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Comment by drblastoff | Hacker News Reader

The IQ of the average college student has dropped from ~120 to 102 over time.

College no longer the domain of a people pursuing intellectually-demanding careers. It’s become an expensive and completely unnecessary prerequisite for the general public, costing them a fortune not only in tuition, textbooks, boarding, etc., but also in the opportunity cost of delaying their earnings and career advancement by 4+ years. We’re now stuck in a fundamentally flawed system.

By ignoring the problems, and actually making them worse by lowering academic standards and pushing the student loan burden to taxpayers, it reeks of either gross incompetence or corruption in our government.

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I tried to track that down. It seems to be a poster and preprint by Bob Uttl, Victoria Violo, Lacey Gibson, available at https://www.scienceopen.com/document_file/5fb398f5-274e-4729... .

If so, Google Scholar finds only two citations to it, neither interesting, which tells me the conclusions haven't been really examined by others in the field.

I bring this up because my first thought was to wonder how they handled any implicit cultural bias which might have been in the 1950s-era tests. If the IQ tests favored well-off white students, which were over-represented in college students back then, then IQ result would be excessively high for the 1950s students.

The alternative explanation for the secular decrease in student IQ is that IQ tests became less culturally biased over the same period of time.

I saw no discussion of this possibility in the paper.

Thanks for this; it seemed like a particularly dubious claim.

Sometimes you can just blame people. All you need to do is hear the stories of parents forcing meetings with teachers to complain about how their child is failing because they didn't submit any assignments. And the school administration pressures the teachers into acquiescing to the parent's demands.

If 100 is average IQ, isn’t it more likely that a higher percentage of population enrolling in college has caused the average college IQ to revert to the average population IQ?

You might say it’s a distinction without a difference, but surely it’s a healthy trend for more than 10% of the population to have access to a college education. (120 IQ is 90th percentile.)

I believe you've just restated GP's point regarding the fall in IQ.

The point that college is becoming useless as a reversion to the mean?

I dunno, I think it’s a question of framing. If you think that the lowered standards of admission (which are not evenly distributed amongst all colleges, btw - I doubt the average IQ at Harvard is 100) will degrade the experience for the more intelligent students, then sure, I was restating GP’s point.

But I’m not sure that’s the case. You get out of college what you put into it. The presence of some students with average intelligence should have a limited affect on the experience of someone with higher intelligence (YMMV - this depends on the quality of the institution and the effort of the student).

There would always be outliers - did a 140 IQ student have a bad experience in college when the average was 120?

> The point that college is becoming useless as a reversion to the mean?

The point that college stopped being a signal of raw intelligence and potential and became a way to gatekeep people who couldn't afford it from the same level of white-collar jobs of people that could.

> There would always be outliers - did a 140 IQ student have a bad experience in college when the average was 120?

Probably to some degree, but it wasn't that pronounced. People below a certain intelligence level almost have a deliberate culture of ignorance (at least in America) - e.g. being proud of not having critical thinking skills and berating others for sounding smart.

People like this don't belong in college.

> People below a certain intelligence level almost have a deliberate culture of ignorance (at least in America) - e.g. being proud of not having critical thinking skills and berating others for sounding smart.

You've conveniently not stated what you to believe that threshold to be, and likely no evidence exists to support your hypothesis so I'm not even going to ask for it.

About 44% of the population goes through college.[1] If this population was the top 44% by IQ, then the minimum IQ would be 102.[2]

Instead the average IQ is 102, meaning many college students are below average in intelligence. We’re populating our universities with students of less academic potential than you would expect given the number enrolled.

[1] https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/percentage-of-americ...

[2] https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/IQtable.aspx

Are you saying that people of below average intelligence can't benefit from a university education?

The question is not whether any particular person can benefit from university education - the answer is that there is a possibility of benefit for any person. That does not mean that every person should attend university.

The question we should be considering is, given that university education comes at substantial expense, and that the number of students our university system can accommodate is necessarily limited: what students are justified in going to university, by their ultimate social and personal benefit?

I would argue that sending unintelligent people through university is counter-productive: it undermines the quality of conversation and culture of the university by allowing mid-wits to shift the conversation. It undermines the standards that professors apply to their students by making it intractable to fail much of their class. It lowers the bar, even for the capable students. Thus it diminishes the education, most tragically, for the capable students who might otherwise take us to greater heights of understanding.

>It’s become an expensive and completely unnecessary prerequisite for the general public,

This isn't a "problem" per se because that is literally what we drilled into multiple generations of people.

