Can’t we be just a tiny bit hardheaded about what it takes to succeed in college?, Charles Murray asks, as he shares some empirical points about “academic ability” — IQ — and success in college:
- By adolescence, what you see is what you get in academic ability. There is still a lively empirical controversy about how much IQ can be changed by outside interventions in preschoolers, but not in high-schoolers. Among the best programs, you’re looking at improvements in the region of 0.2 standard deviations on an exit test, and those fade to triviality when retested two or three years later.
- A common operational definition of “college readiness” in the literature is a 65 percent probability that a youngster will get a 2.7 grade point average in his freshman year — not a demanding standard in an age of grade inflation and soft courses. In a study based on 165,781 students at 41 major colleges, the combined SAT score that predicts a 65 percent chance of a 2.7 freshman GPA is 1180. It is a score that only about 9–12 percent of American 18-year-olds could get if all of them took the SAT.
- Both the 1979 and 1997 cohorts of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), consistent with a half-century of collateral data, show that the mean IQ of whites who get a BA is 114–115, a range that demarcates the top 16–17 percent of the distribution. (The story about IQ and college experience among blacks raises a host of ancillary issues that I won’t try to deal with here.)
- Both the 1979 and 1997 NLSY cohorts indicate that the 50-50 break point for successfully completing a BA among those who are self-selected to try to attend a four-year college is an IQ of 105, which cuts off the top 37 percent of the distribution.
- We’re currently giving out BAs to about 35 percent of all 23-year-olds.
He adds one last thought:
If we really have the best interests of young people at heart, when do we start counting the costs — emotional, financial, and in opportunities — of a dropout rate from colleges that is in excess of 40 percent?