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Comment by cjbgkagh | Hacker News Reader

College grads average IQ had dropped from 119 in 1939 to 102 in 2022. For many jobs an IQ test would be sufficient to determine expected likelihood for long term success. College still teaches domain expertise but to a larger and less intelligent cohort - so I would attribute the lower value of degrees more to it's decreased relevance to general intelligence. Which would suggest the very thing to fix it would be through the use of IQ tests, but we're not allowed to do that.

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IQ scoring is routinely adjusted so that 100 represents the mean. It should be expected that IQ scores for college grads trend towards 100 as higher percentages of the population go to college. University is also not designed to maximize standardized test scores the same way that public high school is. I would expect recency and intensity of math education to play a higher role in IQ scores than the specialized knowledge and exposure to the arts that comes from a college education.

Certainly expanding the cohort alone is sufficient to cause a drop in average IQ scores - which is exactly what I said. College is no longer a useful proxy for IQ score. I made no claim that college would cause IQ scores to increase and if they do play a role I don't think it is a very large one. Raw scores are fitted to a normal distribution but the IQ scores are normalized across time by comparing that distribution to other distributions. Certainly some processes for obtaining IQ scores can be more flawed than others.

There is a reverse Flynn effect (peaked for children born in 1975) so not only are average IQ scores lower for college grads but there has been a drop in IQ for the general population.

I see what you are saying, thank you. Personally, I would not rely on IQ scores for much, mainly because people have become increasingly specialized and I wouldn't expect specialized knowledge to translate well to a general intelligence test. It also does not seem as though other general forms of intelligence map well to IQ and it may even be arguably one of the less useful measures of intelligence outside of the extremes. e.g., I would expect a high school student in Calc 2 to crush me in a math test, but I would never go to them seeking life advice. I'm not married to this belief and could probably be swayed, but that is my current impression.

By my observation IQ correlates to anxiety disorders so often people with high IQs tend adopt risk adverse behaviors to minimize that anxiety and that undermines opportunities for success. People with really high IQs tend to end up on the spectrum and regularly burnout. Extremely gifted youngsters tend to end up with similar and often pretty severe health problems. So while I do agree that in general past success is a good indicator for future success and IQ is not the be all and end all, I would suggest that many high IQ people can be properly medicated to lead much more productive lives than currently do. And this difference would explain much of the residual lack of expected success.

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