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Correlation between SAT/IQ & where you went to college

07 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by pumpkinperson in Ivy League, Uncategorized

≈ 20 Comments

Ann Coulter is one of the many people I promised to estimate the IQ of in the near-future, which got me thinking about a recent comment she made:

Trump graduated from the Wharton School of Business and went on to make $11 billion. Carson went from Yale to the University of Michigan Medical School and was the first man to separate twins conjoined at the brain. Fiorina graduated from Stanford University and then earned $80 million in business.

By contrast, look up the educational achievement of the average pundit sneering at Trump’s idiocy and the ordinariness of his supporters. I won’t be as nasty as they are, but wow! – people who went to bush-league schools shouldn’t throw stones. There’s nothing wrong with attending a bush-league college. But maybe ease up on holding yourself out as a great intellectual appalled by the dirty masses if you went to a third-rate college in the era of need-blind admissions.

Actually authoritative Forbes magazine puts Trump’s net worth at $4.5 billion, which is unbelievably impressive, but it’s nowhere near $11 billion.  But Coulter’s larger point is that where you went to college is a good proxy for intelligence.  Trump himself seems to share this view.  I remember an episode of The Apprentice where a contestant was bragging about college credentials, and Trump’s sidekick George H. Ross noted that where you went to college didn’t matter.  But Trump rather obnoxiously cut Ross off saying something like “I disagree.  It means a lot.  It’s very very important”  I wonder what Trump’s 80% non-college base would think of that.

In order to test Coulter’s assertion, I looked at some SAT stats for a few colleges:

college sat range (25 percentile to 75 percentile) CR + M iq equivalent estimated standard deviation
caltech 1450-1580  141-152  8.25
harvard 1400-1590  137-153  12
harvey mudd 1390-1570  136-151  11.25
yale 1380-1550  136-149  9.75
stanford 1360-1550  134-149  11.25
princeton 1360-1540  134-149  11.25
georgia tech 1220-1415  123-138  11.25

 

SATs were converted to IQ equivalents using my formula:  IQ equivalent = 23.835 + 0.081(post-1995 SAT score: CR + M).  Standard deviations (SD) were estimated for each college by multiplying the IQ equivalent gap between the 75th and 25th percentile by 0.75.  This was done because assuming a roughly normal curve in each college, the SD should be 3/4 as large as the gap between these two percentiles.  For example, the IQs of all Americans are normally distributed with an SD of 15, which is 3/4 of the 20 point gap between the 25th percentile (IQ 90) and the 75th percentile (IQ 110).

Analysis of variance

The average SD of the seven colleges above is 10.71.  Squaring 10.71 to get the variance gives 114.7.  But if we square the SD for Americans as a whole (15) we get 225.  This suggests 51% (114.7/225) of the variance in IQ (as measured by SAT) exists within a given college, which means that 49% (0.49) of the variance in U.S. IQ must exist between colleges (and non-college).  The square root of 0.49 suggests a potent 0.7 correlation between where you went to college (assuming you did) and how well you did on the SAT (or for those who didn’t take it, how well you would have done).

In order to test whether the correlation really is 0.7, it helps to look at two extremes.  The most selective and least selective colleges in America.

The most selective college in America

In terms of median SAT scores, Caltech is the most selective college in America.  There are about 224 freshman a year (excluding foreign students) out of 4.413 million 18-year-olds in America.  Cutting the number of freshman in half, we see the median freshman is in the top 112 out of 4,413 million, or roughly the top one in 39,402 in terms of selectivity of college attended.  Thus, if there were a perfect correlation between IQ and college attended, the median Caltechie would have an IQ of 161 (U.S. norms).  Their actual median SAT (CR + M) is 1515 to 1525 (depending on the source) which equates to an IQ of 147, and we should probably reduce this by 5 points to 142 because I suspect many students inflated their scores by taking the SAT multiple times to get the best combination of scores (a procedure known as superscoring and it is by no means unique to Caltech)

The least selective colleges in America

The least selective colleges in America are no college at all or colleges that don’t require the SAT.  65% of all American late teens do not take the SAT, so the median non-SAT taker is in the bottom 33% of American late teens in college attended (or not attended).  Thus if there were a perfect correlation between IQ and college attended, non-SAT takers would have a mean IQ of 93 (U.S. norms).

