I was a student that despite being a year younger than my peers could read the text book, attend class and generally do B work without study, homework or applying myself in the least. That worked for elementary and secondary schooling.
When I hit the University level, bang — brick wall. In my Junior year a counselor looked at my mid-term grades of 8 hours of A and 7 hours of F and said, “You don't really want to be here, do you?” He was right, for that period and time in my life.
Many bright kids are poor students or pupils. In my case work experience and independent study took me from the most basic positions to a good top job in my 30s. I spent the next 35 years thereafter climbing the income ladder but it was a ladder where I could have started at a higher rung if I had been a more conforming pupil and a little less “bright.”
A lot of today's students are going to enter the business world and find they don't advance because what we get now out of the university systems are candidates that often can't understand a contract or specification, write a business letter, do simple math with consistent results or have a work ethic of any caliber.
Some years back I inherited a new hire who was had a double masters degree in Engineering and Architecture. He could not accurately count toilet partitions and urinal screens off a set of plans and document it legibly. He could not add a dimension string consisting of feet, inches and fractions and consistently come up with the right answer. He was a 3.6 student as I recall. He always had somewhere to be immediately after five o'clock.
I recall interviewing a candidate with a PhD in engineering. He was unable to answer a relatively simple question involving rotation within a two-dimensional coordinate system. Even more telling was that he didn't even pick up the pencil I supplied and didn't attempt to even understand the question. This person was evidently used to having things easy and didn't see the necessity of even humoring me during the interview.
I was actually selected late in the day to do the interview because the prior interviewers realized that the candidate was consistently dodging the technical questions. I was expected to press the issue in order to determine whether the candidate had the requisite skills or did not. He evidently did not.