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Straight A’s: Do They Still Matter?

Every field of endeavor has honors and awards that people shoot for. In Major League Baseball, the top pitcher wins the Cy Young award. In college football, the best all-around player receives the Heisman Trophy. In the business world, America’s fastest-growing companies earn spots in the Inc. 500.

These honors are priceless, lifelong sources of pride for those who earn them. But they are also routinely devalued – often by those who didn’t earn them (or friends/supporters of the same.) Nowhere is this more apparent in college than with straight A’s. Once seen as a proud symbol of scholastic success, the straight A semester is running out of admirers. And it goes beyond sour grapes from poor students.

Tom Peters, a respected business intellectual and Stanford MBA best known for co-authoring In Search Of Excellence, recently said:

“In the long run, the A students work for the B students. The C students run the businesses.  And the D students get the buildings named after them.”

Is Tom right? Are A’s just hollow victories, celebrated in school but ignored everywhere else? Many people seem to think so, but I don’t. While there is certainly more to life than grades, straight A’s are still an achievement worth pursuing.

I will refute the most frequently heard “straight A’s don’t matter” arguments in turn:

Argument #1: “Colleges teach people to be obedient employees, not free-thinking entrepreneurs. Therefore getting straight A’s just means you followed the rules better than everyone else.”

Why It’s BS: Perry Marshall (one of my favorite writers and a college graduate) speaks for many “straight A skeptics” when he says:

“If you get an “A” in school, it’s simply because you did the exact same thing as 29 other kids, but you did it a little bit better than most of ‘em. It’s almost never because you did something unique or expressed yourself as an individual.”

True, but I believe Perry misses the point. College is ultimately whatever you make of it. I, for example, view my degree as career insurance. As a self-employed freelancer and businessman, I never expected college to provide me with income-generating skills. I want only the assurance that my degree will be there if I temporarily need “regular work” to survive.

In other words: my degree is a credential – a social signal. And all else equal, that signal is stronger if your grades are higher. I’m not saying this is the only good reason to pursue A’s. In fact, it’s not even the only reason I pursue them (as I’ll explain later.) I discuss it only to prove that there is no necessary connection between straight A’s and conformity.

Argument #2: “Grade inflation is rampant on America’s college campuses. Therefore getting straight A’s just means you met artificially lower expectations.”

Why It’s BS: Yes, college professors are handing out A’s like Halloween candy order to save their jobs. But this is a systemic problem with college itself. What are individual students supposed to do about that? Should they slack off and settle for C’s because a bunch of self-serving professors care more about job security than intellectual rigor?

Seems pointless to me. Students don’t set grading policies. Furthermore, plenty of top students genuinely deserve their A’s and would get them whether grade inflation existed or not. Devaluing their achievements because of flaws in a system that others control is a huge injustice.

Argument #3: “Bill Gates/Mark Zuckerberg/Steve Jobs dropped out of college. Therefore getting straight A’s is not essential for big-time success.”

Why It’s BS: This argument is the dumbest of all because it totally ignores statistical significance.  In reality, most people who fail out of college don’t go on to start legendary businesses. The fact that a few of them did does not make academic failure a strength or an asset. Indeed, we constantly hear about these dropout-to-riches stories precisely because they are so rare. (And I say this AS a former high school dropout, by the way.)

What we don’t hear about as often are the academic superstars who absolutely do achieve breathtaking career success. Take Sandy Alderson, longtime MLB executive (and current GM of the New York Mets) with degrees from Dartmouth and Harvard Law School. Somehow, Alderson’s accolades didn’t stop him from transforming the Oakland Athletics into World Series champions, spearheading the Moneyball revolution or becoming one of the most respected and accomplished men in the game.

So, no, straight A’s are not required for big-time success. But the Sandy Aldersons of the world prove that they certainly don’t hurt.

Argument #3: “In the working world, no one cares what your grades were. Therefore getting straight A’s is no guarantee of career success.”

Why It’s BS: So what? Since when is the working world’s opinion the only thing that matters? What about striving for personal excellence? Call me old-fashioned, but there’s something to be said for succeeding on principle. Saying to yourself, “you know what, college might be a grade-inflating, factory-worker-producing indoctrination facility, but I’m here, and for that reason alone, I choose to excel.”