What is the actual IQ of non-SAT takers?  We know that the average SAT score of the 2/3rd of U.S. late teens who take the SAT is about 1016 (IQ 106), and we know the average IQ of all U.S. teens is 100 (by definition), thus the 2/3rds who didn’t take the SAT must have a mean IQ (on the SAT) of 97.

Slope of standardized regression line

As mentioned above, if there were a perfect correlation between IQ and college attended, then Caltechies would have a median IQ of 161 and non-SAT takers would have a mean IQ of 93: A gap of 68 points.

But the actual IQs (as measured by the SAT) are 142 and 97 for Caltechies and non-SAT takers respectively (a gap of 45 points).

In a bivariate normal distribution (which this may not be), the slope of the standardized line of best fit in a scatter plot equals the correlation between X and Y.  As you’ll recall from grade 9 math, slope = rise/run.  Rise = increase along the Y axis, run = increase along the X axis.

In this case, the increase on the Y axis is estimated at 45 points (the actual IQ gap between Caltechies and non-SAT takers) and the increase on the X axis is 68 points (the theoretical IQ increase if the correlation were perfect).  Dividing 45 by 68 gives a slope of 0.66, or roughly 0.7, which is the same correlation as inferred from the analysis of variance performed earlier in this post.

Does correlating college attended with SAT overestimate the correlation between IQ and college attended?

The answer is yes.  Because colleges, especially competitive colleges, actively select students based on SATs, said students would regress precipitously to the mean on an IQ test not used to select them.  Assuming a 0.72 correlation between the SAT and the Wechsler intelligence scales, I’d expect the correlation between college attended and IQ to drop from 0.7 to 0.7(0.72) = 0.5 if a neutral IQ test were used.  Thus, where you went to college is only a very rough proxy for IQ, unless the IQ was measured by the SAT (or similar tests) in-which case it’s a somewhat strong proxy.

 

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How Ivy League students perform on each subtest of the WAIS

04 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by pumpkinperson in Ivy League, Uncategorized

≈ 39 Comments

Note: An earlier version of this article contained speculative data about how scaled scores related to IQ on the original WAIS.  I have since been provided with the correct numbers and so this article was substantially revised on March 16, 2016.

As I’ve discussed before, a commenter named Andrew informed of me this study, where six samples of  seniors from  the extremely prestigious Dartmouth (the 12th most selective university in America) averaged 1357 on the pre-1974 SAT.  I previously estimated that 1357 before 1974 equaled IQ 133 (U.S. norms); 132 (U.S. white norms). However because many Ivy League students presumably took the SAT multiple times and only their best scores are counted, it’s reasonable to deduct the equivalent of 2 IQ points from these SAT derived IQ equivalents, reducing them to 131 (U.S. norms), 130 (U.S. white norms).

Assuming these students are typical of high SAT Americans, it is interesting to ask how much they regress to the mean on various subtests of the WAIS.

Averaging all six samples together, and then adjusting for the yearly Flynn effect from the 1950s through the 1970s (see page 240 of Are We Getting Smarter?) since the WAIS was normed circa 1953.5 but the students were tested circa 1971.5, then converting subtest scaled scores to IQ equivalents, in both U.S. norms and U.S. white norms (the 1953.5 norming of the WAIS included only whites), we get the following:

iq equivalent (u.s. norms) iq equivalent (u.s. white norms) estimated correlation with sat in the general u.s. population inferred from regression to the mean from SAT IQ 31 points above U.S. mean.
sat score 131 130 31/31 = 1.0
wais information 128.29 127.2 28.29/31 = 0.91
wais comprehension 122.22 120.9 22.22/31 = 0.72
wais arithmetic 120.37 119 20.37/31 = 0.66
wais similarities 119.16 117.75 19.16/31 = 0.62
wais digit span 117.37 115.9 17.37/31 = 0.56
wais vocabulary 125.93 124.75 25.93/31 = 0.84
wais picture completion 105.87 104 5.87/31 = 0.19
wais block design 121.82 120.5 21.82/31 = 0.7
wais picture arrangement 108.33 106.55 8.33/31 = 0.27
wais object assembly 113.65 112.05 13.65/31 = 0.44
wais verbal scale 126 125 26/31 = 0.84
wais performance scale 116 114 16/31 = 0.52
wais full-scale 123 122 23/31 = 0.74

 

 

Information and Vocabulary have the strongest correlation with SAT

Of all the individual subtests, Information correlates most with SAT scores, followed by Vocabulary.  This makes sense because Information (a test of general knowledge), like the SAT. measures verbal and numerical acquired knowledge, and Vocabulary, like the verbal SAT, measures verbal acquired knowledge.  Also, Information and Vocabulary are highly g loaded, and should correlate well with all tests.

