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Definitions of Grades and Career Success
For the purpose of this article grades are defined generally as Grade Point Averages (GPA's). To keep the article to a manageable size, the GPA's taken into consideration are only the ones from four-year college degrees. In a few instances placement tests' scores, like the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), are also referred to as grades.
Measures of career success, on the other hand, have varying definitions. The two most common measures of career success defined for this article are higher earnings and job advancement. Since the link between salary and job performance is a direct one (Wise, 1975: 353), the remainder of this article will refer to earnings as the measure of career success.
Higher Grades/Higher Earnings
The vast majority of the studies that were discovered concluded that higher grades produced higher future earnings. The logic seems sound. Studies have shown that there is a good positive correlation between higher grades and higher abilities as measured by I.Q. tests and scores on admissions tests (Spaeth, 1968: 553; Hause, 1971: 294-295). Moreover, people with higher I.Q.'s tend to gravitate toward more schooling and multiple studies show, as one would expect, that this in turn increases earnings (Hause, 1971: 294; Brown & Reynolds, 1975: 1005).
One of the studies examined suggested that grades make an impact on earnings initially on the first job out of school only (Thomas, 1998). Meanwhile another one of the studies concluded that although higher grades have an influence on the rate of increase of earnings in the long run, they do not make a difference in starting salary (Wise, 1975: 356).
An interesting phenomenon was observed by another study about medical education. The study notes, "by withholding encouragement from lowranking students and perhaps actively discouraging them from aspiring to certain career paths, medical education, in common with other fields of learning, can eliminate access to prestigious career outcomes" (Marshall, Fulton, & Wessen, 1978: 127). This type of problem would work in favour of painting a better picture for the view of higher earnings from higher grades because it would push the lower achievers' earnings down while elevating the higher achievers' earnings.
A 1989 longitudinal study tested for the effect of the difference in colleges on future...