SCHOOL vs. REAL LIFE

10 years after graduating from one of the best high schools in the country, the most common job among the former students is a gas station attendant.

There were 30 of us in our class, five boys and twenty-five girls. All of us finished high school. (some had to repeat a year)

I attended a very respectable high school. The year I graduated, we were the only school in the country with a perfect, 100% pass record at the state end-of-year exams. It is ten years since then, which seems like a good time to have a look at how we, the former students, are doing. I wanted to see what kind of jobs we have and what impact our high school grades have on our life. This is why I conducted a small study…

MY THOROUGHLY UN-SCIENTIFIC METHODOLOGY: I took our class yearbook and used Facebook and Messenger to find out three things about my former classmates: (1) their current job status, (2) how happy they are in life at the moment, and (3) their grade and general attitude towards school. I gathered all the data by talking to my classmates directly or asking others for information.

My former classmates live and work all over the world and in fields as diverse as professional theatre and theoretical mathematics. But despite our school being one of the “best” in the country, our most common job is gas station attendant.

We were a quite typical class and our overall grades (averages over 4 years) conformed to a standard gauss distribution.

The image represents male and female students accurately

What kind of jobs we have?

For the purposes of this mini analysis I divided my former classmates into five categories based on what kind of job they currently hold.

It should not be too hard to decide in which category any individual fits.

Let’s have a closer look. There are four people in our class that we could say that have already “made it” — meaning that they have reached a very visible success in their fields. We could say that they are at the forefront of their professions.

The overachievers in our class: a coach of a professional basketball team, a member of parliament, a tv host and a respected theoretical mathematician.

Then, we have a group of people that could be best described by saying that “they have made their parents proud.” They have reached good (and stable) jobs in their chosen fields and have all the chances to grow professionally.

Most of these have a decent income and are not at all afraid about the future.

The next category are people who were forced to pick the first job they could because of various circumstances. They might have gotten a child, dropped out of college or could not be supported by their parents anymore.

The vast majority of these have children.

Moving on to a category that did not exist a decade ago. It presents very unique lifestyle challenges and therefore deserves to be included on this list: people without a stable profit, also known as the precariat. These are freelancers that are not quite able to count on enough work every month or those forced into some kind of a gig economy. Their unifying feature is a lack of a consistent income.

Almost none of these people have children, own their own living quarters, or have any savings.

Lastly, there are those who were unable to find a job and have either stopped searching or could be considered unemployable. This is either because they have graduated in a field with poor job prospects, a lack of skills needed to enter the job market, or both.

All of these are completely dependent on their relatives to survive.

A decade after high school, we are all reaching our thirties. This is the time when most of the people settle into their careers and start reaping the rewards of their early efforts. It seems that our class is doing about average, we are again seeing a predictable gauss-like distribution.

Perhaps the only surprise in this distribution is a slightly larger number of people than expected working in the gig economy.

Connecting this with high school grades

Comparing the jobs former classmates have with the grades we earned in high school makes for a very interesting analysis. Here are two of the most surprising findings:

Clearly, something very unusual is happening with our A students.

Even though there were only five boys and twenty-five girls in our class, all four overachievers are male.

This points towards an achievement gap between those who the school system marked as “poised” to succeed, and those who actually went on to reach success. Moving on to other categories:

This category seems to have grades that we would expect from them. Decent but not outstanding.

The grade gap between people working in their fields and those that do not is noticeable, but is not large.

People working in the gig economy are scattered all over this chart.

Looking at the whole picture of our class, we can see that those with “average” grades (B, C, D) vastly outperform those on the extremes (with A’s or F’s). Looking at the people with the worse grades this performance gap might be explained with conventional arguments of a lack of abilities or a lack of work ethics. However looking at the other end of the spectrum, we are hard pressed to explain why our best students are not succeeding.

The A students are clearly underperforming, while the top achievers had only average grades.

To understand the data in this (tiny) sample I felt compelled to obtain some more information about the circumstances of their life. So I asked my classmates two questions and compared their answers. They are:

1. How important was high school for you? (on a scale from “not at all” to “extremely important”)
2. How happy are you in life right now? (on a scale from “not at all” to “extremely happy”)

The answers are plotted on the vertical axis, with extremely happy/important on the top.

A very high correlation can be seen between the importance of school and the grades.

Those who found school very important are much less happy and have far worse careers than those who cared a lot about school.

What to make of this data?

I feel this section should start with a disclaimer. Objectively, our class of 30 students is too small of a sample to make definite conclusions about the school system at large. We also need to take into account that our school was certainly considered as one of the most respected grammar schools in the country. The year I enrolled, only two schools in the entire nation required higher test scores than ours. Nevertheless, the findings are very interesting and certainly deserve our attention.

This shows that academic success is not aligned with success later in life

If we ignore the A-students in our class, who are obviously very unsatisfied with their careers at the moment, there is only a slight correlation between good grades and better jobs. Instead the data hints at an almost inverse correlation between the amount of importance we attributed to our schoolwork and our future success. Unless you had real problems with your grades in high school, it would appear the less important school was for you ten years ago, the better you did in life.

Our class produced quite a number of overachievers, as expected from a selective institution, but their academic record was very unremarkable and school for them was not really important. This shows that academic success (at least in our class) is not aligned with success later in life.

Another interesting finding: those working part time jobs are the most similar to the overachievers both in terms of grades and how important high school was for them. The charts above do not show an important fact: the overachievers all used to be part of the “green” category of project workers for a few years before breaking out. In any case, their success in school does not appear to be a predictor of their later success or happiness.

What do you make of this?

If you are like me, instead of providing answers, this research only opened up more questions. How does the relationship between grades in school and success in life look like in other classes or schools? Does it show the same trends as in our class? If that is the case, why is this happening? Can we do something about this?

An ask for help

It would be great to see data from more classes and schools to begin answering some of the questions raised. I am looking for people between the ages of 26 and 32, meaning that they have graduated from high school about ten years ago, willing to find out what their former high school classmates are doing and sharing this data (anonymously, of course) with me. I am planning to analyse the larger dataset and publish the results.

The commitment involves filling out a questionairre about your classmates’ current jobs and past grades. This should not take you more than 30 minutes, and I expect you can get all the answers if you “stalk” your former classmates on Facebook or Messenger — that’s how I did it. If interested, please reach out to me through our university: m.goljar0920171@arts.ac.uk, and I will send you the questionairre with all the instructions you need to complete it.