[whimblepop]

https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.14293%2FS...

The average university attendee's IQ is virtually indistinguishable from the average person's IQ.

People don't go to college because they're smart. They predominantly go so they can earn more money and/or work more enjoyable jobs when they graduate. Being smart isn't the main reason that adults encourage teenagers to pursue college either. It's mostly a matter of class reproduction; it's the "default" for anyone whose parents are college graduates.

And failing out once you get to the university isn't generally an IQ issue, either. Mediocre and slightly stupid people graduate from universities with degrees they've earned fair and square every year. You don't have to be smart to finish a degree. You do have to be reasonably prepared, and that's the primary issue.

[cjbgkagh]

It used to be 130, which is two standard deviations above the mean. I think this is the appropriate amount.

[whimblepop]

IQ is about aptitude and credentials on specific topics are about knowledge and skills. It's the wrong thing to optimize for.

Besides, high-IQ students can still underperform for many of the same reasons that average-IQ students often do (e.g., under-preparation, lack of discipline, disorganization, mental illness, financial distress, unstable living situation). We should be better addressing those things before students get to a university no matter what their IQ is.

Beyond that, if you have good competency tests on both ends (i.e., the credentials before a four-year degree are accurate signals, and university degrees effectively prove a high degree of competency), who cares if someone manages to get those credentials by working harder while being dumber? I like working with clever people. I also like working with people who know their shit because they take their time to study and consider things. (When I'm lucky, I get to work with people who are both!)

[godelski]

  > IQ is about aptitude and credentials on specific topics are about knowledge and skills.

Meaning it can be learned. Trained.

I'm not defending the metric. People use it like it is some innate thing that doesn't change over one's lifetime. In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ.

It's also important to note that IQ is normalized. An IQ of 100 today is different than an IQ of 100 20 years ago. Notable, it's been increasing, so someone taking an IQ test in the year 2000 getting an IQ of 100 would have had an IQ of 130 had they taken it in 1950. That's an incredibly important piece of information needed to even do basic comparisons of IQs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

[bmn__]

> > IQ is about aptitude

> Meaning it can be learned. Trained. […] In fact, a college education is a great way to increase your IQ.

You make this argument on the assumption that the effect is causal. But in reality one cannot distinguish whether education raises IQ or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college.

[godelski]

  > or whether people with higher IQs stay longer in college.

If that were the case a person's IQ wouldn't increase during that time.

It's also pretty well known and well studied that you can train people to score higher on IQ tests. I'm not talking about years of training either

[whimblepop]

Whether things like "intelligence", "cognitive ability", and "aptitude" (some of which may be synonyms depending on your view) are innate vs. learned or fixed vs. variable over time are orthogonal to each other. And for each of those pairs, the answer may not be as simple as a binary division or even a gradient (it may decompose into something weirder, being causally determined by multiple factors where some of those factors are fixed and others aren't).

Moreover, both of those questions are separate from questions that get at what IQ measures (does it measure aptitude, does it measure factual knowledge, does it measure social knowledge or acculturation within a specific context, etc.).

Lots of things are easy to identify as both substantially genetically determined and variable over time and mediated by environmental factors, e.g., height. Lots of things are likewise easy to identify as significantly environmentally determined but also largely stable over time if not altogether fixed (e.g., personality, attachment styles).

It's also at least possible for all of the following to be true at the same time:

  - IQ tests correlate with socioeconomic status
  - IQ test scores vary over time and can be increased
  - some IQ score increases, or some part of a given IQ score increase, reflects a genuine aptitude increase
  - IQ tests are somewhat gameable in that training for IQ tests can increase scores so that some of the measured increase does not measure improved cognitive ability

where aptitude means something like fluid problem-solving ability, speed of learning, etc.