The 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.
Is 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.
Good, 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.
Yeah 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.
On 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.
There 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.
Attending university is unbelievably useful, but it's not really because of the subjects that you take. I can't remember half the things I learned in class, but my persisting friend groups and life opportunities can all be traced back to my time in university. (Which isn't to say that the subjects were useless; they provided a solid foundation in math and computer science. But to say they prepared me to become a professional programmer would be a baldfaced lie (conveniently, a lie that my first employer seemed to believe without me needing to tell it)).
Attending university is useful for making friends?
That's not what I would classify as useful. You can get friend from many many places. Attending university for friends is not a valid reason to attend imo.
It's not exactly a hot take that networking in general is one of the advantages of attending university.
Likewise, if one's opinion is that the point of university is to get an education, you could just as equally counter with "well, you can get an education from many places". And frankly, it's much easier to recreate the educational aspects of a university than the social aspects. I was a hopeless teenager coasting apathetically through life, and attending university got me to break out of my mold and learn how to socialize, set life goals, and be a functioning human being. I wouldn't trade that time for anything.
Because you're cherrypicking people to whom a college education in a certain country and field has been highly beneficial.
And actually in large parts of the world, trade schools pay much better indeed.
Reality is that while our society got much more educated the ratio of blue vs white collars hasn't shifted significantly in many decades in most of the world.
Now we find the reality when we need our car adjusted or a plumber at home and we find that the hourly rate is insanely higher than that of an average college graduate.
But I guess on HN where most people have STEM degrees and have found great jobs indeed with their education this does not resonate.
But an average lawyer in France or Italy will never make the money of the average plumber (but stats show that a bit less because those trades often avoid paying taxes entirely) till late in his career (at which point the plumber has built more wealth).
Plumbers can make a significant amount, but it's not that easy to get into either. How many students go to tradeschool and then can't find a position where they want to live?
Plumbers? Pretty much find work anywhere, at least in the US. Developing nations probably a different story. Large plumbing companies will hire people with no experience, trade school not required.
“average lawyer in France or Italy will never make the money of the average plumber”
My disbelief requires more suspension than the Golden Gate Bridge. Most reputable sources will disprove this. Also, it’s not a given that the bottom 30% of lawyers (who pull down the average) would be good plumbers - I have a hard time imagining a worse population to pull from to work with their hands on piping and lug around tools in their pickup truck.
I think these “facts” come from blue collar cosplaying. A survey asking “On a scale of 0-100, how much do you want to be a plumber?” would have a disproportionately massive mode at 0.
I describe it to the youth like this: Getting a degree might not be the fastest way to riches for the exceptionally entrepreneurial/resourceful (who are few,) but it's still by far the most reliable way to reach financially comfort or affluence in the US if you weren't born into it (or if you're entrepreneurial it amplifies what you can do.)
I did a few years of college and got an associate's before dropping out, didn't finish my degree until quite a few years later. I've been fortunate and have privilege, but I most likely would have done better financially if I'd finished a STEM degree from a state school earlier.
It's also way harder in the US to go back to school as a working professional. Most people can succeed in university, but the window to do it with the least struggle closes after you're adulting hard, have a family, etc.
For most people I can understand why this would be true, especially if you have a family. For me, however, it was the exact opposite. When I first went to college I was abysmal at it and soon dropped out. After a few years of work experience, however, I went back and finished my degree while working full-time. Despite having much more to juggle I did vastly better at college my second go-around. I think having better time-management skills, being emotionally more mature and intuitively knowing that I needed that degree in order to get a better job all worked "against" it being more of a struggle, in my opinion.
One of those online folks here. I tell people this all the time. College was largely a huge waste of my time. It got me interested in CS which has become my career, but I probably would’ve stumbled into it anyway. If you can manage to do it without debt, hell yeah—do it. Otherwise it’s just not worth the financial burden unless you’re doing something that only college people do like operating on brains or practicing law.
