Greeting! I am not sure if this topic has been discussed already, so I just like to know your opinion on this.
Yes, generally it's easier for men who are taller, especially 6 ft and above, to attract more girls than the shoter men. However, as time goes by, people age, and the looks might change as well as height. We get shoter when we hit 30s. It's estimated that people who are at age of 80s are 1 to 2 inches shorter than their younger time.
Now speaking of academic career. In some places, especially in Asia, many girls kind of care about academic career. Because with a good academic career, a man could find a decent job much more easily. Tall men and short men can all have academic career as long as they graduate and work hard. A decent job is a guarantee to buy a good house. Having a house is important if one wants a family with his girlfriend.
Knowledge is also important to girls. The more you understand how societies work, the better you can address the problems when they come. Like the old saying, knowledge is power. People always get new knowledge regardless of their looks.
I have seen some short men who atteacted many girls because he came from a good university.
Hard working should be the biggest motive to succeed in dating as well as other goals one wants to achieve
It's not clear what you're asking and I don't know if you've ever seen academics and what their life is like, but having studied at Imperial and counting PhDs from Imperial as well as UCL among our friends, I can guarantee those people are much more superficial than you think. That is, their interests lie much more in status, money, good looks etc than "knowledge" or what not.
What do you think two professors do during lunch? Discuss global warming or debate black holes? Nah, chances are they gossip about colleagues, eagerly chat about the last party where one colleague and another spent a bit too much time together, or brag about the benefits they get with their tenure as profs, such as cars or phones. The vast majority of people in academia have the same motivations as everyone else, they just happen to be less attractive and more talented in introverted activities and hence they end up in academia, seldom for academia's sake, but to increase social status, very often to no avail.
Even you are somewhat like that, because you suggest you want to go into academia to land a good girlfriend. Whilst you can increase your status by going to a good uni among certain parts of society, and it can make you more attractive to some women who deeply care about it (as I know from my own experience), it comes with a lot of downsides and definitely won't get you the hot wife you dream about. Chances are you will realise you hate the academic world (as many do), and then you will end up without a girlfriend and depressed about your job.
Now having said all this, from experience I absolutely guarantee to you that a
good, very well paid job is much more effective for what you want to achieve because many more women care about that than about uni. In fact, even those who care about uni, just do so because they see uni as a proxy for a good job. Yet a great many people from Oxbridge, Imperial etc end up in boring low paid jobs (e.g. academic jobs) that never lead to anything simply because the economy is quite detached from the academic world in terms of what it wants. On the other hand there are plenty successful people who went to average unis, dropped out or never even went to uni. At least that is what I observe in Canary Wharf and in the area where I live close to Chelsea. In other words, don't think that academia guarantees a good job. It does not. You will have to analyse what the market
really needs and then make sure you can offer that.
On a final note, having talked to Betz and his team, even those short men who are successful, rich, have wives, kids, even grandkids, houses, cars, yachts, you name it, end up doing the procedure this forum is about. Some people achieve everything in life and then go get the procedure done at 60. There is not a single short men out there not wishing he was taller. Height trumps everything.