Last time I passed a job interview, on several rounds of interview not one was about general intelligence, or general knowledge, or general anything. It was about my ability to solve the kind of problems they were solving and I had some experience solving. Last time I failed a job interview it was because of a bad culture fit.
I have not looked at the numbers, but I would suspect Ivy league admissions to be more correlated with wealth / geography than possibly anything else, but you probably square that with a belief that intelligence is hereditary as wealth is.
IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation. There is certainly a use case for that, but thinking it captures the whole of "cognitive ability" is like thinking that duolingo captures the whole of litterary.
By the way, anytime one can't understand why $DEBATED_TOPIC is debatable should be an indication that one should switch to a slower though process.
This is actually like one of the primary tricks of the IQ perverts. They'll take literally any test, run the results through a transformation function to get it into their bell curve, and start making claims about how IQ correlate with This-Or-That based on it.
So: the people that developed intelligence tests were not psychologists; lies, damned lies and statistics; "pioneering" the idea of using math doesn't mean that people using math today are doing the same thing; whatever the definition of IQ might be is irrelevant because "IQ tests" are not rigorously defined; however precisely IQ is defined is also irrelevant because it's supposedly just a proxy for "g"; psychology is not psychometry and so discarding IQ does nothing to the field of psychology.
I am of the opinion that, although there is some generality in IQ tests, they measure only one specific aspect of cognitive ability defined by: abstract + quick.
My intuition is that cognitive abilities encompass much more than that. Anyone who have ever argued at length with that smart but obtuse engineer who can't tell the forest for the tree will know what I'm refering to. To me, a better test for "cognitive abilities" would also measure how someone is able of nuance, of humor, of seeing things from different perspectives, of introspection, etc, not just solving puzzles that can be described in a couple of sentences.
And I'm not talking about "emotional intelligence" here. To me, E-I is just the other side of that same flawed model that smells too much like modern day phrenology.