This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
Colleges for generations have been thought to be home of the brilliant, or at least the smart.
After all, coming out of those august institutions are new medical ideas, scientific thoughts, writings, music, art, and much, much more.
A new study, however, shows undergraduates are, well, just average nowadays.
The report at Real Clear Science explains that a team of researchers from Canada showed students’ IQs from 1939 to 2022 fell steadily from about 119 to “a mean of 102 today.”
That’s only a hair above the population’s average of 100.
”Undergraduates are now no more intelligent on average than members of the general population,” the report confirmed.
Real Clear Science explained, “This finding is interesting for a couple of reasons. First, the decrease in undergraduates’ IQs sharply contrasts with the long-observed ‘Flynn effect,’ which describes how IQ scores among the general public have been steadily rising over time. In 1984, James Flynn published a paper showing that Americans’ IQs had risen by about three points per decade over the prior 46 years — an increase that Flynn found was not attributable to recalibrations of IQ tests, which are performed roughly every 15 years. His finding has since been replicated by other researchers, and the climb in IQs appears to have mostly continued (though there are signs it may have reversed in the first two decades of the 21st century).”
The researchers confirmed, “The decline in students’ IQ is a necessary consequence of increasing educational attainment over the last 80 years. Today, graduating from university is more common than completing high school in the 1940s.”
The complications are multitude, including that the lower a student’s IQ, the more likely he or she will drop out short of a degree, but with those infamous student loans.
And not even two out of three finish their degree in six years.
The report said, “Over the years, observers have widely opined that colleges have grown more akin to corporations, selling shots at degrees (and a better life) to young, naive consumers. In 1980, the inflation-adjusted price to attend a four-year college full-time was $10,231 annually, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Thirty years later, the price increased to $28,775. Long gone are the days when universities were vaunted places of learning for inquiring minds. Now, they function more like big business.”
Further, the study also noted that because of the “averageness” at colleges, “employers can no longer rely on applicants with university degrees to be more capable or smarter than those without.”
