The Wall That Knows Too Late

For several years, a significant part of my role involved building and running campus programs—hiring bright young management trainees, designing their development journeys, and facilitating their long-term career in the organization. This meant frequent trips to the country’s top business schools, where I would oscillate between pre-placement talks, interview panels, guest lectures, and informal conversations with students over coffee. Over time, these campuses became familiar territory: I knew the corridors leading to the interview rooms, the auditoriums where PPTs were held, even the quiet corners where nervous candidates rehearsed their answers.

It was during one such visit—another hiring season, another pre-placement talk—that something caught my eye. On the way to the Director’s office, I walked past a corridor I had somehow never paid attention to before, lined with framed photographs and neatly engraved nameplates: a Wall of Fame celebrating the school’s “Distinguished Alumni.” I slowed down, curious, reading the batch years and designations, noticing how many of these faces now led companies, shaped policy, or built institutions I recognized.

“Nice wall,” I said to the Director, pausing in front of the” Wall of Fame”. “Tell me… when these men and women were on your campus, could your faculty have picked them as future stars?”  

He smiled, a little ruefully. “Honestly? No. They were good, of course. But so were many others. If we could have predicted this, we’d have invested a lot more in them while they were here.”  

That line stayed with me all the way back from the campus.  As a visiting recruiter, I realized that the Wall of Fame is, in some ways, a monument to our collective blindness.  

The irony   

Business schools honor “distinguished alumni” decades after graduation, engraving their names on walls and websites once their achievements are clear and public.

Yet those same institutions invest heavily in selection tools, grades, projects and classroom participation, all with the implicit belief that they are identifying “high-potential” leaders in advance.

The uncomfortable truth is that the two worlds do not perfectly overlap: the students who ace courses are not always the ones who eventually land on that wall.

The why   

As someone who has sat on both sides—campus interview panels and corporate talent councils—this gap is both fascinating and unsettling.

Admissions criteria and early academic indicators are reasonably good at predicting academic performance in the short term (CGPA, passing courses), but much weaker at predicting long‑term outcomes like graduation timing, career impact or societal contribution.

Even sophisticated predictive models in higher education mostly forecast near-term academic success (pass/fail, retention), not who will go on to build institutions, change industries or shape policy.

In other words, business schools are quite good at predicting who will do well ‘here and now’, and quite poor at predicting who will matter ‘out there, decades later’.

The ripple effects

On the drive back, the Director’s candid admission forced me to confront a few of my own assumptions as a senior leader coming for campus hiring.

If business schools themselves cannot reliably foresee who becomes “distinguished alumni”, my confidence in using only conventional campus signals—CGPA cut-offs, case competition wins, committee titles—as predictors of long-term leadership success must be questioned. The Wall of Fame is a visual reminder that many future stars may have been “average” on campus, and that some of today’s campus superstars may plateau early once they leave the protective structure of academia. That realization creates a dissonance: my recruitment process is optimized for what is ‘easy to observe now’, not necessarily for what will matter 15–20 years later.

The Wall of Fame incident has subtly but firmly nudged me to reconsider how I approach campuses.  In hiring, it pushes me to widen the funnel beyond the usual “top 10 percent,” to intentionally meet students who may not have the perfect résumé, but show learning agility, resilience, curiosity, integrity and the openness to feedback—traits research increasingly links to longer-term outcomes. In campus programs, it nudges me to design interventions that build longitudinal capabilities—critical thinking, ethical judgment, collaboration across boundaries and differences.

If prediction is inherently noisy, then perhaps the best response is not to chase a perfect algorithm, but to create conditions where a wider variety of students can discover and express their potential.

A quiet lesson

Looking back, the Director’s answer was more honest than most corporate or academic narratives are comfortable being.  Institutions love to tell linear stories— “We admitted them, we trained them, look how they turned out”—but the evidence around predictive validity is far more modest and cautious.

For me, that honesty has become a quiet checkpoint: every time I walk past a Wall of Fame on a campus visit, I remind myself that I am not spotting finished products; at best, I am encountering ‘possibilities’ that will unfold in ways neither the school nor I can fully foresee.  Perhaps the real value of that wall is not celebration alone, but humility—a reminder that our carefully designed filters and rubrics are, in the end, only partial maps of a much larger, messier human journey.