How smart do you have to be to get a degree?

Answering the title only, so forgive me:<p>&gt; How smart do you have to be to get a degree?<p>Not especially, what you have to be is hardworking and committed. You don&#x27;t even need to show significant improvement; just an understanding of the subject material.<p>Of course this gets less true as you go up the degrees. (Batchelors requiring a broad rote understanding, Masters requiring a more detailed understanding and PhD requiring some sort of novelty that pushes the field forward).<p>However there&#x27;s a saying: &quot;Hard work beats talent when talent doesn&#x27;t work hard&quot;.<p>I have <i>lived</i> this.<p>My sister is not smart. That may seem unkind but she would be one of the first to admit this. Things do not come to her easily, she has a hard time recognising patterns and lacks a certain level of &quot;common sense&quot;. She is extremely motivated though. Thorough and hardworking.<p>I have had the fortune of being quite gifted, I test well and have a great propensity to solve novel puzzles. I, however, procrastinate and am easily distractible.<p>She has a degree, I do not.<p>Intelligence had nothing to do with it. Being hardworking did.

These results are to be expected, if IQ is normally distributed, but we push more people into obtaining university degrees.<p>The value of a university degree has severely deteriorated since every white collar job essentially requires having one and it will continue getting worse.<p>I would assume that it&#x27;s worse in the US than in Europe, because in EU it seems that education is less commercialized and you can get a degree for free if you are above average.

It&#x27;s obviously anecdotical but I know both many smart persons without higher level education and many &#x27;not-so-bright&#x27; persons with university degrees. However, all those with degrees have parents with degrees and those without come from lower class, for the lack of better term, families.<p>If your parents have never set foot in an university and worked manual labor all their live, you are less likely to even consider higher education. While doctors may want their children to pursue a good career, even if those children hold no interest in that education.

I have not seen anyone say this, so I will (apologies if I missed someone&#x27;s comment). It is not clear that IQ is a good measure of smart.<p>I&#x27;ll also note that when I teach Elementary Statistics and ask undergrads for a show of hands of who has taken an IQ test, often in a class of 30 I won&#x27;t get more than a hand or two. So I guess these studies are administering the tests specially for the study?

If you increase the number of people going to higher education isn&#x27;t it obvious that average IQ will fall. Since 1940 the percentage of population that completed college went up from 5% to 30% whilst average IQ dropped 7-10%<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File:Educational_Attainment_in_the_United_States_2009.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Educational_attainment_in_the_...</a><p>Would be interesting to plot average IQ against the percentage of population that go to college.

Is IQ everything that counts?<p>Does the family&#x27;s social class count or not? Does the socioeconomic situation of the state, country, neighborhood count or not? Does fashions, wars, crises, recessions, mass layoffs, drugs permitted by states, industrial changes, friends, political changes, city councils, police and judges, corruption, monetary funds, teachers, management of study centers, laws, banks and what not... count?<p>Living in Spain, more than 20 years working with Linux (self-learned from magazines, books, and modem-internet in the 90&#x27;s), could not get a degree (by family situation, did start to work in fields unrelated to technology at 16&#x27;s)... have found many persons with a degree and very low IQ in my career.<p>Still, interesting article. Here, even basic education is 100% worse than it was 20, 30, 40, 50, etc years ago.

The article seems to consider a &quot;degree&quot; to be fungible across providers. At least in the UK, there&#x27;s a definite hierarchy of universities and the value of their courses, even if a pretence of equivalence is sometimes maintained.

Actual Title: &quot;Education Isn’t What It Used To Be&quot;<p>That&#x27;s less clicky, but more descriptive of the article.

Depends on the degree, mostly. Necessary disclaimer that everything I&#x27;m about to say is about statistical averages, which of course doesn&#x27;t apply to you, dear reader - you are hypercompetence incarnate and I know the world heavily undervalues you. :)<p>The average bachelor&#x27;s degree holder in the United States has an IQ of about 115, or about an 1100&#x2F;1600 on the SATs. Some of the majors you probably intuit to be rigorous (mathematics, engineering, CS, and quite often philosophy) really do also tend to have higher average IQs for successful graduates - I usually hear 125 to 130 floated for these ones. There also exist majors with lower average IQs, like [REDACTED] and [REDACTED].<p>Competition for the top schools tends to push the average IQ there much higher no matter which nation one looks at - my alma mater&#x27;s average SAT scores would suggest an average IQ of 130 or so across the board. But, for most people going to most schools, that won&#x27;t make that much of a difference, and unsurprisingly a lot of really smart people decide the extra thousand hours to crank out 200 extra points on the SAT just isn&#x27;t worth it. That&#x27;s why surprisingly often you&#x27;ll meet e.g. an engineering graduate from Podunk Polytechnic who&#x27;s smarter than half the people you meet at the University of Ivory Towers.<p>College degrees act as a valuable signaling mechanism of both one&#x27;s intelligence and ability to work consistently in a modern environment. One relevant term to Google is &quot;sheepskin effect&quot;. If your IQ is anywhere in the triple digits, it is almost certainly possible for you to get an associate&#x27;s degree, and it&#x27;s probably possible for you to get a bachelor&#x27;s as well.<p>If your IQ is in the double digits, it&#x27;s probably not the best move, just from an effort to reward standpoint. Luckily the trades pay quite well and provide an alternative track that&#x27;s both in demand and more accommodating of people who have less raw brainpower to throw around, but who are otherwise quite good and decent people.<p>And of course, I&#x27;ve known e.g. a few electrical engineers who became licensed electricians <i>after</i> their degree just because they liked working with their hands, and they almost always seem to clean up very well.<p>Practically anyone interested in this topic would do well to read <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Case-against-Education-System-Waste&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0691174652" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Case-against-Education-System-Waste&#x2F;d...</a>, both if they love college and if they hate it.

