Average IQ of College Students Has Dropped 17 Points Since 1939
“The recent findings also reflect the notion that being accepted to college today no longer requires the intelligence that it used to”
This isn’t hard to believe. Just look at schools that are now offering courses on Taylor Swift. Everything has been dumbed down.
Real Clear Science reports:
Why College Students’ Average IQ Has Fallen 17 Points Since 1939
It’s commonly cited that undergraduates are significantly smarter than average, with IQs ranging from 115 to 130. But as a team of Canadian researchers showed in a recently published meta-analysis, that “fact” is woefully out of date.
Conducted by first author Bob Uttl, a psychologist and faculty member at Mount Royal University, and his co-authors Victoria Violo and Lacey Gibson, the meta-analysis aggregated numerous studies measuring college students’ IQs conducted between 1939 and 2022. The results showed that undergraduates’ IQs have steadily fallen from roughly 119 to a mean of 102 today — just slightly above the population average of 100. In short, undergraduates are now no more intelligent on average than members of the general population.
This finding is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the decrease in undergraduates’ IQs sharply contrasts with the long-observed “Flynn effect,” which describes how IQ scores among the general public have been steadily rising over time. In 1984, James Flynn published a paper showing that Americans’ IQs had risen by about three points per decade over the prior 46 years — an increase that Flynn found was not attributable to recalibrations of IQ tests, which are performed roughly every 15 years. His finding has since been replicated by other researchers, and the climb in IQs appears to have mostly continued (though there are signs it may have reversed in the first two decades of the 21st century).
The recent findings also reflect the notion that being accepted to college today no longer requires the intelligence that it used to — or at least the sort of intelligence measured by an IQ test. While useful, IQ tests are not definitive measures of intelligence. After all, intelligence comes in a variety of forms beyond what questions on a test can reveal.
“The decline in students’ IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years,” the researchers commented. “Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s.”
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When the proportion of high school graduates going to college increases from , for example, 5% to 40% (hypothetical numbers), at least two things are going to happen. First, the proportion of those with high IQs who go to college will increase. There will proportionately be a lot fewer brilliant high school grads who don’t go to college. Secondly, the average IQ of college students will decrease when the proportion of high school grads in college increases from 5% to 40.
As such, the findings are just common sense. Not a surprise.
Yes and no.
Your deductions are accurate but also assume that IQ (or perhaps intelligence itself) won’t increase with college experience or ignores the measurement by only talking about pre-college intelligence.
Now, I know we tend to measure IQ only during these high school years, but that is inadequate, especially with the developmental delays we see since circa 2000.
That said, intelligence gain is draining quickly through the college experience. I expect we are seeing reverse trends.
During the years when college participation increased dramatically, intelligence also increased dramatically. The exposure to previously inaccessible information was very high and the general morale and average motivation of the student was comparably high.
Once participation hit plateaus and became habit, morale/motivation dropped off while information accessibility increased even prior to college.
College is not necessarily entirely obsolete yet (approaching though!), but it works very hard (I’d argue too hard) on the morale/motivation coaching and not hard enough on the optimal goal. Colleges should be teaching the vetting of information, analyzing it, weighing multiple pieces, avoiding biases (which is far too selective right now), and ultimately forming an informed balanced and intelligent opinion with logic and concrete rationale.
Woke progressive leftists say that standardized testing is racist. How can you be so raaaaaaaaacist? Now defend yourself!
Man this is a great line though.
“The decline in students’ IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years,” the researchers commented. “Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s.”
The only thing it ignores is that K-12 has performed this appeasement as bad or worse than higher education.
It’s good to get analytical and quantitative confirmation for that which is becoming obvious as an observational trend.
I don’t know how the study was conducted, but averages tell you nothing. The study should be broken down into socio-economic demographic categories, and it is those categories that need to be compared individually, rather than collectively. To provide a crude example (from one of Tom Sowell’s books) the average reading level in Texas is below the average reading score in Wisconsin, yet whites and blacks in Texas outperformed their respective demographic group in Wisconsin. So why was Texas’ average lower? The black demographic in Texas had a far greater weight in Texas than in Wisconsin, and that was sufficient to pull the Texas average below the Wisconsin average.
I think you mistook “black” for “hispanic” in your last sentence. Black Texans outperformed Black Wisconsinites in the previous sentence. That leaves only one other large demographic group to consider as the causality of the difference.
No, I think you missed it.
What he’s saying is there are 4 groups
Black and White, Texan and Wisconsinite.
