching those two through high school and beyond.
No Val and Sal at my kids HS. Student speakers are the president of the student council and senior class president.
When I graduated from HS, we had a 3 way tie for Val. One of them is a lawyer for a government agency. The other two have careers that no one would consider high profile.
A high school classmate, who was an average student, spent his entire career in the hospitality industry. He eventually managed a famous resort, earning an MBA along the way.
I was val. I didn’t end up with a high-powered career, because that would have entailed living in a large city such as Boston, and I had no desire to do that. But running our own company out of our house in the Maine woods is not a bad lifestyle! I have no regrets. And it was fun going back for my 30th HS reunion and having classmates (who didn’t give me the time of day in HS) saying, “I want my photo taken with the valedictorian!” Ha.
My daughter was sal and I wouldn’t call her a rule follower or a world changer. I don’t think she aspires to either. While many of her Wellesley classmates are freaking out about getting jobs at Google or other top companies, she will be pursuing her dream of becoming a hospital chaplain. The val of her HS class, who is graduating from Stanford, will be starting law school in the fall, but is looking at immigration law, not some high-paying, high-prestige job. I believe the val of my high school class became a pediatrician.
Funny, most of my graduating HS class likely forgot who the val and sal are within a day or two of graduation.
If I had an opportunity to take a photo with them, it’d be mainly because the val is doing great work for an underserved underprivileged constituency and the sal because he’s a cool friend and head of a tech firm doing cool innovative tech work. However, both are far too busy with their lives to likely have time to attend HS reunions/gatherings at this point.
I was val. Totally based on GPA. They used everthing through the last final of senior year so no speech. They announced val at graduation (I found out about an hour before from the superintendent’s daughter). I was a rule follower for sure. Today I work at NASA. I was in mission control for quite a while. I got out of it to be able to have regular hours to take my kids to sports and spend more time with them. Got out of management for the same reason. Still there today and not sad about choices but didn’t change the world, just maybe a shuttle flight or two.
Oh, cobrat, you’re something else!
@momofcarly, very cool!
Our valedictorian is now a state’s attorney. I don’t know if that is good or bad, but it fits in with the article.
A few years ago, someone asked me who,the Val,and Sal of. Y class were. I had NO idea. They were not listed in our yearbook which went to publication LONG before graduation.
I found a friend who happened to have saved the HS graduation program. My class was 1100 or so…and the name of the Val rang a bell…but that was it.
There were eight (yes…eight) student speakers at my HS graduation, all chosen with a class vote. Neither the Val or Sal spoke. Eight was WAYYYYYY too many speakers!
I remember the Val of my DD’s HS class but I have no idea who the Val,was of my son’s class.
I agree with posters above…once you graduate from HS, this becomes a much less meaningful thing…except to the Val and sal families!
Thanks.
Ironically, despite the val and sal often being stereotyped as “rule followers” and conformists, my HS graduating class val ended up not fitting those stereotypes.
If she had, she’d have either gone off to become an equity partner(IP, litigation, M & A, or something along those lines) in one of the higher profile white shoe biglaw firms, gone into politics like an older classmate who is now in Congress, etc.
Ironically, if she had attended and graduated from my LAC, her career path would have been quite conformist by its standards.
For his formal graduation portrait photo, my son wanted to pose while burning a handful of high school documents. It’s a symbolic gesture of how much he hated his high school years. To him high school was mostly a huge waste of time. He resented having had to live four years of perpetual tension between true learning and conforming. He knew he had to conform in order to be able to achieve high GPA that’s required for successful college admissions, but he hated the experience of conforming to his teachers’ expectations and their assignments devoid of meaning. Towards his senior year, he even started to distance himself from a coterie of his best friends because, according to him, all they ever talk about and care about was how to “play the game” to come out at the top.
He specifically avoided any attempts to go for the Val/Sal distinction (with my full approval and support); instead, he spent more of his time doing things that not only mattered to his heart but played a “self-healing” role in more significant ways than he’d ever know. When his high school was driving him crazy, I would often find him in our basement well past midnight making music. Music’s been his passion and it’s what allowed him to survive his high school years.
He graduated 6th in his high school class of 370, but thanks to his musical abilities, he’s been admitted to a higher USNWR ranked university than the Val/Sal. At the university he’s headed to, my guess is that he won’t be as torn between having to play the game and wanting to truly learn as I expect the new environment to be more flexible and open to intellectual freedom and creativity. As far as I know, his goal is not to be a world shaker nor a conformist. I think he just wants to be true to himself.
Grade inflation has made the val/sal designation almost meaningless; it’s so crowded at the top, the best students are only separated by thousandths of a point.