As a dropout that has worked in higher education, you don’t have to be smart at all, wealth, cheating, and nepotism&#x2F;prejudice are all students need.

Below average at worst.<p>Conscientious matters most, and I would wager is overly represented in those of average to below average intelligence — compared to above and beyond.<p>A provocative corollary: “but what about genius PhDs&#x2F;professors&#x2F;researchers” I would say being born in the upper middle class, but of middling intelligence, will make the path straight forward, requiring no great intellect.

More people getting an education is a good thing. The value of a degree has not deteriorated just because dumber people are also graduating. If you cannot distinguish yourself from those you deem dumber than you, then you won&#x27;t be able to arrive to the conclusion I am alluding to.

I would make the argument that what passes for education has gone down drastically. People aren&#x27;t getting smarter on the path to getting degrees.<p>Look at Harvard today. One of the US&#x27;s premier institutions has lost its way when it comes to academic rigor being one of its primary functions.

&gt; But we’re also spending more and more of our lives in education, and that threatens the time in the parts of our lives where we really enjoy being adults.<p>The time I was going to school was probably the best time of my life. Not because of school itself, but because of having a stable group of friends, lots of &quot;events&quot; and things to look forward to... and a lot of support for extra-curricular activities, like sports and hobbies.<p>After you finish school, you can feel like having a pointless life if you don&#x27;t find something to concentrate on (usually your career - which is in many cases a pointless thing to focus on anyway).

University was a big wake up call for me. I learnt that it wasn&#x27;t the smartest people that did best, but those that were most able (and willing) to follow instructions.

Interesting, I didn&#x27;t know about this effect. However the analysis seems to implicitly assume that a person&#x27;s IQ remains constant as they move up the educational ladder. This does not seem right, assuming that education system works as it should (ie, exposing students to harder and harder issues over time), and also because people should still naturally develop intellectually after high school.

tl;dr<p>If you don&#x27;t select for IQ on input, you don&#x27;t get IQ on output. Putting more people through university doesn&#x27;t change this. It just devalues a degree as a marker of relative intelligence.<p>This is called &quot;failing&quot; by some people, and technically it isn&#x27;t (because numbers.) But socially and culturally perhaps it is.<p>Author suggests at the end that we should spend less time educating people. But - rather obviously - if more of the population goes to university, education for them is being extended to graduation.<p>So you have kids spending more time being educated, leaving with a less useful qualification.<p>What&#x27;s missing is any discussion of how this affects the culture, the work force, and the quality of universities themselves. Is there any evidence it&#x27;s easier for relatively low-IQ people to become university professors or managers? How does that affect outcomes? What does it mean for employment and economic stability and output?<p>Overall a blizzard of graphs, but rather superficial analysis.

Getting a degree is more than just being intellectually smart. Many smart folk can&#x27;t apply themselves as they get bored easily so fail their courses. A degree requires application, endurance, and stamina. It&#x27;s not a sprint but a marathon applies here I feel. A sprinter is the intellectually smart person in most cases.

I have two degrees but don’t think I’m very smart. I’m actually pretty slow at understanding certain things. I have one big quality though that really helped, and still helps me get through complex things: I can get really really obsessed with a single topic and spend all my time on it.

Since I&#x27;ve seen both stupid and brilliant people get degrees in technical fields, I&#x27;m inclined to say that you don&#x27;t need to be particularly smart to get one. The corollary to this is that you can&#x27;t assume a person is smart just because they have a degree.

How comparable are IQ tests from 1940 and 2024? And how good a measure of intelligence are IQ tests?

&gt; Among major European nations, who’s the most trustworthy? [...] The answer depends on who you ask.<p>In Poland, the Germans seem to have been selected as both &quot;Most Trustworthy&quot; and &quot;Least Trustworthy&quot;.

Imo in some unis it&#x27;s enough that you paid the bill and have a pulse.

Not very, points at me.

An I.Q. above body temperature.

with my data sample = 1, I can say not very

I got a degree and I’m a dumbass, so you really don’t need to be smart at all lmao

We can argue about the degree holders of yesteryear or we can look forward to a more fair and equitable future for the degree holders of tomorrow.<p><pre><code> Seattle high schoolers were told that “Worship of the Written Word” is white supremacy </code></pre> Before you yell at me about this tidbit or similar rumblings about &quot;knowledge of math&quot; understand that:<p>1) I&#x27;ve confirmed this off-line first hand with actual parents (who are frankly, besides themselves), not some random news blurb. You can do the same.<p>2) As uncomfortable as it may be for you to discuss: This will further change the nature of degrees going forward.<p>I would politely suggest it will devalue them completely but that&#x27;s just my subjective opinion I suppose.<p>As a worshipper of the written word I have no idea where we go from here and am looking for some sort of ray of hope because it is getting scary.<p>Edit: This comment has been almost immediately pinned to the bottom of the thread. Bizarre to say the least. What is going on here?