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by jamesdmiller 2718 days ago
If you care about what college someone graduated from, you care about something highly correlated with IQ. Indeed, part of the reason why elite colleges are able to command such high prices is that, as you mention, we rarely use formal IQ tests when evaluating people and so graduating from an elite college is the best way that high IQ individuals can signal intelligence.
1 comments

It may be that attending such colleges is highly correlated to IQ; I'm unaware of research on that topic. (as closely as my field is related to that topic, highly elite schools tend to be outliers and aren't in the scope of my own activities)

What I can say somewhat definitively is that any such research would be fairly outdated. IQ tests simply are not used at any scale that would be required to study such a correlation, and so if there are recent studies they'd likely rely on sparse data from a small subset of (possibly self-selected & biased) students.

SAT or other standardized scores are a different matter. But as my other comments in this thread state, those tests are very much not designed and calibrated to measure anything beyond 1st year college success. 1st year success does itself correlate with 2nd year, grad rates, etc., but the signal degrades significantly as time goes on.

"IQ tests simply are not used at any scale that would be required to study such a correlation" I think you are wrong about this. There are a huge number of social scientists who study IQ. Also, IQ tests are very frequently given to children, and to everyone who wants to join the U.S. military.
Edit: I'm speaking from my knowledge of this topic in the US. I'm not ware of practices in other countries.

I'm familiar with the school systems and their on boarding processes for new students in many parts of the country, and am not aware of any pockets that systematically utilize IQ tests.

You're correct about military recruits, but I don't know if their scores are reflective of the general population. Certainly the composition by demographics differ somewhat from the general population, which woild cause me some concern if I were trying to generalize from their IQ tests to the broader population.

However, the context of my comment was about IQ related to elite colleges, and that remains an area where the data is sparse for IQ scores of such students. There simply isn't much if any research being performed these days tying IQ to success in higher education.