I only skimmed through the article. I prefer to look at the actual numbers. The stats mention 80% of the Boston valedictorians graduated from a 4-year college. Of those who attended college, 79% were the first generation in their family to attend a college. While the article mentions that a some students struggled in college and some transferred colleges, an 80% 4-year degree rate does not sound that bad to me when considering that the overwhelming majority are first in the family to attend a college. I also expect that students who attended highly competitive colleges were far more likely to be successful in college than the average, and as such likely had a far higher graduation rate than the overall. Highly selective colleges tend to have extremely high graduation rates, extremely generous FA, and excellent support networks including counseling. The article seems to highlight the apparent minority of students who struggled and had perceived negative outcomes, likely in an effort to increase readership.
In Blackwell’s case, while he found college challenging, the article mentions primarily getting B’s in freshman year, which is near the average freshman GPA at most other colleges with similar selectivity. The article doesn’t imply that he failed to graduate because of a poor academic preparation or a poor SAT score. Instead his failure to graduate at BC seems to more relate to non-academic factors – working 70 hours per week to support his pregnant girlfriend and losing his scholarship due to not knowing/understanding the minimum enrollment rules. Spending many hours on the football team and his brother killing two of his friends also didn’t help
The discussion seems to be moving towards SAT scores and IQ for some reason. GPA/rank/val, SAT score, and family income all have some degree of correlation with degree of success in college as measured by graduation rate, college GPA, or similar. All 3 also have some degree of correlation with each other. When separating the 3 from each other with controls, in general GPA/rank tends to be more predictive of college success than SAT score. However, the combination of these 3 criteria still only explains a small minority of variance in any measure of college success. Instead the vast majority of success in college instead depends on other factors, including factors like the ones Blackwood experienced – GF gets pregnant, can’t pay for college, outside activities take too much time, family crisis, etc.
As a specific example, the study at https://cshe.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/publications/rops.geiser._sat_6.13.07.pdf compares how well combinations of these factors predict GPA and graduation rate among ~80k students in the UC system. It found the following. When also controlling for field of study, the variance explained was roughly similar. A variety of other studies found similar conclusions.
SAT I + Parents Education + Income + HS API – Explains 13.4% of variance in college GPA
HS GPA + Parents Education + Income + HS API – Explains 20.4% of variance in college GPA
SAT I + HS GPA + Parents Education + Income + HS API – Explains 24.7% of variance in GPA
SAT II + HS GPA + Parents Education + Income + HS API – Explains 26.3% of variance in GPA
SAT I + SAT II + HS GPA + Parents Education + Income + HS API – Explains 26.5% of variance in GPA