4 ms·

Mean IQ of College Grads is Dropping

12 points by byrneseyeview 18y ago

jpeterson 18y ago
"Mean IQ of College Grads is Dropping" is basically the same statement as "more people are graduating from college."
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  True iff America is an IQ meritocracy, and college is an IQ measuring institution.
  - jpeterson 18y ago
    The mean IQ of college grads started out as higher than the mean IQ of the overall population. As you add more people from the overall population, you would expect the college grad mean IQ to get closer to the overall population mean IQ.
    - byrneseyeview 18y ago
      Right, if your situation is just "X is the IQ cutoff for getting into college," you could infer that as more people go to college, X gets lower. But you could also see a situation in which smart people opt out of college, so even if the number of people who wanted to go to school were constant, the average IQ would drop -- e.g. fifty years ago a smart person could succeed by getting a scholarship to a great school; now said person gets 90% of what he needs to know from Wikipedia, and can spread a great idea by uploading something to Sourceforge rather than muddling through the thesis-writing, thesis-approving process. I don't think it's just one phenomenon, and a model that either considers America a pure IQ meritocracy or assumes that college's role has changed by degree and not kind is clearly inadequate.
- dangoldin 18y ago
  Not neccessarily true. You are assuming that these additional people have an IQ lower than what the average used to be. More people can be graduating from college who have a higher IQ. An example may be Harvard. Harvard just lowered the tuition for certain incomes, thus more kids can now go to Harvard that were not able to be before due to finances. These kids may have an IQ higher than the average Harvard graduate and they would have increased.
comatose_kid 18y ago
The author's conclusion that lowered admission standards are why IQ has dropped is suspect. Any number of factors could be causes for this (ex: the average amount of TV watched by a student may have increased over the last 40 years).
- misterbwong 18y ago
  AKA. Correlation != Causation.
- etal 18y ago
  Given his conclusion and brief rant, you'd think it would occur to him to grab data about the percentage of the population with a bachelor's degree for each decade, and plot that versus the IQ data. (No, I wasn't going to, it's not my rant.) Also, there's zero discussion of the scores ticking back up from the 1990s to the 2000s. Stricter admissions standards? Somehow that doesn't seem likely. Teaching against standardized tests in high school helping students to score better on the standardized IQ test? Better than nothing.
schtog 18y ago
obv if a bigger percentage of the population goes to college they wont be as smart on average. i mean this is article is a bit ridiculous in the sense that is trying to state this as something alarming or weird and not something obvious. secondly i dont think intelligence matter THAT much, obv it matters but other skills matters too. more people are graduating because we need to, not letting people in wouldnt make things better.
a-priori 18y ago
I have a few issues with this post. First, it's a mistake to assume IQ is a perfect measure of intelligence, especially over long time scales. I'm highly suspicious of psychometrics. Second, I don't understand US race dynamics, but would anyone care to explain why this guy split the data by race, then disregarded all Black data points? Furthermore, it's well-documented that IQ scores are culture-specific. If you're from a different culture than whomever developed the test, you will score lower. This could also apply to the micro-cultures of two races even within the same country. Finally, he says explicitly that the "sample size is very small", which makes any results drawn from them suspect. (Karma Nazi says, "no upmod for you!")
- kingkongrevenge 18y ago
  > I'm highly suspicious of psychometrics. > it's well-documented that IQ scores are culture-specific. Psychometrics is not BS. There's a mountain of data showing properties like IQ (i.e. g) are real, useful measures, not culture specific, and are highly heritable. These are inconvenient truths to a lot of people with egalitarian ideals so there's mountains of FUD clouding the cold hard facts about IQ.
  - lolb 18y ago
    I didn't know Linda Gottfredson posted here. IQ is a useful (if not especially real) measure, but less so than other measures, it is culture-specific, and it is hardly "highly heritable"; Devlin et al. showed a while back that its narrow-sense heritability is about 35% at best, and most studies of IQ's heritability grossly overestimate it by failing to control for a multitude of environmental effects. And psychometricians don't seem to get how factor analysis renders their beloved general intelligence measure a tautology, so it's understandable why someone would regard their work as BS. [Edit to add some of the "cold hard facts about IQ" that IQ pushers like the parent comment don't tell you: IQ's heritability varies with socioeconomic status from about 80% to virtually zero, and also increases with age, which makes any claim about IQ having a high heritability across the board extremely suspect. Note also that despite the name, heritability isn't a measure of 'how genetic' a trait like IQ is; IQ pushers often take advantage of that misunderstanding. Heritability is merely a rough estimate of the ratio of a trait's variance explainable by genetics to the trait's total variance in a population; as such heritability varies between groups, between environments, and between times. It is neither necessary nor sufficient to demonstrate that a trait is 'genetic'.]
lolb 18y ago
Check out the sidebar of this guy's blog. Wonder what his agenda is. Wonder what he could mean by presenting this data, ripped out of context in this way?