It is interesting that two commenters on this blog with extremely high SAT scores have reported very high scores on these subtests.  Black national merit finalist ruhkukah obtained his two best WAIS-IV scores on Information and Vocabulary (both at the 99.9 percentile, and even this might be an underestimate because this is the ceiling of these subtests).

Meanwhile commenter chartreuse, who scored 1560 on a version of the SAT, and perfect on the GRE (which is very similar to the SAT) notes that his highest Wechsler subtest score from childhood was on Vocabulary.  He did not state his Wechsler Information score, but did report performing twice his chronological age on another general knowledge test from childhood.

 

 

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More evidence that Ivy League students average IQ 122

15 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by pumpkinperson in Ivy League, Uncategorized

≈ 53 Comments

Evidence continues to accumulate showing that the average IQ of Ivy League students is 122.  In a previous post, I cited a study showing that a sample of Harvard students tested in 2003 averaged Wechsler IQs of 122 (U.S. white norms); 124 (U.S. norms), and now I’ve analyzed data from another sample of Ivy League students circa 1971.5 who also averaged Wechsler IQs of 122.

In this study, which a commenter informed me of, six samples of  seniors from  the extremely prestigious Dartmouth (the 12th most selective university in America) averaged 1357 on the pre-1974 SAT, and a full-scale IQ of 127.88 on the WAIS (U.S. white norms); 128.95 (U.S. norms).

However because the WAIS was normed in 1953.5, and the full-scale Flynn effect on the WAIS from 1953.5 to 1978 was 0.306 IQ points per year (U.S. norms)(see page 240 of Are We Getting Smarter?), then WAIS IQs measured in 1971.5 would be inflated by 5.51 points.

This reduces the their IQs from 128.95 to 123.44 (U.S. norms); 122 (U.S. white norms).

How does this compare to their SAT scores?  If all American late teens (not just the college bound elite) took the SAT in the 1970s, the average combined score would have been about 770 (see The Bell Curve, pg 422), suggesting 770 equated to IQ 100 (U.S. norms).  Meanwhile, Mensa requires SAT scores obtained before 1974 to be at least 1300, suggesting 1300 = IQ 130 (U.S. norms).  From these two data points, we might guess that 1357 before 1974 equaled IQ 133 (U.S. norms); 132 (U.S. white norms).

So Dartmouth students, largely selected based on SAT scores, averaged 33 IQ points above the U.S. mean on the SAT, but regressed to 23.44 points above the U.S. mean on the Wechsler.  This would seem to imply a 0.7 correlation (23.44/33) between the Wechsler and the pre-1974 SAT.

This is much higher than the 0.53 correlation between the Wechsler and the post-1995 SAT I estimated based on the regression of Harvard students.  More research is needed to determine whether this is just chance fluctuation from one study to another, or whether it reflects an actual reduction in the correlation in recent decades.  Another possibility is that because the regression slope was estimated from a much higher point in Harvard students, it may simply reflect a reduction in the correlation at higher levels, either because Spearman’s Law of Diminishing Returns strongly exists, or because of ceiling bumping, which should be more acute on the new SAT.

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Formula for predicting official IQ scores from SAT scores

20 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in Ivy League

≈ 9 Comments

Scientists Meredith C. Frey and Douglas K. Detterman came up with a formula for predicting how one would score on an official IQ test from their performance on the post-1995 SAT. The formula was presumably derived from regression predicting IQs on the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) from scores on the SAT (see scatter-plot C below) of 104 students at a selective private university.

sat

Such formulas are useful, because if you ever hit your head, a psychologist might administer an IQ test to see if you have brain damage. But if you score low, it doesn’t necessarily prove any damage; it could just be that you’re naturally dumb. Thus knowing your statistically expected performance on an official IQ test from your past performance on tests like the SAT is diagnostically useful.

The formula is as follows:

X’IQ = (0.095 * SAT-M) + (-0.003 * SAT-V) + 50.241

It is interesting to apply this formula to the average Harvard student who scored 1490 on the SAT (reading + math). Assuming the typical Harvard undergrad scored 745 on both the reading and the math section, the formula predicts they will score 123 on an official IQ test. Note, 123 is NOT their SAT score converted to an IQ equivalent, it’s their expected IQ on a different test, given their score on the SAT, and thus there is severe regression to the mean.

