Study: High School Grades Can Determine Your Future Income

Better make sure you ace that next algebra exam, kids — there is, in fact, a correlation between your high school GPA and the amount of money you eventually make.

A new study from the University of Miami found that a one-point increase in high school GPA can affect salaries by 12 to 14 percent later in life. That same single point can also double a person's likelihood of graduating from college from 21 to 42 percent.

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But don't lose heart, parents. Just because your child hasn't already brought home a perfect report card doesn't mean he or she is doomed for life.

"High school grades are just one indicator of future success in the labor market, and there are plenty of examples of students who did poorly in high school and then went on to achieve professional success as an adult," the study's lead author, Michael T. French, PhD, a professor, health economist, and director of the Health Economics Research Group at the university, tells Yahoo Shine.  "In other words, strong correlations are not necessarily causality."

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That said, French says parents who want to empower their kids could talk to them about his study in order to illustrate the long-term effects of hard work, and hopefully inspire them to get their grades up.

However, there is one major sticking point. The good-grades-mean-more-money rule's not quite so simple when you take gender into account: A male C student ends up making about as much as a female A student. "The wage gap between men and women has been widely publicized for many years, and our study confirms this fact.  That is one of the reasons why we estimated our models separately by gender," French explains. "There are many possible explanations for the gap, including gender discrimination, career interruptions that are more common among women, women self-selecting into traditionally lower-paying occupations, et cetera."

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But don't forget about outliers who have become millionaires and billionaires skipping out on their high school diplomas. Richard Branson, Vidal Sassoon, Gisele Bündchen, Bill Cosby, and Tumblr founder David Karp all dropped out of high school. However, if you're not an entrepreneurial genius or potential future supermodel, it couldn't hurt to hit the books and come up with a backup plan.

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