I’ve achieved some noteworthy things in my young life, but none closer to my heart than my first straight A semester. They weren’t just letters on a screen – not to me. Those six A’s in fall 2008 symbolized the reversal of ten years of academic falure. When I closed my eyes, I flashed back through all the steps that brought me there and felt deeply satisfied. I have no idea whether “the working world” is impressed by it. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. It means something to me, as a man.

Make Up Your Own Mind

I’m assuming you read UberStudent because academic success matters to you. If so, then I encourage you to guiltlessly and proudly pursue straight A’s. No, it’s probably not healthy to make it an obsession (although that applies to just about anything.) Having said that, don’t let a bunch of cynical put-downs stop you from kicking ass this semester!

Is College About Education or Credentials?

It’s a decades-old debate with strong believers for each position.

On one side, you have the academics – professors, scholars and other denizens of the intelligentsia – who believe college is about learning and self-actualization. To them, enrolling in a degree program is less about advancing your career and more about becoming a well-rounded person. Earning a degree (to this crowd) should enable you to not only rise up in the world but also, through intellectual effort and character, shape it.

On the other side, you have the professionals – entrepreneurs, employees and ambitious students – who believe college is about the credential. A “piece of paper” (as degrees are so often called) without which their career goals cannot be reached. To this crowd, a degree is something that should be completed as rapidly as possible. College, for them, is just a speed bump on the road to what they really want.

Which Side Is Correct?

Personally, I stand somewhere between these two visions.

I have always valued education – the actual learning of useful, interesting things. It’s why I’m a voracious reader and soak up knowledge from every valid source I can access.  When I attend classes, though, I have to admit: my mind is often on the credential. I’m thinking about “the piece of paper” and how secure I’ll feel once it’s in tow.

Which, believe it or not, actually made me feel guilty at times. The half of me that craves knowledge feels betrayed by the other half’s hunger for prestige.  I suspect most students who value intellectual development and career advancement have felt something like this before.

Well, today, I read something that puts this whole issue into long-overdue perspective. It’s written by Josh Kaufman as a guest post on Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich blog. I strongly recommend reading the whole thing for yourself. Josh explores the nature, purpose and value of college in more detail than most will ever grasp. But I’d like to highlight a few snippets that are useful for our purposes here on UberStudent.

The Key Distinction

The point I found most eye-opening is that education and credentials are not the same at all. There is no inherent reason for us to think of them together. We only do because colleges package them that way:

“Education and credentialing are sold as a bundle, but you’re usually better off unbundling them as much as you’re able. By treating them as separate tools with different objectives, you expand your available options enormously.”

This goes straight to the heart of why degrees have become so important in the last thirty years. Something like 70% of jobs now require at least an associates degree (and that number is rising every year.) Why do employers value degrees so much? If they aren’t synonymous with hard, usable knowledge, what’s the point?

My best friend’s father once heard his son and I complain about how “useless” college material is and set us straight.  What he told us (and what many never realize) is that college is not job training. Employers aren’t hiring you for your mastery of Algebra or U.S. History. No – what an undergraduate degree demonstrates is that you can finish what you start. A four-year program of study may not contain job-specific material, but it does prove that you’re responsible and at least minimally competent.

(See Ramit’s post Your College Is Not a Technical School.)

Why Credentialing & Education Collided

So why have colleges bundled education and credentials together?

The simple answer is “to make money.” And while I certainly agree with that, it doesn’t tell the whole story. For that, we need to recall why colleges exist in the first place. As a society, we’ve become so obsessed with “the piece of paper” that many of us forget what colleges and degrees were even created to do.

The fact is, colleges and universities have been around since long before degrees mattered to employers. They were not created fifty years ago as credential dispensers. Colleges have been around for literally hundreds of years. In fact, as recently as the 1950′s, having a degree was somewhat rare – an intellectual affectation or a luxury rather than the practical necessity it is today. And with good reason: colleges were for people who wanted to immerse themselves in study for its own sake, apart from any career benefits. Relatively few people could afford to do this forty or fifty years ago.

Furthermore, while they are happy to take your money, colleges did not necessarily ask for their awkward role as places of learning/credential dispensers. It’s really a product of social evolution. In a capitalist economy, employers need some way of screening people for character and ability. A filtering heuristic – preferably one that’s effortless to them and paid for by you.

