Meta-analysis: On average undergraduate students intelligence is merely average

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.

It 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.

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).

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.

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.

> that means more people are getting an education

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

It also means that the level is considerably lower.

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.

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.

From 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.

A university education being considered a badge of honor and a sign of intelligence is pretty common everyone in the world.

I highly doubt that they re-normed the IQ scores for the undergraduate population rather than the overall population.

If 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.

This is just a wordy disregarding of the whole field then?

> 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.

>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.

I don’t think it’s a mainstream pov that IQ is environmental.

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.