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Comment by curiouslurker | Hacker News Reader

"There’s the old saying that A students become professors, B students become mid-level managers at large corporations and the C students endow buildings and professorships."

Is this really true? Where is from?

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It is true that people with poor GPAs (to a certain extent) often do very well. They might achieve extreme results more often than people with better GPAs.

To what extent? The number is 2.9 http://www.businessinsider.com/eric-barker-millionaires-bad-...

However, this just shows that they are outliers. It may turn out to be the case that there are just as many negative outliers for that GPA (or not, I don't know).

If you are asking if it is true that this is an old saying, I have heard the sentiment before many times. I can't remember the name of the book where someone said the people who got the to the moon were lead by a C-student but all of them had perfect GPAs. However, I don't know of that particular phrasing.

This 2.9 number comes from "Millionaire Mind," published in 2000 with the data from 1990s. The same book states that 2% of millionaires were in the top 1% of the college classes and 90% graduated from college. Note the huge amount of grade inflation since the surveyed millionaires graduated (their average age was 54, so they would be in college on average in the 1960s) and a large increase in the percentage of students attending colleges. And a myriad of possible selection biases. It doesn't seem like a good argument that people with poor GPAs do better than people with high GPAs.

http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf

https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2010/ted_20100428.png

https://books.google.com/books?id=p60tDntHVnUC&pg=PA99&lpg=P...

Exactly. How much money did those people start out with? If you're from a wealthy family and will work for the family business it doesn't matter what your GPA is.

Don’t know if this is true, but it rings true all the same. A students get bogged down with “getting an A” at what they do. That requires a lot of time and work. C students socialize and make connections. They fail a lot more often than they succeed, but there’s survivor bias.

A students also go to med school.

I'm from Ghana and this trend happens quite a lot. But most of the time, the C students who become successful tend to come from wealthy families...

I love your post.

Because our successful American C students come from wealthy families as well.

The key is that there's a big difference from getting C's because you are working on a business on the side and getting C's because you are spending too much time partying or just aren't that smart. Too many people use this as an excuse to justify bad grades.

For me I just saw it as another example of the 80/20 rule. I could spend hours studying to get an A or do the minimum and still get a B and spend my time working on more important stuff

Thanks to grade inflation there are only A students now.

I think the quote is implying the C students are the wealthy legacy students that are there to party, but who have the family money to name buildings.

Zuckerberg and Gates either had good enough high school GPAs and SATs to get into Harvard or got in on legacy (George W. Bush Yale style).

They didn't get in on legacy. Their fathers went to local public universities instead respectively.

Both had rich parents though. I think that makes it slightly easier to get into Harvard. They could live in good neighborhoods, attend the best public or private schools and also try entrepreneurial activities with a safety net. Now maybe that safety is overrated in general but it is still there nonetheless.

Gates also left a mark or two at Harvard for actual academic stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pancake_sorting

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