Declining IQ of college grads

[AlaskaBushPilot]

Interesting article:

https://bigthink.com/thinking/iq-score-average-college-students/

The average IQ of college graduates declined from 119 in 1939 to 102 in 2022.

That's incredible. Not the direction of decline, but the magnitude.

More people graduate from college now than graduated from high school back then.

It is an example of unintended though logical consequences. The observation that higher education is correlated with higher earnings resulted in the conclusion that everyone should get a high school degree. The same reasoning was applied to college.

But when society demands that everyone get a degree, the only possible result is that the degree becomes increasingly meaningless.

This means “employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees.”

Looking more closely, we know degrees like Physics and Astronomy are at the top of the IQ scale and degrees like education are at the bottom.

If we combine these two observations then we conclude that a number of majors are on average significantly stupider than the general population.

lol.

 

[Blue Mountain]

It's worth noting that an IQ of 100 is the arithmetic mean of the general population: 100 is completely "normal," and two-thirds of the population are between 85 and 115. So from 1939 to today (85 years, or about 4 generations) university has gone from being a place for people with above normal intelligence to just anyone in the general population.

As the OP noted, this is the inevitable result of a decades long push to give as many people as possible a "university education," in the process watering down its value.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

We also have to consider the Flynn Effect:

An IQ of 100 in 2020 is way higher than an IQ of 120 in 1940.

 

[jt512]

We also have to consider the Flynn Effect:

An IQ of 100 in 2020 is way higher than an IQ of 120 in 1940.

[citation needed]

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Looking more closely, we know degrees like Physics and Astronomy are at the top of the IQ scale and degrees like education are at the bottom.

If we combine these two observations then we conclude that a number of majors are on average significantly stupider than the general population.

lol.

lol? You think education is some kind of joke?

“The decline in students’ IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years,” the researchers commented.

The 'stupider' students tend to drop out or fail to pass. It doesn't mean the graduates of any particular major are 'stupider'.

According to statistics from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, only 58% of students manage to attain their degrees within six years. What’s more, the rate of dropping out is negatively linked with IQ — the lower an undergraduate’s IQ, the more likely it is that they will leave college without a degree, potentially saddled with debt. One influential study showed that for white American undergraduates with an IQ only slightly above average, their chance of graduating is essentially 50-50.

But when society demands that everyone get a degree, the only possible result is that the degree becomes increasingly meaningless.

Not true, and not what this article is about. It would be great if everybody was good enough to get a degree. Problem is many are not good enough, and just end up getting saddled with debt they can't pay off.

The answer to this is not to make degrees only attainable to those with the highest IQs, but to align them with students' capabilities.

What is the value of a degree in education? It shows that you have the skills and knowledge required to be a teacher. Should a high IQ be a prerequisite for this job? In my experience no - 'geniuses' generally make poor teachers.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

[citation needed]

(from the link in the article)

The Flynn Effect – Explaining Increasing IQ Scores

He explains that “if you score the people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an average IQ of 70. If you score us against their norms, we would have an average IQ of 130” (Flynn, 2013).

 

[jt512]

(from the link in the article)

The Flynn Effect – Explaining Increasing IQ Scores

So, it is doubly bad. Population-wide IQs have risen while the IQs of college grads have fallen.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

So, it is doubly bad. Population-wide IQs have risen while the IQs of college grads have fallen.

Nope.

What it means that most 1940 IQ 120 kids would fail today's college exams.

 

[novaphile]

Sadly, we're now in the age of the 'Reverse Flynn Effect'.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289623000156

 

[The Great Zaganza]

the logical next question is:

is that something US specific or not?

it is very possible that we have exhausted all the easy gains on how to make Humans better at solving IQ tests. We might be nearing a barrier, and setbacks would be normal.

Or it might be something to do with the state of the US education system.


I suspect that there is something else going on: human organs like to operate at their capacity - we are probably doing more things that are not covered by the IQ test than we did before.
This might be more of a blind spot of the test than a decline in cognitive abilities.

 

[Brainster]

We also have to consider the Flynn Effect:

An IQ of 100 in 2020 is way higher than an IQ of 120 in 1940.

The utility of that knowledge is actually quite a bit less than you might think. A college is looking at students and trying to figure out which ones can make the grade at their institution. Businesses are looking at college grads and trying to figure out which ones to hire. Nobody is comparing them to people in 1940.

 

[The Great Zaganza]

Of course we should ask a deeper question: are the criteria by which colleges and businesses select actually good for society and the economy?
A very strong case can be made that it has created a monoculture that is inflexible, uncreative and driven more by perceived than actual accomplishments.

 

[Vixen]

High school and other degrees are not about IQ. They are about the ability to complete a task. Success in life is about completing what you have started.

 

[Thermal]

Not sure why it's surprising that when college was only for actual high end scholars/scientists/researchers that they would be exceptionally bright. When it's accessible to the public at large, the IQ is more representative of the public at large. Would something else have been expected?

 

[Thermal]

So, it is doubly bad. Population-wide IQs have risen while the IQs of college grads have fallen.

