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Originally Posted by ucqwerty  I am surprised to see that nobody is really arguing that there is a correlation. |
It'd be a pretty silly argument - there is ample evidence that those who complete more school, do better in school, and go to more prestigious schools earn more money. Assuming that's your metric of career success the case is closed from a data collection perspective. That said, the effect appears only on the average. The outliers in both directions are both dramatic and numerous.
I myself am an outlier on the high side - I was only passably successful in school (MS from a state university with acceptable grades) but I've been very successful in my career - I'm probably top-5% of earners out of those of similar degree and age.
I can tell you what differences I see: school success is about four things
1) acceptable intelligence
2) a willingness to follow requirements/directions exactly
3) a willingness to put in sufficient time to do a good job of following the directions
4) the ability to infer implied but not explicitly stated requirements on assignments and follow those requirements (for example, a sociology paper may have the implicit requirement that you support the prof's political bias)
I had no shortage of 1) but only a limited interest in 2)-4) depending on the class, so I got only acceptable grades.
The real world is different. Intelligence still matters. Showing up still matters. But the tasks you need to be doing are no longer externally assigned. You now have wide latitude to choose what you do, and suddenly the choices matter. For example in school if you're doing a music degree it makes no real difference whether you do your performance classes on English horn or French horn. You can get an A just as easily either way. But in the real world it matters - there are 4 French horn chairs for every 1 English horn chair in a symphony and there are many more competent English horn players. So playing French horn is a way better choice.
Similarly, drive matters in the real world. There's no one telling you that you have to do much of anything. Just sitting on the couch is an option. There's no list of task your have to accomplish with due dates and surprisingly little punishment if you do nothing at all when compared to school.
Other people have commented on people skills, and I agree in general that they increase in importance.