[JackOfCrows]

Define intelligence.

One of the issues with academia and academic training is it defines intelligence very narrowly. For example, it teaches people that simply having the right answer (or even just saying the right answer) is enough to be "smart". And then these smart people get out in the world and struggle because they learned a lot of "correct answers" but they didn't learn bigger things like: how to solve a problem, how sometimes people don't like you when you seemingly have the correct answer, how to account for all sorts of things you don't know outside the confines of a test question or assignment, or how to get the social buy in to actually do the correct thing (because "people liking you enough to do what you suggest" can be just as important as actually knowing what to do, if not moreso).

The other thing is the academic environment teaches a competitive intelligence but in many business situations you need many kinds of intelligence. If you are not good at sales but you're selling something, a social butterfly sales person can make or break you. An actual project manager that knows how to run a project can be worth more than gold. An accountant can keep your books better than you can even if you are broadly better at math in general because tax law is its own thing.

Further, intelligence overall isn't broadly applicable to many areas. Think of the doctors and lawyers who don't know how to open a PDF or the many programmers who blow off license agreements and legal documents until they get sued.

Academia gives you a narrow definition and scope of intelligence. The world is much more complicated.