I know plenty of brilliant people who are now unemployed or severely underemployed (working minimum wage retail jobs despite having a college degree). Despite being academically gifted, they haven't found their way to careers that match their abilities.
I haven't been able to put my finger on what exactly it is that causes these people to "get lost" on their way, but it is common enough that I think we need to be doing something differently with regards to gifted & talented education in the USA.
I was once the person you describe, and I'm currently the person the parent comment describes (in a velvet coffin 100k+ job).
One problem is that gifted programs (at least in public schools) are contrary to reality. If the gifted programs in your state are like the one I was enrolled in, then members had to have a 130+ IQ to be admitted. There is the rub. Upon exiting school you suddenly and jarringly discover that not everyone else in the world has a 130+ IQ like the people you spent the past 8-10 years with, and things get very slow. Even at places like Google and Facebook not everyone has a 130+ IQ. The world is a boring and unchallenging place when you're forced to go through it at school-zone speeds.
Some people, like me, have severe difficulties adjusting to this deceleration. I was in gifted programs from first until tenth grade. However, after college (tech Ivy), I spent almost a decade in low-paying and unchallenging jobs while wracked with depression. Only a few years ago was I able to pull myself out of that hole.
The solution is to disband gifted programs. The culture shock experienced by the members once the scaffolding is removed can be pretty severe. It's probably better to make the gifted kids understand that the other 96% of non-gifted people on earth with them are going to be around them all the time. They should learn to deal with it. If there's any gifted education, it should be outside of normal schooling.
Thanks for sharing your experiences, though I'm not sold on your conclusion.
There are plenty of students who, when bored or unchallenged, underperform to the point where they are initially mistaken for having an intellectual disability. For these students to have no support throughout school seems like a recipe for these students to "get lost" earlier in their life rather than after high school (where it seems to happen in my anecdotal experience).
On that note, I'm particularly interested in what, if anything, helped you to pull yourself out of the hole: were there any identifiable experiences that helped you find a "sense of direction", for lack of a better term?
I still contend that creating an institutional gaggle of smart kids is wrong. It's equivalent to creating a school just for black kids; it's merely form of segregation. I hope they stop doing it, for the sake of society in general.
As for me, I was correctly diagnosed with bipolar disorder after many years of misdiagnoses. Now with proper treatment I don't have mood swings, take rash actions, or go into months-long dark, suicidally depressive states. But I also can't output 2 weeks of project work in 3 days with 8 hours of sleep anymore. I'll take the good with the bad though. Overall, the death of my father was probably the main catalyst for improving myself.
I was also in a G+T program in the 80s and I'd say a major problem in young adult years is no one cares how smart you are, after 16 or so years of being told there's nothing more important than being smart. Much like your GPA, your IQ is pretty much irrelevant once you graduate. Workplace progress suddenly switches entirely over to who you know, who is your dad, who you impress, who you kiss up to, your golf game, etc.
In other words, social skills. Maybe we can just add that to the curriculum? If a gifted child can attend to social cues and learn some beneficial behaviors (and they surely can), then the outcome could be much different?
You make it seem that gifted children lack social skills. We don't, however, you spend a lot of time with other gifted kids and types of behaviors that provide social currency in that circle may not do so in circles with non-gifted individuals. This is why I'd prefer gifted programs not exist.
Artificially concentrating smart kids in a group and then scattering them into the world is pretty counterproductive. I mean, it makes the school district look good ("We have 120 high-IQ students in the county! Stellar exam scores! We're fantastic!"), and at the end of the day, that's all the matters. The school system doesn't care much what happens after the students have left it.
This is a function of how gifted kids learn social skills. Before adolescence, children primarily seek approval from parents and teachers. Gifted kids get this in abundance, and learn how to earn, as you put it, social currency with adults (at least those who value academics), which is not the same as how to earn social currency with their peers in adolescence and early adulthood. And of course, gifted students learn more quickly, and are reinforced more. It's a perfect environment for developing anti-social behaviors.
For academic achievement, the majority of research backs up your thesis, and it isn't even a tradeoff, where you get better academics at the expense of worse socialization. Gifted programs don't work. It is far better to accelerate a student to a higher grade, even if it means putting students in classes with much older students (accelerating a gifted student is the most effective positive intervention that can be taken in K-12 education according to Hattie's recent review of meta-analyses, Visible Learning, and nothing else is close). It pushes them academically, and more often than not, helps them socialize, because they learn how older kids interact before internalizing too many abnormal frames and social habits.
I know a gifted kid that was accelerated to higher grades. Lonely and sad. Not a lot of friends that much older than him; no dates; no hanging out. 16-18 yr olds don't want to talk to a 14yo, especially in high school.
So maybe we have to work with what we've got - 14yo that can learn fast - so teach them fast. Can't do it in the regular classroom, so gifted class. Socialization is apparently an issue there (why? same age group as other kids have, same teacher - what's really different?) so work on that.
> Even at places like Google and Facebook not everyone has a 130+ IQ.
I wasn't in the gifted programs when I was in school (to the contrary: the K-12 system stuck me in Special Ed for behavioral problems), but... this bit comes as a surprise. I thought Google and Facebook only hired the very gifted in the first place. I do have a 130 IQ (almost exactly, and it would be higher if not for my miserable visual-processing abilities and my "merely gifted" calculation abilities), and I'd be really surprised to find that the top tech companies (or... even... academia...) are filled with people less intelligent than me.
Congratulations: you just made me feel very, very alone.
> The world is a boring and unchallenging place when you're forced to go through it at school-zone speeds.
Yes. Yes, it is. Worse: when you're really really clever, and anywhere near a decent human being, you spend a lot of time failing to understand why the rest of the world seems to be so damn cruel, because after all, from your point of view, anyone with some decent common sense can see, plain as day, how to make things nicer for everyone.
Absolutely! We are way past the time, at least in the U.S., to not have a guaranteed basic income system of some type (that includes at least basic health care).
I haven't been able to put my finger on what exactly it is that causes these people to "get lost" on their way, but it is common enough that I think we need to be doing something differently with regards to gifted & talented education in the USA.