Not really. The standards are different. Questions are asked on a modern Stanford Binet that would have made no sense in 1939. Flynn quite conveniently plays a little word game around that, qualifying "by our/their norms" in his comparisons.

The main reason IQ scores have gone up is better education, resulting in a wider vocabulary, and hence the ability to answer more questions. You could have a slam dunk genius who grew up unexposed to much literature, and he would test poorly. My wife administers IQ tests professionally, and has to stay on her toes to recognize this before scoring, especially with ESL kids.

 

[Olmstead]

But is a high IQ actually useful?

 

[Ron Obvious]

But is a high IQ actually useful?

It appears to be highly correlated to academic and societal success.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

It appears to be highly correlated to academic and societal success.

But is it?

 

[Thermal]

But is a high IQ actually useful?

Aptitude for efficient problem solving, thorough command of the language and understanding of its nuances... yeah, gonna go out on a limb and call things like that useful, at least compared to the alternatives.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Successful people who dropped out out school.

Sheldon Adelson
Richard Branson
Amancio Ortega
Steve Jobs
Mark Zuckerberg
Alicia Keys
Dick Cheney
Tiger Woods
Bill Gates
Brad Pitt
Jack Dorsey
Ellen DeGeneres
Steven Spielberg
Vin Diesel
Kayne West
Madonna
Harry Truman
Henry Ford
Paul Allen
Paula Abdul
Frank Lloyd Wright
Steve Madden
Lady Gaga
James Dean
John D. Rockefeller
Paul Newman
Michael Dell
Eddie Murphy
Ted Turner
Oprah Winfrey
Steve Wozniak
Walt Disney
Bob Dylan
Scientists
Thomas Edison
Albert Einstein
Mark Twain
Jack Kerouac
Jack London
William Faulkner
Harper Lee
F. Scott Fitzgerald
George Bernard Shaw

And that's just a few of the most famous ones.

OTOH some, like me, dropped out and never made it big. But that doesn't mean my life hasn't been a success.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Aptitude for efficient problem solving, thorough command of the language and understanding of its nuances... yeah, gonna go out on a limb and call things like that useful, at least compared to the alternatives.

Intelligence is certainly useful, but is a high IQ sufficiently more useful than a normal one? If it causes you to be pushed into a rat race of academic achievement then perhaps not. That's why I dropped out. I wanted a job that I could be competent at and enjoy doing without being pushed to (or beyond) the limit.

There's a lot more to life than just being able to solve puzzles faster than the next guy.

 

[Ron Obvious]

Successful people who dropped out out school.

-snip-

And that's just a few of the most famous ones.

Anecdotal evidence, in other words. I'm sure I can also list e.g dozens of people who completed university successfully, but nevertheless died broke and homeless. That doesn't mean there's a causal relationship.

 

[Trausti]

Successful people who dropped out out school.

Going to university doesn't make you smart. It used to be that it was difficult to get into unviversity, so a university degree signalled a certain level of intelligence and competence. As the numbers of universities exploded, and standards dropped, that signalling is gone. If anything, unless a person majors in the hard sciences, university probably makes people dumber.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Aptitude for efficient problem solving, thorough command of the language and understanding of its nuances... yeah, gonna go out on a limb and call things like that useful, at least compared to the alternatives.

Being an idiot is tough. But having an exceptionally high IQ is no guarantee of success. I’d say having an average IQ for the field and good attitude is more valuable to an employer than being brilliant but not willing to get anything done.

In other words, you have to be smart enough to do the work, but not so smart that you don’t want to do the work.

 

[Dr. Keith]

Going to university doesn't make you smart. It used to be that it was difficult to get into unviversity, so a university degree signalled a certain level of intelligence and competence. As the numbers of universities exploded, and standards dropped, that signalling is gone. If anything, unless a person majors in the hard sciences, university probably makes people dumber.

History major?

 

[Vixen]

In England educational achievement was often closely linked to class. The so-called public schools started off as a charity providing education for the upper middle classes' boys who were expected to work for a living (the aristocracy didn't need to work as we know it). The upper classes on seeing the benefits of such an education quickly sent their sons to the same public schools, with Eton originally being a 'feeder' to Oxford University Kings College, founded by Henry IV (iirc). So the fetish of employers for the Eton-Oxford brigade, not to mention the armed forces and politics is a thing associated with high status rather than high IQ.

People don't like the new egalitarian standard of roughly 50% of the population now obtaining a bachelors degrees because it is no longer a class marker (although in England the class system is still there).

 

[Wudang]

Both a university lecturer (Comp Sci) and a senior HR manager have told me that a degree is just a certificate that shows you know how to learn. FWIW.

 

[Darat]

It appears to be highly correlated to academic and societal success.

Correlation does not imply causation

 

[Jack by the hedge]

So, it is doubly bad. Population-wide IQs have risen while the IQs of college grads have fallen.

No. This doesn't indicate anybody has got dumber, and IQs are being compared with their contemporaries so a general rise over decades is irrelevant here.

Tertiary education used to be for an elite, heavily skewed to the academically able rather than just rich kids, so that group could be expected to have a much higher than average IQ. Now it's for half the population so the average graduate IQ is closer to the population average without anybody having to get any dumber to cause it.

