Outstanding students of color arrived on campus without the web of white middle-class family and school structures that provided Anglo students with practical knowledge in such areas as college choice strategies and career planning.

College bonds weakened for students of who lived off campus, took outside employment, and maintained active family commitments. Unskilled in navigating the university, these students were unlikely to enter the personal networks where insiders traded the practical information they desperately needed.

For minority students, as for women and working-class white valedictorians, superior college grades did not lead smoothly to high-level satisfying work.

The stories of successful channels, stifling ruts, and missed paths all point to the same conclusion: the successful passage from school to postschool achievement requires an interpersonal process of increasing self-understanding, career socialization, and tacit knowledge.

Academically capable men and women almost never follow a single-minded interest from childhood into careers.

The happiest have found adult achievement arenas that do engage them, occasionally through the luck of good early choices, sometimes by leaving worn paths, and most often through exploring themselves and careers with the help of guides and sponsors.

Just as the stereotypes of the one-sided academic grind or the obsessed genius are myths for high school valedictorians, also false is the conception of academic achievers as troubled individuals effective only in school.

As a group, valedictorians have always led well-rounded, socially integrated, ‘normal’ lives.

Female valedictorians marry a little later and participate somewhat more heavily in paid work than women in their age group nationally.