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Meta-analysis: On average undergraduate students intelligence is merely average
- paulpauper 3y agoThe results show that the average IQ of undergraduate students today is a mere 102 IQ points and declined by approximately 0.2 IQ points per year. The students' IQ also varies substantially across universities and is correlated with the selectivity of universities (measured by average SAT scores of admitted students) this is not too surprising and is generally assumed to be true given that high school grads subsequently then go to college, in which the attrition rate is high. Now do college grads, and the IQ goes up markedly. I think the 110+ figure has always been assumed for grads, not merely students.
- lumost 3y agoIs the attrition rate still high? When schools charged a summer’s wage I could see this - but are students really dropping out after spending 50k+? My experience has been that most schools have eased their grading and created easy out majors to support the higher price tag. If students thought that there was a high attrition rate… they likely wouldn’t be willing to pay the high price.
- spamizbad 3y agoThe myths this analysis dispels are interesting because I don't think I know anyone who believes any of them. Perhaps is a generational thing?
- fnordpiglet 3y agoFrom the first paragraph: We traced the origin of this belief to obsolete intelligence data collected in 1940s and 1950s when university education was the privilege of a few.
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- paxys 3y agoA university education being considered a badge of honor and a sign of intelligence is pretty common everyone in the world.
- keenmaster 3y agoGood, that means more people are getting an education. I’ve seen too many hot takes online from people who attended college and vastly benefited from college who tell others that university isn’t as great as you think, go to trade school and learn something practical, etc…with a complete and utter lack of self-awareness or sense of irony.
- paulpauper 3y agoYeah exactly. Do as I say, not as I do. Look at all those reddit FIRE/investing subs. Everyone with those 6-fig salaries has degrees. No tradespeople. It's obvious where the $ is, student debt notwithstanding. If the goal is to make $, and you have the aptitude to finish, its hard to beat the 4-year degree.
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- hotpotamus 3y agoOn the one hand, that's a selected group of people who sit at desks and can chat on a web forum during the day at their jobs (as I am right now), so I wouldn't take them as representative. On the other hand, the trades fucking suck - there are posters here who I will generously interpret as being a bit... touched perhaps? when it comes to the realities of work and particularly pay that the average tradesman must face. I'm sure somewhere, some tradesperson in the world is making a couple hundred thousand a year, but statistically speaking, basically none of them are. There's a reason they want their kids to go into a different line of work.
- OJFord 3y agoThere are plenty of them earning six figures, short term (not including the degree years) some trades are probably reliably better - the median anyway, not compared to FANG. There's just perhaps not that much overlap with those circles.
- corethree 3y agoIt usually isn't. They're right. They benefit usually because of a name brand school. The name brand is the benefit, the education less so. What people do on the job has overwhelmingly no relation to what they learned in school. Only like at most 5 percent applies in most cases.
- badosu 3y agoThat should be a good thing right? At least the way I read is: "undergraduates college maps to normal demographic distribution" which should reflect the result of more access to higher ed
- corethree 3y agoMore women are attending college than ever before. In fact more women total are in higher education then men. I'm not spelling out what that means here but this study reflects what you choose it to reflect and that's not always good. Or maybe it is... again depending on your perspective.. and your gender. This study is also too general. Some universities that are selective and actually have higher IQ students.
- tgv 3y agoIt also means that the level is considerably lower.
- antegamisou 3y agoThe final, formatted version of the article will be published soon. Haha, smart way to gain traction even if the final paper turns out to tell a completely different story from the abstract..
- darig 3y ago[dead]
- sfblah 3y agoI genuinely don't understand how analyses like this one are taken at face value but then media turns around and argues that IQ is primarily a result of environmental, not genetic factors. If it's environmental, then shouldn't going to university substantially increase these students' IQs? In general, going to university means you're exiting whatever culture/family system you grew up in. And, the whole point is to educate you. Point being, why doesn't research like this immediately get canceled for being anti-whomever?
