Are schools rewarding the right people as the highest achievers? If the goal is hard-working, productive, adaptable adults, then U.S. high schools are recognizing precisely the correct group.
For all students, a network of career exploration opportunities, sponsors, and mentors is a critical accompaniment to coursework.
Higher education, in contrast, did not always keep its promise to develop the talents of even its best students. Left with classroom achievement alone, many students never found a negotiable path to a clearly envisioned career corresponding to their deepest interests and values.
Women—and only women—lowered their intellectual self-esteem between high school graduation and sophomore year of college.
As valedictorians matured from high school they began to change their views of success from stereotypical ideals such as material wealth or emulating their parents’ lifestyle to an idea created on their own. They now sought balance between money, career and family as opposed to, say, only wealth. Academically and careerwise most of them were traditionally successful.
Are valedictorians successful a decade and a half after high school? Yes is the simple answer to this straightforward question…Yet the answer becomes infinitely less simple when we examine what society and the valedictorians themselves mean by “success.
The record is clear; nothing succeeds like success and there is no predictor of academic success better than a history of academic success.
Extremely talented students face an odd danger: they do so well in the paths they choose that they might not question whether the direction really fits them.
Male valedictorians attended Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford. Only one woman chose an Ivy League university-Cornell.
For academically talented women, in contrast, school success does not guarantee occupational success. Even the best female college students need people who will support them, encourage them, and – most important—who will connect them to opportunities.
Outstanding students of color arrived on campus without the web of white middle-class family and school structures that provided Anglo students with practical knowledge in such areas as college choice strategies and career planning.
College bonds weakened for students of who lived off campus, took outside employment, and maintained active family commitments. Unskilled in navigating the university, these students were unlikely to enter the personal networks where insiders traded the practical information they desperately needed.
For minority students, as for women and working-class white valedictorians, superior college grades did not lead smoothly to high-level satisfying work.
The stories of successful channels, stifling ruts, and missed paths all point to the same conclusion: the successful passage from school to postschool achievement requires an interpersonal process of increasing self-understanding, career socialization, and tacit knowledge.
Academically capable men and women almost never follow a single-minded interest from childhood into careers.
The happiest have found adult achievement arenas that do engage them, occasionally through the luck of good early choices, sometimes by leaving worn paths, and most often through exploring themselves and careers with the help of guides and sponsors.
Just as the stereotypes of the one-sided academic grind or the obsessed genius are myths for high school valedictorians, also false is the conception of academic achievers as troubled individuals effective only in school.
As a group, valedictorians have always led well-rounded, socially integrated, ‘normal’ lives.
Female valedictorians marry a little later and participate somewhat more heavily in paid work than women in their age group nationally.
In their early thirties, the most career-invested women and men in the Illinois Valedictorian Project are those who have found deep personal meaning in vocations. Those qualities and conditions that keep students centered on work are different than those that made them high school valedictorian.
