Funny you should say that. I’ve also been working for around 10 years now.
I just attended a JC reunion, went to RJ, and the most successful person was the person I least expected to make anything of himself, mostly because he flunked out of J1.
Let’s call him Nick. From what I remember, he took his A levels as a private candidate or something, and he got into NTU. Then he dropped out of NTU and became a real estate agent. Shortly after, he started to write a condo management software which he built for several years before selling it recently for a lot of money to an Australian company.
I don’t know the exact amount but it was 8 figures and I didn’t even hear it from him. I had a lawyer friend who was on the M&A team for this deal.
Many of my classmates went to top overseas universities. I myself went to NYU for chemical and bio engineering and did my MBA at UChicago. I just hit a 5-figure monthly last year and I traded an arm and a leg for it. I was around 75th percentile at RJ and barring the scholars, all the best students seem to be doing alright but not spectacularly.
Nick didn’t only flunk out, he was one of the most disruptive jokers and pranksters at RI. I knew him since I was sec 3 and he was always trying to crack jokes in class, he was dozing off all the time, he pulled childish pranks on classmates, he cheats during exams, he copies homework, he made a habit out of playing hooky. As a close friend of his, it never occurred to me that he wasn’t smart. He was just about as bright as anyone I met at RI. You can tell this by just talking to him. He just had a different personality.
So it is true that we haven’t the faintest idea who will make it big and who will not. We do know that if you do well in school the probability that you will be middle-class is high. But it takes a lot more fairy dust to go higher than that.