High school teachers often try — sometimes to no avail– to convince students that how well they do in school will matter later in life.
Now they have data to prove it. A report published Monday in the Eastern Economic Journal by researchers from the University of Miami found that a person’s grade-point average in high school not only indicates the person’s chances of getting into college and whether he or she will finish college or graduate school. It could also be an indicator of how much that person will earn later in life.
“A one-unit increase in your GPA has a very sizable impact on your education and earnings,” says Michael T. French, director of the health economics research group at the University of Miami.
Indeed, for a one-point increase in a person’s high school GPA, average annual earnings in adulthood increased by about 12 percent for men and about 14 percent for women, the report found.
