RealClearScience has an excellent article on the declining IQ scores of college undergraduates. People are acting like this is surprising ... it should not be surprising.
When relatively few went to college it tended to get many of the brighter students, with IQs averaging 115 to 130. Today the average is more like 102, but many more young people go to college. Notice I wrote "go to" and not "graduate from." The article concludes that between 1939 and 2022:
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.
There’s a potential problem with this open door to academia. According to statistics from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, only 58% of students manage to attain their degrees within six years. What’s more, the rate of dropping out is negatively linked with IQ — the lower an undergraduate’s IQ, the more likely it is that they will leave college without a degree, potentially saddled with debt.
As a marker of mental quickness and ability, today's bachelors degree is worth no more than 1939's high school diploma. Confronting these numbers, can you imagine how happy I am to be long retired? The kids were still somewhat smart when last I taught, today not so much.
Getting a 'generic' B.S. or B.A. is no longer a hot ticket to a good job, and employers know it better than anybody. A specialist degree which teaches a specific skill still has value; a major in (victim group) studies or communications is probably worse than useless, better left off one's resume.
Note also that IQ is still one of the best predictors of student success in a degree program and in a career, if perhaps not in life more generally.