 

[Brainster]

Successful people who dropped out out school.

Sheldon Adelson
Richard Branson
Amancio Ortega
Steve Jobs
Mark Zuckerberg
Alicia Keys
Dick Cheney
Tiger Woods
Bill Gates
Brad Pitt
Jack Dorsey
Ellen DeGeneres
Steven Spielberg
Vin Diesel
Kayne West
Madonna
Harry Truman
Henry Ford
Paul Allen
Paula Abdul
Frank Lloyd Wright
Steve Madden
Lady Gaga
James Dean
John D. Rockefeller
Paul Newman
Michael Dell
Eddie Murphy
Ted Turner
Oprah Winfrey
Steve Wozniak
Walt Disney
Bob Dylan
Scientists
Thomas Edison
Albert Einstein
Mark Twain
Jack Kerouac
Jack London
William Faulkner
Harper Lee
F. Scott Fitzgerald
George Bernard Shaw

And that's just a few of the most famous ones.

Are you making the claim that those people succeeded despite having low IQs?

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Are you making the claim that those people succeeded despite having low IQs?

Why would you think they meant that?

 

[Brainster]

Why would you think they meant that?

I doubt very much he meant that; instead he wanted to refute the point about IQ being highly correlated with academic and social success, and came up with a list of people who are quite obviously (mostly) high IQ and highly successful. You could argue that since they didn't graduate college, they weren't particularly academically successful.

It is an article of faith among some around here that all a high IQ tells us is whether you are good at taking IQ tests.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

It is rather trivial to make tests reliable -- ie, to give the same result each application. IQ tests are highly reliable. But about measuring what? They measure g, general intelligence, taken to mean the average performance of an individual over a range of reasoning skills. The validity of IQ tests, then, only relates to their ability to measure what is taken as g. Their results do historically correlate highly with school performance, but they do so in a declining fashion, that is, starting high in elementary school and reaching a fairly weak correlation by graduation school. This can be interpreted as the tests being highly similar to school testing, thus constituting an alternate measure of the same skills, or to success in graduate school being more related to social or other skills, rather than intelligence.

I tend to think it is the former, and that if IQ scores are declining, the teaching of, modeling of, and practice of using basic reasoning skills might be experiencing a decline, especially vis-a-vis the change to screen-based media. In short, physical interaction with the environment is the age-old method for animal learning, and the simple acts of physically taking notes and making outline summaries of schoolbook chapters (giving structure to information and physically putting that framework down on paper) might be what is missing in a relative sense.

But it is irksome, to say the least, to hear some Trumpling utter articles of religious faith about how the world works, all while simultaneously carrying a mobile phone with GPS. I do not know what kind of dumb that is, but stubborn dumb is a far worse epidemic than declining test scores.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

... if IQ scores are declining...

There's no evidence in the article that IQ scores are declining. Rather it's that college is no longer reserved for "the brilliant and privileged" so their average IQ is more typical of the general population.

 

[Hlafordlaes]

There's no evidence in the article that IQ scores are declining. Rather it's that college is no longer reserved for "the brilliant and privileged" so their average IQ is more typical of the general population.

There have been reports from a variety of studies referring to a reverse Flynn effect; ie, declining IQ scores. My post refers to how that might come about, given what IQ tests measure.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Surely, the issue is not that IQs have declined but that the educational standards have been lowered such that a bigger percentage of the population is graduating from college?

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Are you making the claim that those people succeeded despite having low IQs?

No, I'm 'claiming' that they were extremely successful despite not managing to get a degree. Therefore the theory that societal success is highly correlated to academic 'success' and IQ is highly suspect. I suspect a large proportion of academic 'genuises' are actually rotting away in universities doing very little of note, and are certainly not as successful as people like the ones in my list.

I also know a number of people of decidedly average IQ who are more successful than me - because there's a lot more to being successful than just (or even) being a smart alec.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Surely, the issue is not that IQs have declined but that the educational standards have been lowered such that a bigger percentage of the population is graduating from college?

Shocking, isn't it? What's the World coming to when any riff-raff can get a degree?

Contrast this with the courses we did when I was a telecommunications technician. We were all expected to know our stuff and pass the tests with high marks. Failure was not an option!

The funny part was that I had achieved a far greater understanding of electronics just by reading library books and hobby magazines than the engineers we worked for - and they wouldn't listen to me because I didn't have a high-powered university education. Not that I am any genius mind you. I just applied myself to a subject I was interested in.

 

[Darat]

Where is the evidence that standards have been lowered rather than say there being more opportunity for more people to do a university degree? When I was the age to go to university there was little expectation that most people would even consider going to university regardless of their academic achievements.

 

[Gord_in_Toronto]

Where is the evidence that standards have been lowered rather than say there being more opportunity for more people to do a university degree? When I was the age to go to university there was little expectation that most people would even consider going to university regardless of their academic achievements.

Googling for >lowered educational standards< gets a lot of hits. I not so interested that I will try and track down a definitive answer but the evidence appears to be there.