Well, much like natural selection uses the resources at its disposal, employers and society have used college degrees as their heuristic. As Josh explains in his post, a degree is now a social signal:

“College credentialing has become a luxury market. Students (and their parents) aren’t really buying education – they’re buying social status. The credential is seen as a straightforward path to prestige.”

Frighteningly, Josh also points out that many degrees now cost more than they will ever be worth. The value of degrees as a social signal is trending down (because more people have them now) while the costs continue to rise. Josh devotes an entire section of his post to  ”The Student Loan Industrial Complex” – his phrase for students taking on mortgage-sized debt for degrees with negative return on investment. Fascinating (and spooky) stuff.

What Is Education?

Most of us still associate “education” with practical expertise. The ability to produce consistent results using what you’ve learned. Harvard MBA John T. Reed, in his article The Nature Of Expertise, defines “…expertise very broadly as simply knowing specific inputs that produce certain outputs. That is, if you do X, Y will happen. For example, if you plant corn seed, corn plants will grow. That is expertise.”

Outside of school, expertise so defined is what counts. But if you think this is what you’re buying from a university, you’re probably mistaken. Moreover, if you have valuable expertise and can prove it in the marketplace, having a degree becomes far less important.

As Josh explains:

If your work can provide benefits that other people want or need badly enough to pay for, they simply won’t care whether or not you have a credential. Money in the bank speaks for itself.

As for potential employers, think about it from their perspective:

• Would you rather hire someone who took marketing classes in college, or someone who actually helped a business get a 1200% return on their marketing investment?
• Would you rather hire a random computer science major, or someone who’s actually built a fully functioning web application with real, paying users?
• Would you rather hire someone who has taken a leadership class, or has actually recruited, lead, and managed a functioning team?

It’s true. As an entrepreneur, not only was 75% of what I do to run my company learned outside of school, but our customers have never asked about my degree. I still don’t have one (I will by fall 2011.) We keep sending them sales and they sending us checks.

I also freelance for a top creative studio with Fortune 500 clients. Soon to be a project manager there. They’ve never spoken a word about my degree.

For the last year, I served as affiliate manager for John Carlton, a world-famous copywriter. My responsibilities included managing product launches and coordinate promotions with their sales partners. During an hour-long behavioral interview, I was grilled every which way about my experience and business instincts – but never once about my degree.

But if I ever stopped performing in any of these capacities, the money would stop coming – whether I was a grade-school dropout or a Harvard graduate with distinction.

Should You Still Take Pride In Academic Achievement?

So what does all of this mean to UberStudent readers? If degrees are just socially evolved filters for job applications (rather than towering beacons of intellectual prowess) should you still take school seriously? Should you still strive for good grades and be proud of getting them?

That’s your call, but I say absolutely! College is still challenging. Remember: challenges are literally what school measures your ability to withstand. Yes, you are expected to study and write papers and pass tests, but all of this is part of a much larger assessment. Ultimately, school is a test of your character, perseverance, and ability to overcome.

Moreover, depending on your career path, a credential might be exactly what you need. Josh is no fan of MBA degrees, for instance, but he openly admits that some jobs flat-out require them and that if you really want those jobs then you should get your MBA.

In short, the fact that colleges are selling you a credential (and not necessarily education) need not dampen your enthusiasm for succeeding there. A degree is still a real achievement. It’s something no soul on earth can ever strip you of.  Just don’t delude yourself about what it symbolizes and what it doesn’t.

[For what it's worth, Josh's first tip for making a degree pay off is NOT going to college if you're still unsure of what to do with your life. Or, exactly what I said in my post on discovering your academic purpose.]

What do you think? Is college more about education or credentials? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

Developing The Resolution Of A Top Student

Technique goes a long way toward becoming a great student. I’ve covered it often on UberStudent, whether it’s the science of hand-written notes, methods for effectively e-mailing professors or strategically dropping your classes. But tactics can only take you so far. Simply knowing how to get awesome grades is worthless until you put that knowledge into action. And this crucial act – the literal doing of the work over an entire four years – ultimately requires one thing: resolution.

Tactics are situational.  They help you navigate specific, narrowly defined tasks – such as using process of elimination on multiple-choice tests. Resolution transcends tactics. It’s a full-time, emotional commitment to succeed no matter what. In other words, resolution never quits.

