Referring to these results, Nicholson remarks, "From this study of the careers of sixteen hundred and sixty-seven graduates, living and dead, where three different methods are employed in determining distinction in after life, it appears that the results are fairly constant, and we are justified in assuming that, for this college at least, the chances of distinction for a high honor graduate, one of the two or three leading scholars of the class, are just even; that one out of three of those elected to Phi Beta Kappa is likely to achieve pronounced success in life; and that each of the remaining members of the class has less than one chance in ten to become famous. In other words, roughly speaking, the quarter (or the fifth) of the class elected to Phi Beta Kappa are likely to supply just as many distinguished men as are the remaining three-quarters (now four-fifths) of the class."
The study of Nicholson includes only that type of success which would be likely to lead to inclusion in _Who's Who_, viz., the more strictly literary, professional, political, and academic success. The commercial, industrial and business careers are not so likely to lead to inclusion in this directory, and yet success in them is no less definite than in the professional work. It is rather difficult to determine the degree to which success in these fields is determined by ability alone, and to what degree it is a function of chance, inheritance, social charm, prestige, and geographical and economic circumstance. Nevertheless it would be interesting to know whether such measure of success as can be secured correlates in any way with success in the work of school years.
In an unpublished study of the graduates of Pratt Institute, Dr. D. E. Rice has compared the grades achieved by students in the courses in Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering with the salaries the men were receiving several years after graduation. There were in all six classes of men, numbering about forty each--three classes from Mechanical Engineering and three from Electrical Engineering, for the years of 1907, 1908, 1909. The salary reports were asked for in 1913, four to six years after graduation.
The men were ranked according to the grades they received in the eight different subjects included in the curriculum, the grades being 10, 9, 8, and 7, corresponding to the ordinary grade system of A, B, C, D. They were then ranked according to the salary reported at the time of the investigation. Results for each class were treated separately so that the time elapsing since graduation was not a factor in the results. The following table gives the results when these two rankings were correlated by two statistical methods of computing correlation.