A predicted IQ of 123 remarkably similar to the mean IQ of 122 a sample of Harvard students actually obtained when tested on the WAIS. Some readers might be wondering why I’m not equating the predicted IQ to white norms as I normally do. The answer is that the RAPM was normed in Iowa (one of the 5 whitest states in America) so converting to white norms would be redundant.

One possibility is that this formula underestimates the expected intelligence of high SAT people because the scatterplot clearly shows a pile up of scores at the ceiling of the RAPM, however this pileup only seems to consist of 12% of the sample (not enough to significantly flatten the regression line, especially since some of them would have scored the same even if the test had more hard items).

In addition, I personally looked at the scatter plot carefully and did my best to write down the RAPM IQs of every single participant with an SAT score from 1400-1600. This was an admittedly subjective and imprecise exercise given how small the graph is, but I counted 38 top SAT performers and these were their approximate RAPM IQs: 95, 102, 105, 108, 108, 110, 110, 113, 113, 113, 113, 113, 117, 117, 117, 117, 117, 120, 120, 120, 122, 122, 128, 128, 128, 128, 134, 134, 134, 134, 134, 134, 134, 134, 134, 134, 134, 134.

While the mean RAPM IQ of the top SAT performers was likely reduced by ceiling bumping, the median wold not have been, and that median was 120, suggesting the regression line prediction of 123 was not too low.

An RAAPM IQ of 123 is 26 points above the U.S. mean IQ of 97. An SAT score of 1490 equates to an IQ of 139…or perhaps 137 if a many SAT takers are tested repeatedly and use their best score as commenter Lion of the Judah-sphere suggested… about 40 points above the U.S. mean of 97. Dividing 26 by 40 suggests the SAT and RAPM correlate 0.65. If we assume that the correlation between the SAT and Raven is entirely caused by g (general intelligence)…a reasonable assumption given they have little in common but reasoning.. and if we further assume that the RAPM has a g loading of 0.85, then we can deduce that the SAT has a g loading of 0.76 (0.65/0.85).

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Respected blogger responds to my post about Harvard, SATs & IQ

18 Saturday Apr 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in Ivy League

≈ 32 Comments

A respected blogger named Emil has responded to my recent post about Harvard students regressing precipitously to the mean when they take an official IQ test. Although some studies have found the SAT only correlates 0.4 with official IQ tests like the WAIS, Emil writes:

The lower values are due to restriction of range, e.g. Frey and Detterman (2004). When corrected, the value goes up to .7-.8 range. Also .54 using ICAR60 (Condon and Revelle, 2014) without correction for reliability or restriction.

While it’s certainly true that the SAT’s correlation with official IQ tests goes way up when you correct for range restriction, I’m not sure how appropriate the correction is here. The point of such corrections is that if a sample has a restricted range of general intelligence (g), but an unrestricted range of non-g variance, then almost by definition, variance in g will have less predictive power than non-g variance, since the latter variance exceeds the former.

However people who take the SAT, particularly at the same high school, are not just restricted in g, but are also restricted in academic background and test preparation which likely correlates with SAT scores independently of g, thus studies that correct for range restriction in g, while ignoring range restriction in non-g variance, may grossly overestimate the SAT’s correlation with IQ in a random sample of all American 17-year olds.

Emil also notes the average IQs of Harvard students in the study I cited might be deflated by an oversampling of social science students who are less intelligent than STEM students. I definitely agree that STEM students are more intelligent than social science students, however I’m not sure this would have a significant effect because most Harvard students are not in STEM, so the non-STEM students would probably be a lot more representative of the average Harvard undergrad than STEM students are. However this needs to be explored in more depth.

Emil then writes:

SAT has an approx. mean of ~500 per subtest, ceiling of 800 and SD of approx. 100. So a 1500 total score is 750+750=(500+250)+(500+250)=(500+2.5sd)+(500+2.5sd), or about 2.5 SD above the mean.

I realize Emil is just doing a rough estimate, but it’s important to note that verbal and math sections of the SAT are said to only correlate about 0.67, so someone who scored +2.5 SD on each subscale should be about +2.8 SD on the composite (relative to the SAT population, who are already above the U.S. population mean). At least in theory..

Official stats from the year 2000 (around when the Harvard students in the cited study were tested) showed that the national mean verbal SAT was 505 (SD = 111) and the mean math SAT was 514 (SD = 113) and the composite score had a mean of 1019 (SD = 208). Assuming Harvard students have a mean SAT of 1490, they would have scored 2.26 SD higher than the average SAT taker. Roughly the top one in 85 SAT takers, and probably the top one in 255 level for all American 17 year olds (+2.66 SD).