This isn’t really anything new.  The Art of Manliness believes resolution is an essential virtue for good living. Parents try to instill it into their kids. But I don’t know anyone who captures its essence as succinctly as copywriter John Carlton. In a blog post called The Reason You Screwed Up, Carlton defines resolution in one crisp sentence:

“You show up where you’re supposed to be, when you said you’d be there, having done what you said you’d do.”

Carlton calls this simple creed “The Professional’s Code.” The interesting thing is that within his post, Carlton takes aim at college students, in particular, for not having this habit. He believes the educational system has trained us to believe a good excuse solves everything:

“I knew a girl in college who killed off her grandmother three times in three semesters. Got her out of taking a final (didn’t study), out of being penalized for skipping a week of class (rock concert), out of not having a paper written on time (didn’t even try).

Granny never found out. And lived a good many more years.

And this girl went on to the Dean’s List, grad school, and a Ph.D.

The lesson learned: You can be instantly forgiven… and even felt sorry for… if you just deliver a good enough excuse for screwing up.

That’s a really, really, really bad lesson to absorb.”

He’s right. I know far too many students who have exactly this attitude. Heck, I used to have it! It’s a very comforting and seductive thing to believe – but it’s also a dangerous one. In the working world, Carlton explains, no one cares WHY you screwed up. The fact THAT you screwed up is all that matters. Other people now have problems to deal with because of your negligence.

True, college is not entirely like the working world. Other people wont suffer when you fail. But YOU will. The first thing I ask UberStudent readers to do is develop a purpose for being at college. A meaningful reason to do your best and care about the grades you get. If you’ve already done that, then college isn’t a pointless chore for you anymore.

That means you aren’t cool or clever for skipping classes or blowing off assignments. You aren’t “getting away with it.” If anything, you’re declaring war on your future – on the dreams that supposedly matter to you! I’ll never forget the moment I realized this once and for all.

Early in college, my best friend and I regularly skipped our evening classes. Not for anything important, mind you. Usually just to go have dinner or see a movie. It was fun for a while, but eventually, our better judgement caught up with us. We were sitting in a restaurant one night when Chris suddenly said to me (in all seriousness) “you know, we are RUINING our lives, right?”

Tough to swallow, but 100% true if that’s how you’re going about college.

Look: we’ve ALL met the girl from Carlton’s example in one of our classes. She’s the one whining about how “unfair” it is to be assigned a 12 page paper. She’s the one making rude comments behind the professor’s back. Yes, the girl in his example did well for herself, but that is NOT the norm! More often, those are the most immature, directionless and lackluster students any classroom has to offer.

I didn’t bullshit my way to straight A’s or Dean’s List awards or a 3.7+ GPA, and neither did most people who achieved those things. We worked our asses off to get them. Developing your academic purpose is a critical first step, but that’s all it is – the first step. Achieving that purpose (as opposed to just daydreaming about it) is going to take steadfast dedication and effort. I’m sorry. It’s not my fault. You need to know that.

Carlton’s “Professional’s Code” is an excellent model to follow in your academic career. However, I suggest a slight modification. That code is focused mostly on honoring your obligations to others. In college, your obligation is to yourself (and your academic purpose.)

I challenge you to bring the same resolution to your studies that a top freelance copywriter like John Carlton brings to his craft. John’s job is to write killer advertisements that make his clients rich. Once he accepts a job, he goes all-out to deliver the goods. No whining, no excuses. Your job is to get the highest grades you’re capable of and devote yourself as fully as possible to fulfilling your dreams.

Resolve to do exactly that – no matter what.

[FYI: I've had the privilege of working with John for the last year. He's exactly the way that blog post portrays him to be: affable and entertaining, but dead serious when it's time to play ball. That's how most top performers are in any field.]

Getting Your Emails Read, Understood & Acted Upon By Professors

Email communication with professors is a tricky skill to master. It seems obvious: professors don’t stick around after class (and their office hours rarely match your schedule.) So when situations need to be resolved, you just email them. What could be simpler? Yet it’s important to understand that your professors are busy, distracted people. Many teach several classes per day and some even double as adjunct professors at other colleges. They’ve got a lot on their plate!