Otherwise there’s much better paths with less wasted time and less debt.
To be honest though I’m not sure college really changes the trajectory of people’s lives most of the time. If you get into a ton of debt, you’ll probably be alright in general. If you take the shortcut of not going to college, you’ll also probably be alright.
IMO, you reach the wrong conclusion. It is: academic jobs are overpaid. There's really no point in giving the whole population an academic degree. University should raise researchers (applied or fundamental). Jobs that don't require academic research skills should not require academic credentials.
What you think you mean: more people should get a college education.
What you probably actually mean: high school educations, which we provide free of cost in order to educate the citizenry, are no longer effectual enough at producing an "educated" citizenry, and therefore we should reform high school education.
A portion of that argument is probably rooted in a very good intention: the Gini coefficient is far too high right now. One good way go reduce the Gini coefficient is to reduce the praise for roles like CEO, manager, physician, etc and reclaim more respect the technicians of the world.
University doesn't really connect anyone with "remarkable" people, but if you come from a rural or low populated area, it does help to let you interact with a more diverse (many professions and ideas) set of people.
You're correct that universities don't really have high IQ people (even the grad students, PIs, and professors likely do not have a high IQ these days), but the incentive structure isn't there anymore to allow for this. The publish-or-perish paradigm has basically annihilated the incentive structure for intelligence and now the focus is much more on 'doing' (without much thought). It's pretty simple to see that when looking at the choices in grad students and faculty at places like Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. They're not chosen for drive for novelty, or their cleverness, they're chosen for tirelessly working towards very incremental adjustments to ideas that are then marketed as highly impactful and novel - but the biggest determining factor here is being a "hard worker", not intelligence.
Universal college has been a disaster, one I look forward to us correcting. It has caused untold damage to the millennial and gen X generations. Zoomers have started to adapt but the early ones got swept along with millennials.
For the overwhelming majority of people and majors college is a scam, one that robs you of some of your most productive work years and puts you into massive debt.
Yeah, no. The 18-22 years may be years where you have a ton of energy, but that doesn't mean they're the most productive.
American 18-year old high school graduates are basically children in all but body size and have no experience in doing complex things that the modern economy requires.
They still would have to spend 3-5 years learning skills (whether they do it in college or outside of college is less relevant)
Does it really mean that though? If that increase in dumber people going to university also shifted the programming to fit dumber people better then have we actually given more people a university education, or have we made university the new highschool? Also, we jacked the cost of education through the roof to build the supply for all these people, which diminished the net benefit of university dramatically for many fields
That 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
More 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.
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. 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?
> 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.
I'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.
>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.
Sure, though I'd think it would implicitly teach those things. It's difficult to write a coherent essay or solve a physics problem without critical thinking and logic.
I don't think you can be right about that, because if you believe IQ is largely genetic, that demolishes a whole bunch of things like "institutional racism" that I think is mainstream (or at least CNN tells me it is).
The fact that racism still exists is good evidence that people still believe IQ is genetic and the current vocal push against racism is happening because racism is still an issue.
A lot of people are vocally anti-racist, but it's all just talk. I think that there are a lot of people who just haven't thought through any of this cause they don't care, and they believe that IQ is genetic while also disagreeing with racism. This is why the right continually succeeds at pushing the IQ narrative and the crime statistics narrative to justify racial targeting.
Replying to say that I literally don't know if I'm being downvoted for negating left-wing or right-wing orthodoxies. The world is so confusing nowadays.
Same. 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.
I 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.
I 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.
I’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.
The 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.
When 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.
Remarkable 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.
This 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.
I 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.
My 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.
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.
Who 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.
If 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.
I 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.
TL;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.
Also 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/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...)
73 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadthis 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.
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.
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.
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.
There's just perhaps not that much overlap with those circles.
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.
That's not what I would classify as useful. You can get friend from many many places. Attending university for friends is not a valid reason to attend imo.