Emil then applies the 0.86 test-retest correlation to estimate how SAT takers will score on the WAIS, however this correlation might be way too high because it is based on people taking the same test twice and the SAT and WAIS are not the same test. One’s true score on the SAT will not correlate perfectly with one’s true score on the WAIS.

People who score +2.26 SD above the SAT population on the SAT will average 0.86(2.26 SD)= 1.94 SD when they take the SAT again, which is the top 2.6% with respect to SAT takers, and the top 0.88% of all 17 year olds, equivalent to an IQ of 136 (U.S. norms) or IQ 134 (U.S. white norms) or IQ 132 (U.S. normal white norms). By contrast on the WAIS Harvard students average IQ 122 (U.S. normal white norms; corrected for test abbreviation).

In short, the unreliability of the SAT does not seem to explain the severe regression to the mean Harvard students experience when tested on the WAIS.

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Dominating Ivy Leaguers

31 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in Ivy League

≈ 56 Comments

I recently saw the new movie Gone Girl staring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike (spoiler alert). One of the characters is a Harvard grad who creates a fake identity as a working class person. While hanging out with working class friends, she accidentally drops a huge stash of cash on the ground, exposing the fact that she is much richer than she has been pretending to be. A little later, the two working class friends (a man and woman) show up at the Harvard grad’s apartment. They force their way in and start turning over furniture until they find all her cash and leave with it. The Harvard grad threatens to call the police, but one of the “friends” say something like “Lady, you’re hiding. I don’t what from, and I don’t care, but you ain’t calling no police.”

It was an interesting scene, because the Harvard grad had been placed at the top of society, artificially, by high SAT scores and the Ivy League caste system, but by making a dumb mistake in the real world (failing to hide her money) she was dominated by the Darwinian law of the jungle (might is right). In the end, nature always wins.

In reminded me of an episode of The Sopranos where Carmela (the wife of mobster Tony Soprano) wants to get their daughter into an elite school. She turns to a neighbor (who has a sister who works as a professor at the elite college) to ask if her sister can pull some strings. The neighbor dodges the question by saying something like “with your daughters great grades and SAT score, she doesn’t need my sister’s help getting in.” But Carmela explains that these days, elite colleges are so competitive that high grades and high test scores are not enough.

So reluctantly, the neighbor phones her professor sister to try to get her to write a letter of recommendation for Carmela’s daughter. Absolutely not, responds the professor, explaining that it’s a prestigious college so they can’t have the children of gangsters crawling around the campus. When the neighbor explains to Carmela that her sister can’t write the letter, Carmela is nonplussed.

Carmela decides to visit the professor at her office, bringing lazania as a gift. She introduces herself and asks if the professor can write the letter. The professor makes up some excuse about having to write a letter for some other worthy student. Carmela says the solution is simple, just explain to that student that you can’t write the letter for him. The professor explains that she can’t.

“I don’t think you understand,” says Carmela ominously. “I want you to write that letter”

“Are you threatening me?” asks the professor trembling.

“Who’s threatening? I brought you some lazania,” Carmela replies.

Being smart enough to take the hint and realize you don’t fuck with a mobster’s wife, the terrified professor panics and writes the letter as fast as she can and Carmela’s daughter is accepted into the school post haste. It was interesting, because you think of Tony Soprano as being the tough one in the family, but you can see that his wife has a little of the mobster toughness in her too, but is more subtle about it, and uses it to advance more feminine goals (getting their kid into a good college).

It’s interesting that the despite needing a letter of recommendation, the Soprano daughter was academically qualified to attend the elite school. She probably inherited high IQ genes from Tony Soprona who in one episode stated that his IQ is 136. I remembered thinking this is quite high because although mobsters are rich (a sign of high IQ), they’re also violent criminals with typically low education (both signs of low IQ), so on balance, their IQs should be above average, but nothing special. John Gotti for example had an IQ of 110. But then Tony Soprano seems to have a huge cranium.

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Are IQ and income correlated among people with identical degrees?

30 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by pumpkinperson in Ivy League

≈ 155 Comments

Even though it makes perfect sense that IQ and money would be positively correlated, the idea has encountered enormous resistance, even among some people who believe intelligence tests are excellent measures of innate intelligence. There are several reasons for this backlash:

1) Intelligence and income are two of the most highly valued traits, so suggesting a correlation between the two can be taken quite personally given the enormous income inequality in America. It’s bad enough that income helps determine our quality of life and social status, but to have it reflect our intellect too seems unfair and makes people very jealous.

