
Mean IQ of College Grads is Dropping - byrneseyeview
http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2008/06/mean-iq-of-college-grads-dropped-9.html
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jpeterson
"Mean IQ of College Grads is Dropping" is basically the same statement as
"more people are graduating from college."

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byrneseyeview
True iff America is an IQ meritocracy, and college is an IQ measuring
institution.

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jpeterson
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.

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byrneseyeview
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.

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a-priori
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!")

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kingkongrevenge
> 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.

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a-priori
Let me clarify. I don't think psychometrics are BS; I think they are real
measures of certain skills. However, the results of IQ tests have certain,
significant limitations that people often don't appreciate. In practice, the
tests are overused and the results are over-generalized. This article is a
prime example of my criticisms.

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comatose_kid
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).

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etal
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.

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schtog
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.

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lolb
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?

