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Declining IQ of college grads

AlaskaBushPilot

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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.”
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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.
 
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.
 
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We also have to consider the Flynn Effect:

An IQ of 100 in 2020 is way higher than an IQ of 120 in 1940.
 
AlaskaBushPilot said:
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.
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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.
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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.
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AlaskaBushPilot said:
But when society demands that everyone get a degree, the only possible result is that the degree becomes increasingly meaningless.
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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.
 
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.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
We also have to consider the Flynn Effect:

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

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.
 
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.
 
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.
 
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?
 
jt512 said:
So, it is doubly bad. Population-wide IQs have risen while the IQs of college grads have fallen.
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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 said:
But is a high IQ actually useful?
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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.
 
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.
 
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