2) As income inequality continues to grow, so too does resentment for the super-rich, especially in a bad economy. People would prefer to demonize rich people for being greedy and unethical than credit them for being smart.

3) Even people with limited education can get rich. This is very upsetting to people who are not rich despite attending the best schools or obtaining advanced degrees. They were told that the were superior to less educated people and are deeply invested in the Ivy League caste system, so to see some high school dropout who mispronounces words make a hundred times more money than they do, generates enormous rage. The rage can only be placated by telling themselves that the gazillionaire, despite his financial superiority, is intellectually inferior; genetically inferior. Thus the correlation between IQ and income must be denied, or at least dismissed as a statistical artifact with no direct causal implications.

4) Many of the most valuable people in history were not especially rich. Suggesting money reflects income is upsetting to the fans of such people. Although many of us understand that correlations are general trends that often don’t say much about specific individuals, when the subject is as sensitive as IQ and money, emotion trumps rationality, making it easier to just dismiss the correlation outright.

It’s interesting to observe the cognitive dissonance that occurs when you show people evidence that IQ in fact enjoys a robust positive correlation with income (+0.4).  Their first instinct is to say “well maybe low IQ predicts poverty, but there’s no evidence that high IQ causes above average income.”  This rationalization is win-win for the typical liberal, because it allows them to feel smarter than all the minimal wage Republicans working at Walmart without feeling dumber than the rich who they despise.

What happens when you cite evidence showing the IQ-income correlation is more or less linear through virtually the full range of IQs and virtually the full range of incomes?  Then the excuse becomes, correlation does not equal direct causation.  In other words, IQ causes education, and education causes income, but IQ does not cause income directly.  This excuse is a win-win for the Marxist Ivy League types because it allows them to feel smarter than less educated folks no matter how rich the latter are.  For they didn’t make the money the “correct” way; by going through the Ivy League gate keepers.

Such thinking helps to preserve the Ivy League caste system that elitists love because it stigmatizes the high incomes of non-Ivy League graduates as being a result of only luck, hard work, and sociopathic opportunism and denies the “free market” credit for rewarding talent.  Rather it is the Ivy League that rewards talent, and the “free market” only rewards talent to the extent it rewards Ivy League grads.  Thus anyone who gets rich or powerful without jumping through Ivy League hoops gets stigmatized as an enemy of meritocracy who must be destroyed.

Claiming that the IQ-income correlation is entirely mediated by education is also used by anti-HBD folks to deny IQ tests measure real world intelligence.   Instead, IQ tests are dismissed as only measuring narrow test taking skills that are useful for getting a degree, but it is the degree or the test scores that are rewarded by the “free market”, not the real world intelligent behavior of high IQ people. But what does the research show?  Scholar Ruth Berkowitz looked into the correlation between LSAT scores (a proxy for IQ) and income among lawyers.  She writes:

The regression results show that, across the top 50 schools, LSAT scores are significantly related to starting salary, even when controlling for the cost of living in the school’s location. One point on the LSAT is worth over $2,600 on the new scale…Of course, each point on the LSAT is not equal in terms of its effects on starting salary. At the high end of the scale, one point is worth much more than it is worth on the lower end of the scale. Without controlling for any other variables, a one point increase on the new scale on the LSAT (or a 1% increase at the mean) leads to a salary increase of $3,080 (8.5%) for the top 50 schools whereas a one point increase leads to only a $1,812 (6.2%) increase for all 177 schools combined… Similarly, moving up along percentiles on the LSAT distribution brings higher returns at the high end.

So among people with law degrees, LSAT scores and future incomes are substantially correlated.  But of course, not all law degrees are equal.  Do LSAT scores predict income among lawyers who attend the same law school?  The answer is yes:

The regression results for the individual data show that there is a significant (at the 5% level), albeit a smaller relationship between LSAT scores and starting salaries than there is for the cross-school model. Among the students in one school, one point on the LSAT is worth only about one-seventh of what it is worth in the cross-school model. These results indicate that six-sevenths of the variance is being used up in the screening effects of the school. Law schools have the ability to put more energy into screening students than do law firms. Law firms assume that in general, students attend the highest quality school into which they were admitted. Therefore, the true effect of one point on the LSAT is greater than can be measured within one school. However, in terms of lifetime income, the spread is still a significant difference even within one school. A student with a higher LSAT score, should, on average, make more money than a student who scored lower and attended the same law school. Between schools, the spread is larger. If a student scored in the top 5% on her LSAT and went to a top 5% school, she would be earning a higher salary, on average, than if she attended a lower ranking school.