"Go to college if you don't want to flip burgers forever.", as was oft said. We will become a country of white collar service industries, it was oft said.

We demanded everyone go to college, everyone thus went to college regardless if it made any logical or financial sense to do so.

Meanwhile, the trades are seeing fewer and fewer students and apprentices, blue collar jobs are seeing fewer and fewer applicants, and people who actually gave some thought to going to college or not generally have had happier lives.

The problem isn't everyone going to college, it's the notion everyone should go to college.

We required them to go to college (employers require the checkbox with no exposure to the cost), didn't pay for it (funds to schools reduced to lower taxes), made them take out loans that aren't dischargeable (what other obligations are not dischargeable in bankruptcy besides tax claims, spousal and child support, etc?), did not provide any guarantee for a job mandating the obligation, and did all of this when folks were too young to understand the trap they were sent into. We should be ashamed of this, but in America, this is a Tuesday.

You must internalize the externality of requiring a college degree to obtain a job, and shift the cost to the demanding parties. Universal access to community college and robust apprenticeship pipelines are also potential solutions. Otherwise, people will just give up [1] [2] [3], as it is the rational course of action. Think in systems. With all due respect, this system is garbage and we can do better if improved outcomes are desired.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/01/neets-and-new-unemployables-...

[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/05/23/is-coll...

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/03/economy/young-americans-givin...

The trades are not "struggling". They have the same administrative incompetence issue as uni's. Unions in the long term destroyed your ability to work in a trade by requiring indentured servitude to get your certificate. The one you need to pull any kind of permit or do basic work.

Government and unions have intentionally choked the life out of trades by ensuring very few can get into it. It's a club, and you ain't in it.

The solution is effective - nullify duration requirements, replace with in person testing.

And related to this, there's the failure of secondary schools to actually sufficiently educate children. Is it budget cuts, flawed curriculum, or (this is approaching conspiracy theory territory) a particular political party wanting to keep the population stupid, because a better educated population would vote against them?

Definitely not budget cuts. School budgets have surprisingly little to do with educational outcomes. See Abbott districts in New Jersey for one of the starkest examples of this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district

Despite having better per-pupil funding than the wealthiest districts in the state (thanks to a court order mandating increased funding) student performance has stayed the same and even worsened in these districts.

The single biggest determiners of school performance seems to be the level of parental involvement and the average IQ of the students. Well those, plus selection effects to bump up numbers: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-selection-bias-is-t...

The problem is they have several conflicting goals and education is only one of them. Secondary schools teach whatever their local government or state wants.

Historically, the US copied Prussian Frederick the Great's School system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system#Unit....

Meanwhile the universities saw themselves as research institutions. They view teaching as a pipeline to produce future researchers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_university

When the states met and decided what high schools teach, they created Common Core which was highly controversial. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core#Reception_and_crit...

Now there are things like UT Austin's online high school where they teach everything like Khan Academy. Again they are teaching to meet whatever standard the state told them to meet. https://highschool.utexas.edu/hs_courses

Here's my experience. I went to a majority black school my freshman year and was initially placed into core classes. These classes were filled with clowns and I immediately demanded assessment testing to assess out. Once I was in AP classes, shit got real and I definitely felt like I got what I put in: I could have learned a lot but chose to do the minimum. I also felt like my fundamentals were so flawed that they had to grade me on a curve in order to not fail me. Of course this did me a disservice but I did put in a little effort.

Anyway, the next year I transferred to a white school and they placed me in core classes again. Difference was that in the white school, these kids were chill so I was fine doing the bare minimum. In this environment, the bar was set so low now, it was easy to ace anything. I did take some AP classes that were challenging.

So my hot take is that school is hard for those looking for a challenge and willing to advocate for themselves. I chose to take assessment tests. I went into the offices to talk to department heads. I never once told my parents this or anyone really. I just knew I wasn't personable enough to survive a year of "looking ass" jokes.

Well said. I have a plethora of personal experience dealing with incompetent chair warmers at big uni's everyone has heard of.

The solution is actually simple. remove all federal student loan aid and grants. Only project grants should be used to onboard students into a higher uni education. If there's no work to be done then no students. There should never be an education program where the professors are not including their students in tangible work.

Yes if we make our universities more dependent on extracting money from students and industry the problem will surely get better.

It will, because it filters out the poor quality professors and creates purpose for students immediately that funds their education.

That’s a bit of a reach.

>No work to be done then no students

Guess we have to close all those pesky departments that don’t use many funds for research because the professors only work on fundenmental problems that don’t have linear solution. Goodbye theoretical physics!

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