Undergraduates' average IQ has fallen 17 points since 1939. Here's why
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
Because average IQ of authors has done the same thing since 1939.
My understanding is quite different. That was the view up until the 1980s or so, but increasingly college has become a way of making potential employees pay for their own training, rather than have the employer pay for training.
The source paper at https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1309... does not appear to be published? Did the Big Think author get a preprint?
I ask because I want to see how they handled changes in socioeconomic factors, given how mostly only rich kids and especially academic ones went to college back in the 1930s.
The abstract to the paper says: "First, universities and professors need to realize that students are no longer extraordinary but merely average,"
Do universities and professors assume their students have significantly higher IQ than the general population? Given that IQ tests are not that good of a predictor of college success - socioeconomic status, grades in school, and then SAT are better, as I recall - why should educators change anything?
They're not even a good indicator of intelligence overall.
> With samples at each age of about this size, the present study found no moderation of the genetic effect on intelligence. However, we found the greater variance in low-SES families is due to moderation of the environmental effect – an environment-environment interaction.
From: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3270016/
and
> Specifically, children from low SES families scored on average 6 IQ points lower at age 2 than children from high SES backgrounds; by age 16, this difference had almost tripled.
From https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4641149/
The first study in particular confirms some of my personal anecdata, i.e. that perceived intelligence is largely a matter of upbringing.
> Known predictors of academic performance (e.g., college GPA) among college students are ACT (or SAT) scores, high school GPA, and Intelligence Quotient (IQ) (Sternberg et al. 2001; Bowen et al. 2009).
or from https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1601135113
> This paper uses a variety of datasets to show that personality and IQ predict grades and scores on achievement tests. Personality is relatively more important in predicting grades than scores on achievement tests. IQ is relatively more important in predicting scores on achievement tests. Personality is generally more predictive than IQ on a variety of important life outcomes. Both grades and achievement tests are substantially better predictors of important life outcomes than IQ. The reason is that both capture personality traits that have independent predictive power beyond that of IQ.
or from https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18121/w181... :
> Achievement tests and grades are more predictive than IQ. But none of these measures explains much of the variation of any outcome, leaving considerable room for other determinants.
If there's a 3 point per decade increase then the average college student today would be smarter than in 1939.