So before controlling for what law school one attended, each point on the LSAT is worth $2,600, however among lawyers who attended the same law school, each LSAT point is worth only one seventh of that, so I assume $371 per year.  So, let’s say we have two lawyers who attended the exact same law school, John and Ted.  Let’s assume John got an LSAT score of 180 (equivalent to 152 on the IQ scale) and Ted got a score of 150 (equivalent to 111 on the IQ scale). This would predict an income difference of $11,130 dollars a year, or nearly half a million dollars over a 40 year career.  So in the typical case, there starting salaries would probably look something like this:

Same law school:

Ted LSAT IQ equivalent 111:  $70,000 starting salary, life time earnings over $2.8 million

John LSAT equivalent IQ 152: $81,130 staring salary, life time earnings over $3.2 million

Now a nearly half million difference is huge, but it might seem kind of small considering the two men differ by 41 IQ points.  However they only differ by 41 IQ points on the LSAT. Assuming the law school both men attended was average, if they were retested on the WAIS-IV, their IQs would regress to the mean IQ of lawyers nationally (IQ 125).  Because of a statistical phenomenon known as range restriction, among lawyers, especially lawyers at the same law school, the LSAT probably only correlates about 0.3 with scores on the WAIS-IV.  For example I found only a correlation of about 0.3 between self-reported LSAT scores and self-reported SAT scores, and others have a found a similar correlation between LSAT scores and Bar exam scores. A 0.3 correlation means that even though John was 41 IQ points smarter than Ted on the LSAT, he would likely be only 41(0.3) = 12 IQ points smarter than Ted on the WAIS-IV.

So the bottom line is that if you took the highest LSAT student and the lowest LSAT student at every law school, their WAIS-IV IQs would probably only differ by about a dozen points, and yet their life time earnings would differ by nearly half a million in today’s dollars. So even among people with identical schooling, even small differences in IQ are associated with huge differences in money:

Same law school:

Ted WAIS-IV IQ 121:  $70,000 starting salary, life time earnings over $2.8 million

John WAIS-IV IQ 133: $81,130 staring salary, life time earnings over $3.2 million

Of course it should be noted that while a 12 point IQ gap is associated with a half million difference among people who attended the same school, the same 12 point IQ gap would be associated with a $3.1 million life time earning difference when schooling is not controlled:

Different law schools:

Ted WAIS-IV IQ 121:  $70,000 starting salary, life time earnings over $2.8 million

John WAIS-IV IQ 133: $147,910 staring salary, life time earnings over $5.9 million

So while people like the Lion of the Blogosphere correctly assert that where you attend college is vastly more important to your income than how smart you are, being smart is still quite important in its own right.

Now in full disclosure, I should point out that another study found virtually no correlation between standardized test scores and income among graduates of the same business school.  Ronald Yeaple of authoritative Forbes magazine reports:

Our survey of hundreds of MBA alumni found no correlation between an individual’s GMAT score and that person’s post-MBA success as measured by starting salary and pay over the first five years after graduation. In this study of individual graduates, the R-square = 0.0007, which means that there was no correlation between GMAT scores and post-MBA earnings. Similar studies in the past gave the same result. Based on this research, the GMAT appears to have no power for predicting an individual prospective MBA student’s future career success. Some of the most successful managers in our study had below-average GMAT scores, and vice versa.

The explanation for this is probably that a lot of rich people use their influence to get their unqualified children into business schools they don’t qualify for, and then those same dumb trust fund babies are given a high paying job in the family business they’re also not qualified for, and delegate their responsibilities to higher IQ employees.  But in a field like law, where you actually have to interpret contracts and argue cases, it’s much harder for dumb rich kids to earn high incomes.

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Does Harvard discriminate against Asian-Americans?