- rthkljlkrj 3y ago[dead]
- rsynnott 3y ago> I genuinely don't understand how analyses like this one are taken at face value but then media turns around and argues that IQ is primarily a result of environmental, not genetic factors. The data backing this is largely things like twin studies, done on people who have different _childhood_ environments. With extremely limited exceptions, people are adults when they go to university.
- sfblah 3y agoI'm well aware that twin studies strongly suggest IQ is largely genetic. What I don't understand is how folks can't see that the mainstream view that IQ is environmental is at odds with the content of the OP study.
- logicchains 3y ago>If it's environmental, then shouldn't going to university substantially increase these students' IQs? Or university could just be very bad at increasing intelligence. The goal of university isn't to increase intelligence, it's to increase knowledge, that's why university exams test students' knowledge. Outside of a few subjects university generally doesn't explicitly teach critical thinking or logic/problem solving, the skills most relevant to IQ tests.
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- Perceval 3y agoControlling for attrition, do IQ scores improve after 4 years of undergraduate education?
- andrewla 3y agoIf they do, then that is a significant defect in the testing itself. Most IQ tests are designed with the intention of being stable over time.
- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoCongrats to the authors for re-discovering the definition of IQ. An IQ of 100 is computed as the average of a given population.
- TheCoelacanth 3y agoI highly doubt that they re-normed the IQ scores for the undergraduate population rather than the overall population.
- 0xbadc0de5 3y agoSame. This is more an observation that the population of university students closely mirrors the broader population, and has been increasingly so for the last few decades.
- medo-bear 3y agoI dont think this dispels any myths and the study is scant on details. I wager that IQ results will be significantly influenced by faculty (major/specialization). Today there is a much greater range of university majors. And of course also the university you attend. Today there are too many "universities", some worse than trade schools.
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- corethree 3y agoI believe a similar research study was done on HN where they asked HN people what their IQ was and actually measured it. I vaguely recall the average guessed IQ was 120 or 130 while the actual IQ was around 100 which is similar to this study. In a nutshell the conclusion was that people on HN like to think they're smarter than average and like to up vote articles on IQ when in reality HNers are just average. I can't find the study anymore. But I remember seeing it somewhere.
- jncfhnb 3y agoI’d be curious. I feel like one should be able to estimate this based on life experience. But maybe not. E.g. if you’re effortlessly in the top 10% of any academic or mental performance setting, does it follow that you’re likely in the top 10% IQ (120+?). If it does not follow, what does that suggest about the measurement? At the risk of hubris, I’d be so dumbfounded by something saying I had median intelligence that I would be inclined to say the test is simply wrong. I would not expect the test to be calibrated well enough to differentiate above 90% well. So I’m in that bucket of 120+ estimators. I’m probably not that different from the rest. Kind of makes me want to take a test tbh.
- yterdy 3y agoThe idea of college being a way to connect remarkable people with resources has always seemed sort of suspect. Remarkable people seem to find their own way; it's the rest of us that need a structural on-ramp to the professional or intellectual classes. If anything, credentialism is a roadblock for true geniuses, but it's also a necessary evil, in that regard, in order to protect the public from charlatans.
- mc32 3y agoWhen was that the premise? If anything your second point seems to be how most people view it. An institution that sort of readies those willing to adapt students to enter a workforce adjusted for the demands.
- paxys 3y agoRemarkable people "finding their own way" has always been a myth. No one, no matter how smart, becomes successful without a support system, mentorship, a strong network/clique, sponsors, and more. This is historically what a university has provided.
- smrtinsert 3y agoI don't understand how this myth perpetuates even today.
- yterdy 3y agoThis is historically what a university has provided to the privileged, unremarkable children of remarkable people who developed their support systems and networks and found mentors and sponsors by whatever means they could. That's when you consider modern and classical universities, rather than the intervening two millennia where such institutions were mainly concerned with theological studies and producing fewer innovators and more religious officials who were trained to stick to the literal canon.