As a result, students often complain about professors taking forever to reply to them. While some professors truly are negligent, the problem frequently lies with how you communicate. Here are five steps I’ve found to be extremely useful in getting fast, pertinent replies:

Step 1: Choose One Topic & Objective Per Email

The worst thing you can do when emailing a busy professional is lump multiple topics into one message. There are students who will literally ask for their midterm grade, an extension on a paper and an extra copy of the syllabus in the same email. Bad idea! Though it seems efficient, overlapping topics actually overwhelm your professor. There’s a psychological heaviness to it, and rather than being dealt with right away, such emails often land in the “later” pile.

Instead of cramming, decide ahead of time on:

• One topic (a project, a paper, etc.)
• One objective (an extension, missing information, etc.)

This lets you craft a message around one issue with focus and clarity. It also stops professors from seeing your email as a bottomless pit of need – which makes them more apt to respond.

Step 2: Use Impossible-To-Ignore Subject Lines

Professors are technically supposed to open every student email they receive. Does that actually happen? Of course not. Like other busy people, professors use subject lines to disqualify time-wasters. They don’t want to read your email. They are literally looking for subject lines that justify not reading it. That’s why unimportant-looking subject lines like “question” or “the syllabus” get ignored. Your professor made a snap judgement that your email didn’t really matter.

Your job is to make them think otherwise.

To do this, use clear, impossible-to-ignore subject lines like:

• Urgent Question RE: Your Final Grading Policy (Management, T/TH 8AM)
• Clarification RE: Next Week’s Group Project Instructions (Psychology, M/W 3PM)
• Missing Information: Our Upcoming Research Paper (Western Civ, T/TH 12PM)

Get straight to the point and make no bones about what your email is for. The goal isn’t making professors want to read your email (virtually impossible) but making them feel like it’d be wrong not to read it.

Step 3: Anticipate Standard Objections

Getting your email read is only half of the battle. Now it’s time to focus on the objective chosen in step one. Unfortunately, universities are notoriously bureaucratic and “school policy” will often stand in the way of what you’re asking for. Complaining about it is pointless – it’ll never change, and even if it does does, you wont be why. Instead, use counterfactual simulation to anticipate what a professor’s standard BS objections might be.

For example: if you’re trying to get into a closed course, the professor will say there are only X number of chairs in the room. If you’re asking for an extension on a paper, she will tell you that she never gives extensions. If you want an alternate speech topic or project assignment, he’ll say the ones on the syllabus are the only options. Whatever you’re asking for, know what the standard objections are.

Step 4: Politely Yet Firmly Challenge Them

In his best-selling book The 4 Hour Work Week, Tim Ferriss says that these kinds of “rules” are pretty much meaningless. They persist because no one challenges them. As Tim says, “outside of laws and science, reality is negotiable.” It wont always be easy, but you can often overpower these stock objections with creative proposals of your own.

Sometimes, this is literally as simple as acknowledging the objection and asking for the professor to grant your request anyway. In other words, saying “I know it’s not standard policy to grant extensions, but given [your situation] I believe circumstances warrant one here.” Other professors aren’t so quick to give in. However, the basic approach of anticipating objections and challenging them works surprisingly more often than you think.

Walk the fine line between polite and firm. Don’t act obnoxious or entitled, but do write as though your request is reasonable and you are completely confident in making it.

The goal, by the way, isn’t being an argumentative pain in the ass. It’s eliminating the professor’s need for more information. Your email should contain all the facts of the situation, offer convincing reasons to say yes and leave no excuse for not acting immediately. Otherwise, they can hem and haw for days before making a decision.

Step 5: Request Specific Calls To Action

Always close your email with a specific call to action. Specific is the key word here. It’s not enough to simply ask for “an extension” on your paper. What does that even mean? It’s way too abstract and thus very easy to deny. What you need instead is a precise extension date for a logically supported reason.

Determine exactly what your request requires professor to do and distill it into a pithy closer. Something like:

• “Given the above, may I come to the first day of class with an ADD form and get your signature?”
• “Since [the reason your request is reasonable], can I count on you to [take some defined action] on/by [the date requested.]
• “It would be great to wrap this up today. May I stop by during your office hours to get my alternative assignment approved?”

Following the call to action, close the e-mail with a confident signature – my favorite is “thanks in advance.”

Keep in mind: some professors will still drag their heels no matter how good your original email is. When this happens, it’s your responsibility to send follow-up emails. Two to four days after sending the first one is a tactful rule of thumb.