21 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by pumpkinperson in Ivy League

≈ 60 Comments

Commentator “Mugabe” mentioned a new blog post by scientist Steve Hsu asking whether Harvard discriminates against Asian-Americans. Harvard and other elite universities disgust me for several reasons:

1)The whole reason IQ is so fascinating to me is that intelligent people get to the top naturally by doing smart things & avoiding dumb mistakes. Elite schools demand that smart people get ahead by doing well on an IQ test ( SAT) that gives them credentials. This takes a fascinating natural phenomenon (smart people get to the top) & reduces it to a boring socially engineered self-fulfilling prophecy & prevents us from studying the phenomenon under ideal circumstances. It’s like trying to study why the fastest cheetah gets the food only to discover someone has been testing the cheetahs for speed & feeding the fast ones instead of letting them catch food themselves.

2) Elite schools are full of hypocrites. They claim to be liberal and anti-HBD, yet they use a disguised IQ test (the SAT) as a major factor in selecting students. If that weren’t hypocritical enough, they then cherry pick from the high scoring population which students to select based on arbitrary and suspicious criteria.

3) I’m a proud Canadian. In Canada, there is no Ivy League. Here anyone can get ahead naturally through hard work, ambition, luck, and smarts. We’re not branded for life based on where we went to school at age 20. The American Ivy League thinks they’re a meritocracy but they’re largely a caste system, and graduates go out into the word and actively discriminate against people who went to lesser schools. If you look at the people who write for America’s most influential newspapers, work for America’s most lucrative investment banks, and fill influential positions in the white house, graduates of elite schools are dramatically over-represented, even after controlling for the likely IQ distribution of such occupations.

4) Ivy League schools destroy the fabric of America. If scholar Charles Murray is correct, back in the 1950s, the U.S. used to be a lot like Canada. There were small rural towns in middle America where people with IQs of 130 and IQs of 70 lived as neighbors, each contributing their unique qualities for the good of the local community. But thanks to elite schools, the best and brightest in small town rural America are being removed from their communities where they did a lot of good and sent to places like Harvard where they are recruited into the largely useless coastal elite professions. Meanwhile the small town rural communities they leave behind suffer a brain drain and degenerate into an underclass (see Charles Murray’s book Coming Apart )

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President Obama picks yet another Ivy Leaguer

10 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by pumpkinperson in Ivy League

≈ 97 Comments

At first I was excited when I heard the recent news that president Obama had chosen a black woman to be the next attorney general, but in the back of mind I thought “please don’t let it be another Ivy League snob”. I immediately looked her up on wikipedia and when I saw that she was a Harvard graduate, I felt absolutely sick. The whole reason I cheered for a black man to be president back in 2008 was that I want to live in a less discriminatory world. President Obama has done a good job being more inclusive to women and minorities, but when it comes to being inclusive to non-Ivy Leaguers, his record is terrible.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

President Obama has six Ivy leaguers in the cabinet: Hillary Clinton (Yale Law School) at State; Tim Geithner (Dartmouth undergrad) at Treasury; Attorney General Eric Holder (Columbia undergrad and law school); Gary Locke (Yale undergrad) at Commerce; Shaun Donovan (Harvard undergrad) at Housing and Urban Development, and Arne Duncan (Harvard grad and undergrad) at Education.

President Clinton had five: Defense Secretary Les Aspin (Yale undergrad); Attorney General Janet Reno (Cornell); Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt (Harvard Law); Labor Secretary Robert Reich (Dartmouth and Yale), and HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros (Harvard graduate school).

By comparison, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush had four each.

One of the best things about Canada is we don’t have anything equivalent to an Ivy League. Some universities here are more prestigious than others, but the differences are small, elusive and inconsistent and no one here much cares which university one went to. But in America, it’s a caste system where the Ivy League looms large, and Ivy Leaguers seem to view themselves as some sort of superior ruling class, and when they get into power, they appoint other Ivy Leaguers to positions of influence. And nowhere does this trend seem more pronounced than Washington, where all of the last four presidents have been Ivy Leaguers, and if Hillary Clinton gets elected, that’s an astonishing five in a row.

Part of the enormous overrepresentation of Ivy Leaguers in the white house is that the presidency selects for ambition, IQ and family wealth (all of which are strongly correlated with an Ivy League education) but the overrepresentation of Ivy Leaguers seems to be getting worse, so I can’t help but wonder if a lot of it is outright discrimination against anyone who didn’t attend the right school by various gatekeepers to power.

It will be interesting to see if the republicans oppose President Obama’s choice for the next attorney general. If they do, it will look like they are opposing her because she’s a black woman. If they’re smart they should go after her for being another Ivy League grad and ask Obama why he can’t pick an African American who didn’t attend an elite school, something blogger Steve Sailer has criticized him for.

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