- Nokinside 3y agoI would be interested to know about their executive function and self-regulation skills. The ability to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, working memory, mental flexibility.
- andrewla 3y agoMy intuition is that this finding is correct. This is dangerous; in the social sciences, results that match your intuition will most likely have garbage methodology that does not support their conclusions [1]. I haven't read the study yet to confirm this, but the abstract is unencouraging: > We conducted a meta-analysis of the mean IQ scores of college and university students samples tested with Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale between 1939 and 2022. Wechsler first published the WAIS in 1955. [1] This is similar to results that conflict with your intuition; in those cases the studies will most likely have garbage methodology that does not support their conclusion.
- totetsu 3y agoThis is just a wordy disregarding of the whole field then?
- andrewla 3y agoYes. If I had access to the full article I would be able to perform a more nuanced analysis of their (likely garbage) methodology, but for the moment all I have is the abstract and there's already a significant error there.
- photochemsyn 3y agoWho came up with the idea that intelligence could be distilled down into a single number (IQ), and why is such an obviously flawed concept still bandied about in the modern era? Nobody tries to do this with physical capabilities - assign a single score to someone's physical capabilities - because gains in one area, e.g. strength training with the goal of increasing muscle mass, are counterproductive in other areas, e.g. long-distance running. A generalized fitness score for an individual would tell you very little about their real-world capabilities. In general, the whole idea of scoring IQ smells of eugenic theories of inherited intellectual capabilities, designed to promote concepts such as 'minority populations are genetic inferiors so educating them is a waste of effort'. Fundamentally, mental abilities are just as trainable as physical abilities are, and if you want to discover individuals with unique mental and physical capabilities, you don't want to eliminate anyone from the pool of candidates based on non-correlating factors like race, sex, ethnicity, etc.
- tlb 3y agoIf you don't believe in aggregating different measures of intelligence, you can simply not aggregate the different categories of questions in IQ tests. For example, you can separately average just the shape rotation or language questions. One reason that's unpopular is that there's a gender difference: males (on average) score higher at shape rotation and women score higher at language. The standard IQ tests carefully balance questions to make the average IQ of men and women equal. If a school said "we think the only thing that matters for our program is shape rotation ability, so we'll just look at the score on those questions" they'd be introducing a big gender bias, which is Problematic.
- photochemsyn 3y agoI really doubt there's a gender-based difference in shape rotation that is based on inherited genetic factors and not on early childhood development and education. This is in sharp contrast to gender-based differences in strength development, i.e. I'm sure a cohort of male teenagers would develop more muscle mass than a female cohort when exposed to identical training regimens for several years, whereas I'd be very surprised if boys and girls exposed to identical mathematical training programs for several years displayed such clear gender bias in outcomes.
- paxys 3y agoTL;DR – merely going to university doesn't mean you are smart considering how low the barriers to entry have become, BUT going to a prestigious/selective university still does.
- corethree 3y agoThis article is likely on the front page because a lot of programmers like to think they're smart and at the same time never attended university.
- gwern 3y agoAlso of interest is the reallocation. For example, in the military, you can see the flight of Blue/elite America from the military in the steadily-dropping GCT scores: https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Images/jfq/jfq-81/cancian-figure1.jpg https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Images/jfq/jfq-81/cancia... Every year in this graph starting 1980, it goes down a hair on average. (Yeah, I know there's some guys who claim it's due solely to a change in test procedure in the 1990s, but if they're right, you sure can't see it in the graph there...)
- daveguy 3y agoAverages average. News at 11.
- TaurenHunter 3y agoFindings (paraphrased): 1 - students are no longer extraordinary but merely average 2 - employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without degrees 3 - acceptance into university is no longer an invitation to join an elite group 4 - estimating IQ based on educational attainment is vastly inaccurate 5 - obsolete IQ data/tests ought not to be used to make high-stakes decisions about individuals