Elite Grads Aren’t Impressive. Compared to What?

“Fisher King” and “Coddled Affluent Professional” are unimpressed by the intellectual caliber of Ivy League grads:

I’ve seen a lot of posts along the lines of “Ivy League grads aren’t that impressive.” I’m like, “Compared to what? What is the control group?” It’s the same when people say, “Mensa members don’t do much in life.” I’m like, “What should they be doing that would meet your standard of accomplishment?” How accomplished is the average person? If public recognition is the standard, that’s much rarer than having an IQ of 130–150. To wit, how many living mathematicians or physicists can you name? By comparison, the American Mathematical Society (AMS) has approximately 30,000 members worldwide.

As for the part about elite grads not being as impressive, this is obviously more subjective. But that is sorta the point. They are still above the typical grad from a non-elite school, but the difference is at the margins, where it’s not that obvious unless you know what to look for or compare them side by side. A D1 basketball player is still a very good basketball player, just as a scratch golfer is a very good golfer. But compared to the pros, they fall short. Likewise, the difference between an Olympic sprinter and a top high school sprinter may come down to a second. That might not sound like much, but at the margins, it is.

Pool 100 Ivy League grads and compare them with 100 grads from no-name schools, and the differences may become much more obvious than when comparing two individuals. It’s like saying the average physicist isn’t that impressive compared to Einstein. True, but the average physicist is still smarter than the average person. This is why large longitudinal studies, such as SMPY or Terman’s study, are useful for looking at intelligence and accomplishment. You can see patterns across many people over time that are easy to miss if you focus on individual cases. It’s always possible to find examples of smart people who haven’t achieved much in life, but that doesn’t tell you how smart people do overall.

A common argument is they are desired by employers because of “woke conformism.” Again, I disagree. You don’t need to hire from the top 4 percent of schools and pay a large salary for conformism. The typical BLM/woke supporter is as dumb as a box of rocks; you don’t need the IQ of an Ivy League grad to assimilate woke talking points. The vast majority of people parroting “defund the police” and other slogans fall into this category.

When an employer hires an elite grad and pays the huge wage premium, it’s not because they have expectations of walking on water or anything like that. It’s more like the ability to make non-obvious connections and inferences, to learn quickly (memory and learning speed is positively correlated with IQ), to anticipate and adapt, and a pleasant disposition. The latter is really important: you’re going to be with this person 8 hours a day. Less intelligent people tend to be ‘rough around the edges’ in ways that cannot be mended out.

Overall, going from say, 95-105 IQ (the typical high school graduate) to 120-130 (an elite graduate) is enormous in terms of productivity, and this is backed by studies showing strong correlations between IQ vs. assessed workplace performance. Thus, there is a good reason why employers keep hiring elite grads, and it’s not just due to wokeness.

Moreover, if you’re otherwise surrounded 24-7 by other smart people—online and in your circle “IRL”–then elite college grads may not appear that exceptional, relatively speaking, compared to your high-IQ friends. But imagine growing up in a low-income area surrounded by dull or intellectually incurious people. The sudden transition to meeting smart people in a college setting is much more impactful. For these people, college offers the first exposure to an environment where the mean IQ is in the triple digits. That is a huge shift.