12 points by byrneseyeview 18y ago

jpeterson 18y ago

"Mean IQ of College Grads is Dropping" is basically the same statement as "more people are graduating from college."

byrneseyeview 18y ago
True iff America is an IQ meritocracy, and college is an IQ measuring institution.
- jpeterson 18y ago
  The mean IQ of college grads started out as higher than the mean IQ of the overall population. As you add more people from the overall population, you would expect the college grad mean IQ to get closer to the overall population mean IQ.
  - byrneseyeview 18y ago
    Right, if your situation is just "X is the IQ cutoff for getting into college," you could infer that as more people go to college, X gets lower. But you could also see a situation in which smart people opt out of college, so even if the number of people who wanted to go to school were constant, the average IQ would drop -- e.g. fifty years ago a smart person could succeed by getting a scholarship to a great school; now said person gets 90% of what he needs to know from Wikipedia, and can spread a great idea by uploading something to Sourceforge rather than muddling through the thesis-writing, thesis-approving process. I don't think it's just one phenomenon, and a model that either considers America a pure IQ meritocracy or assumes that college's role has changed by degree and not kind is clearly inadequate.
dangoldin 18y ago
Not neccessarily true. You are assuming that these additional people have an IQ lower than what the average used to be. More people can be graduating from college who have a higher IQ. An example may be Harvard. Harvard just lowered the tuition for certain incomes, thus more kids can now go to Harvard that were not able to be before due to finances. These kids may have an IQ higher than the average Harvard graduate and they would have increased.

comatose_kid 18y ago

The author's conclusion that lowered admission standards are why IQ has dropped is suspect. Any number of factors could be causes for this (ex: the average amount of TV watched by a student may have increased over the last 40 years).

misterbwong 18y ago
AKA. Correlation != Causation.
etal 18y ago
Given his conclusion and brief rant, you'd think it would occur to him to grab data about the percentage of the population with a bachelor's degree for each decade, and plot that versus the IQ data. (No, I wasn't going to, it's not my rant.) Also, there's zero discussion of the scores ticking back up from the 1990s to the 2000s. Stricter admissions standards? Somehow that doesn't seem likely. Teaching against standardized tests in high school helping students to score better on the standardized IQ test? Better than nothing.

schtog 18y ago

obv if a bigger percentage of the population goes to college they wont be as smart on average. i mean this is article is a bit ridiculous in the sense that is trying to state this as something alarming or weird and not something obvious. secondly i dont think intelligence matter THAT much, obv it matters but other skills matters too. more people are graduating because we need to, not letting people in wouldnt make things better.

a-priori 18y ago

I have a few issues with this post. First, it's a mistake to assume IQ is a perfect measure of intelligence, especially over long time scales. I'm highly suspicious of psychometrics. Second, I don't understand US race dynamics, but would anyone care to explain why this guy split the data by race, then disregarded all Black data points? Furthermore, it's well-documented that IQ scores are culture-specific. If you're from a different culture than whomever developed the test, you will score lower. This could also apply to the micro-cultures of two races even within the same country. Finally, he says explicitly that the "sample size is very small", which makes any results drawn from them suspect. (Karma Nazi says, "no upmod for you!")

kingkongrevenge 18y ago
> I'm highly suspicious of psychometrics. > it's well-documented that IQ scores are culture-specific. Psychometrics is not BS. There's a mountain of data showing properties like IQ (i.e. g) are real, useful measures, not culture specific, and are highly heritable. These are inconvenient truths to a lot of people with egalitarian ideals so there's mountains of FUD clouding the cold hard facts about IQ.
- lolb 18y ago
  I didn't know Linda Gottfredson posted here. IQ is a useful (if not especially real) measure, but less so than other measures, it is culture-specific, and it is hardly "highly heritable"; Devlin et al. showed a while back that its narrow-sense heritability is about 35% at best, and most studies of IQ's heritability grossly overestimate it by failing to control for a multitude of environmental effects. And psychometricians don't seem to get how factor analysis renders their beloved general intelligence measure a tautology, so it's understandable why someone would regard their work as BS. [Edit to add some of the "cold hard facts about IQ" that IQ pushers like the parent comment don't tell you: IQ's heritability varies with socioeconomic status from about 80% to virtually zero, and also increases with age, which makes any claim about IQ having a high heritability across the board extremely suspect. Note also that despite the name, heritability isn't a measure of 'how genetic' a trait like IQ is; IQ pushers often take advantage of that misunderstanding. Heritability is merely a rough estimate of the ratio of a trait's variance explainable by genetics to the trait's total variance in a population; as such heritability varies between groups, between environments, and between times. It is neither necessary nor sufficient to demonstrate that a trait is 'genetic'.]

lolb 18y ago

Check out the sidebar of this guy's blog. Wonder what his agenda is. Wonder what he could mean by presenting this data, ripped out of context in this way?