Blacks and Whites from Texas outperform their racial counterpart from Wisconsin.
However, Blacks from either state perform lower than Whites by a substantial margin. So, if there are more Blacks in Texas than Wisconsin than the average IQ might be lower in Texas than Wisconsin when mixing individuals of all races together.
In many studies, Hispanics are lumped in mostly with Whites because Hispanic is an ethnicity not a race and most Hispanics are White. (This is the way it’s done in the census…see https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/TX/PST045223)
This is all his claim though and not mine and I’d love to see his data on that. I’m skeptical because of this…
A quick Google search says Wisconsin is 7.7% Black as of the 2020 census and Texas is 13.4% While that’s almost double, both percentages have low weight, one is just lower than the other. Also, Texas is 5.7% Asian and Wisconsin is only 3.2%.
Again, I’m highly skeptical of this without seeing some data.
Thanks. You understand my point. I was quoting Tom Sowell on this.
I first read about the different scores in Wisconsin and Texas in Iowahawk tweets from about ten years ago. NAEP test results: Nation’s Report Card. Here are the results for 2022.
Reading 8th grade 2022
Wisconsin 262
Texas 255
Wisconsin % @ Basic proficient
White 79
Black 38
Hispanic 59
Texas % @ Basic proficient
White 76
Black 55
Hispanic 59
• Wisconsin:
• Texas:
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/publications/stt2022/pdf/2023010WI8.pdf
https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/subject/publications/stt2022/pdf/2023010TX8.pdf
I posted a reply last night, which pointed out that the NAEP/Nation’s Report Card is most likely where Sowell got the information. Iowahawk tweeted it about ten years ago. I am reposting this without links because my old comment shows only when I log in.
Here are results for 2022. (2022 READING STATE SNAPSHOT REPORT)
Reading 8th grade 2022
Wisconsin 262
Texas 255
Wisconsin % @ Basic proficient
White 79
Black 38
Hispanic 59
Texas % @ Basic proficient
White 76
Black 55
Hispanic 59
• Wisconsin:
• Texas:
Thanks
“…Have Dropped…” Oh the irony.
Indeed. Students have not dropped, IQ has dropped. Today’s headlines are unusually inept.
“While useful, IQ tests are not definitive measures of intelligence. After all, intelligence comes in a variety of forms beyond what questions on a test can reveal.”
…say the same cabal of grifters who created “social/emotional learning,” “strength through diversity,” and “lived (subjective) truth.” Just because charisma, empathy, agility, introspection, and “street smarts” are talents doesn’t make them branch offices of intelligence. This is just progressives exercising their usual “stolen valor” gambit to redistribute the benefits of qualification to the unqualified.
“In 1984, James Flynn published a paper showing that Americans’ IQs had risen by about three points per decade over the prior 46 years”
That’s seriously old news now that we are flooding America with a new subclass of uneducated peasants and criminals. However, it will give you and me an artificial boost in IQ as social scientists are forced to redefine “100” downwards. Oh dear, Biden is creating another white privilege!
With colleges having to admit a certain number of people to keep their racial quotas in balance, something else has to be taken into account: in 1939 they didn’t have studies majors. They had real majors. And yes, I do consider things like philosophy, drama, music, etc. To be real majors. They weren’t all loaded down with politics and nonsense in those days.
When college is available to virtually everyone, the mean IQ will naturally move toward 100. Many decades ago in NY City, high school students could graduate with 4 years of Latin and NY City employers hired high school graduates for administrative positions. A college degree was something special. When it is now barely more than a HS diploma was back then, why should anyone think the average IQ is more than a little above average? By the way, anyone who has seen McGuffey Readers, widely used in the 19th century, might conclude that a parallel situation existed back then with respect to a grammar school education.
Smart people tend to have college degrees.
So let’s send everybody to college and then everybody will be smart!
Prog logic.
Send ’em to Lake Wobegone U, where all the children are above average.
(Garrison Keillor never had a reputation as a great conservative.)
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That’s partly due to DEI and affirmative action.
And in turn, the fact that any dummy can now get into some college somewhere, is why so many kids get degrees in easy, useless majors.
Hogg?
Hogg?
Hogg?
I’ve been teaching college English for 35 years now and I can say that whatever one wishes to say about IQ tests or other standardized tests, students coming in today are observably less well read and much poorer at writing than they were near the start of my career. On the one hand, it makes my job easier as I attend to basic skills; on the other hand, it makes me despair for our future.