This was my thought as well. By "B student" does he mean "students who got B's" or does he mean "students of mediocre intellect and industry"? Those are different sets of people entirely.
I know people smarter than I am who graduated (or dropped out of!) college with abysmal GPAs-- like 2.5, which is a disaster following U.S. grade inflation. I also know intellectual mediocrities who were good at playing the system despite mediocre effort. My sense of Mr. Adams is that he had A potential but probably got B's and C's because he had other projects. That's the good case of a "B student": someone who got mediocre grades because he was working on other things. They should be considering entrepreneurial pursuits. But I wouldn't want to see the average U.S. college graduate (fairly lazy, intellectually mediocre, able to meet college's low minimum demands based on socioeconomic status rather than merit) managing a large, complex company. Hell no on that one, sir.
'This was my thought as well. By "B student" does he mean "students who got B's" or does he mean "students of mediocre intellect and industry"? Those are different sets of people entirely.'
"Assume good faith." The piece makes more sense as the latter, and it certainly doesn't break the argument. I don't see any good reason to impute the first one to Adams. (Not that you did.)
It's obvious that it's not easy to separate who is who, but it's equally obvious that the B crew does exist.
I think what is being said is that since only the top few academic performers get the A label,by design, the remainder should get extra non-academic (here, enterpreneurial ?) skills to level-up when they get out in the real world.
I know people smarter than I am who graduated (or dropped out of!) college with abysmal GPAs-- like 2.5, which is a disaster following U.S. grade inflation. I also know intellectual mediocrities who were good at playing the system despite mediocre effort. My sense of Mr. Adams is that he had A potential but probably got B's and C's because he had other projects. That's the good case of a "B student": someone who got mediocre grades because he was working on other things. They should be considering entrepreneurial pursuits. But I wouldn't want to see the average U.S. college graduate (fairly lazy, intellectually mediocre, able to meet college's low minimum demands based on socioeconomic status rather than merit) managing a large, complex company. Hell no on that one, sir.