Likewise, if one's opinion is that the point of university is to get an education, you could just as equally counter with "well, you can get an education from many places". And frankly, it's much easier to recreate the educational aspects of a university than the social aspects. I was a hopeless teenager coasting apathetically through life, and attending university got me to break out of my mold and learn how to socialize, set life goals, and be a functioning human being. I wouldn't trade that time for anything.
And actually in large parts of the world, trade schools pay much better indeed.
Reality is that while our society got much more educated the ratio of blue vs white collars hasn't shifted significantly in many decades in most of the world.
Now we find the reality when we need our car adjusted or a plumber at home and we find that the hourly rate is insanely higher than that of an average college graduate.
But I guess on HN where most people have STEM degrees and have found great jobs indeed with their education this does not resonate.
But an average lawyer in France or Italy will never make the money of the average plumber (but stats show that a bit less because those trades often avoid paying taxes entirely) till late in his career (at which point the plumber has built more wealth).
Other trades don't pay enough for the hassle.
My disbelief requires more suspension than the Golden Gate Bridge. Most reputable sources will disprove this. Also, it’s not a given that the bottom 30% of lawyers (who pull down the average) would be good plumbers - I have a hard time imagining a worse population to pull from to work with their hands on piping and lug around tools in their pickup truck.
I think these “facts” come from blue collar cosplaying. A survey asking “On a scale of 0-100, how much do you want to be a plumber?” would have a disproportionately massive mode at 0.
I did a few years of college and got an associate's before dropping out, didn't finish my degree until quite a few years later. I've been fortunate and have privilege, but I most likely would have done better financially if I'd finished a STEM degree from a state school earlier.
Otherwise there’s much better paths with less wasted time and less debt.
To be honest though I’m not sure college really changes the trajectory of people’s lives most of the time. If you get into a ton of debt, you’ll probably be alright in general. If you take the shortcut of not going to college, you’ll also probably be alright.
What you think you mean: more people should get a college education.
What you probably actually mean: high school educations, which we provide free of cost in order to educate the citizenry, are no longer effectual enough at producing an "educated" citizenry, and therefore we should reform high school education.
University doesn't really connect anyone with "remarkable" people, but if you come from a rural or low populated area, it does help to let you interact with a more diverse (many professions and ideas) set of people.
You're correct that universities don't really have high IQ people (even the grad students, PIs, and professors likely do not have a high IQ these days), but the incentive structure isn't there anymore to allow for this. The publish-or-perish paradigm has basically annihilated the incentive structure for intelligence and now the focus is much more on 'doing' (without much thought). It's pretty simple to see that when looking at the choices in grad students and faculty at places like Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. They're not chosen for drive for novelty, or their cleverness, they're chosen for tirelessly working towards very incremental adjustments to ideas that are then marketed as highly impactful and novel - but the biggest determining factor here is being a "hard worker", not intelligence.
For the overwhelming majority of people and majors college is a scam, one that robs you of some of your most productive work years and puts you into massive debt.
Yeah, no. The 18-22 years may be years where you have a ton of energy, but that doesn't mean they're the most productive.
American 18-year old high school graduates are basically children in all but body size and have no experience in doing complex things that the modern economy requires.
They still would have to spend 3-5 years learning skills (whether they do it in college or outside of college is less relevant)
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.
Haha, smart way to gain traction even if the final paper turns out to tell a completely different story from the abstract..
Point being, why doesn't research like this immediately get canceled for being anti-whomever?
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.
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.
A lot of people are vocally anti-racist, but it's all just talk. I think that there are a lot of people who just haven't thought through any of this cause they don't care, and they believe that IQ is genetic while also disagreeing with racism. This is why the right continually succeeds at pushing the IQ narrative and the crime statistics narrative to justify racial targeting.
An IQ of 100 is computed as the average of a given population.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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...)
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