[usmeteora]

Well, in the study, they tracked students that went onto become CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, billionaires, Senators, none of which require a Graduate Degree. In fact, most CEOs are Phd dropouts and decided to leave the graduate education system, and some of them dropped out of their Bachelors program even, Mark from FB is in there as well as Lady GaGa. They both have a large influence on society but neither have graduate degrees. I don't see where in this study they were tracking people with Phds only. They tracked all the students who went through the program regardless of what they did.

I believe the only mode of failure they were questioning in the study was the program coordinators own inability or failure to accurately identify people who did end up making large contributions to society (such as Shockley, aka the transistor) who failed to pass their initial thresholds for what they deemed as gifted. Much of the study focuses on questioning the failure of the program to adequately identify and support gifted children, not whether gifted children themselves ended up being successful. I'm honestly surprised noone has brought this up yet and that your comment is so presumptuous.

[squigs25]

They tracked everyone, and measured success by the percentage that earned a PhD. So, while Mark and Lady GaGa were tracked, I don't think I saw any statistic that would have associated these two individuals with a positive outcome (except for the anecdotal line in the paper). I would argue that both Mark and Lady Gaga have probably had more influence than 99.9% of the tracked individuals in the study, and yet they are lowering the presented metric for success (percent that earned a PhD).