I’ve often heard students describe themselves as “street smart” rather than “book smart.”  I take “street smarts” to describe some exceptional type of savvy or sales skills that can only be obtained outside of the four walls of a classroom and I take “book smarts” to refer to rigorous academic study.  It is becoming abundantly clear, however, that “street smarts” is just a disguised synonym of laziness.

When we look at the term “street smarts” itself, it implies that such skills were literally learned on the street, as if one who possesses them was thrust into a tough situation early in life and had to wheel and deal on the street to make ends meet.

Don’t get me wrong, this wheeling and dealing does describe the lives of certain people (and probably a few at this university), but the majority of the people who carelessly throw around the term “street smarts” were never thrust into such situations.

We go to the University of Alabama, one of the best public universities in the region. I think it’s safe to say that, except for a few rare cases, the majority of us never grew up acquiring Slumdog Millionaire-esque street smarts.

I also used to throw around the term in high school.  The “book smart” people I criticized, however, were not those who possessed an arsenal of useless factoids, as I would have liked to believe. They were people who worked incredibly hard, studying to make high grades on upcoming tests. Though they may not have cared about the subject they were studying (or even memorizing), they knew that the good grade they earned, along with a portfolio of other good grades, would significantly increase their chances of success in life.

It’s incredibly odd that this sense of “doing whatever it takes,” even if the manifestations of such labor may not appear until later down the road, is often the greatest quality that those who we say have street smarts possess.  We may ridicule a “book smart” friend for buckling down and relentlessly studying for an exam in a subject they care little about, but this same determination is the type that results in promotions and new opportunities later in life.

We so often view street smarts and book smarts as mutually exclusive, yet we have absolutely no basis of observation off which we can make this assumption.  Though Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, possessed an incredible amount of creative social savvy that simply couldn’t be learned in the classroom, he was also a Harvard student.  To even be accepted at Harvard, he had to have pored over his books in high school.

If any profession or personality type would epitomize the savvy and deal making we associate with street smarts, it would be politicians.  When we look at our long list of U.S. Presidents, however, it’s amazing to see, with only a few exceptions, how many of them attended Ivy League schools and excelled in their academic pursuits.

Donald Trump took an interest in the “street smart” versus “book smart” debate in an episode of the third season of The Apprentice. Scrappy contestants with a high school diploma were pitted against contestants with a college degree and found, unsurprisingly, that the ones with the college degrees came out on top.  Though this was a rather anticlimactic result, it helps put to rest the notion that studying academically is of secondary importance.

We must not assume that those who we consider street smart are street smart because they have made some open denunciation of the importance of studying and classroom learning.  In most cases, they simply don’t have the opportunity to study in an advanced classroom setting.  Yes, we may cite the occasional example of an incredible successful outlier like Bill Gates, who dropped out of Harvard, but the main mass of research shows that the more one engages in higher classroom education (or book smarts), the greater one’s chances of success in life are.

I’ll make the concession that there are many life skills that cannot be learned in the classroom.  In fact, I have often found through the course of my own life that many of the skills I anticipate will be the most useful later in life are those I have learned outside of the classroom.  This, however, is very different than implying that street smarts are in some way a higher ideal to aspire to.

So, the next time you hear somebody throwing around the term “street smarts,” carefully consider their situation.  More often than not, street smarts are nothing more than disguised laziness.

Ben Friedman is a sophomore majoring in social entrepreneurship. His column runs weekly on Fridays.