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Location: Pantego, Texas, United States

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Hillary Clinton has said she wants all Americans to attend college, and wants the state to pay for it. I wonder if she is aware that it takes an IQ of at least 106 to have success in College (and an IQ of 115 to 120 to have success in Medicine, Law, Science, or Engineering). She may not believe in IQ (most liberals say they don't, except when they brag about their own lofty IQ), but IQ has proven to be a reliable indicator of academic performance. This means that less than half of the population (average IQ of 100) is capable of college level work. Consider that only about half of black Americans graduate from high school. It takes an IQ of about 87 to do high school level academic work. Since the average IQ of black Americans is about 85, then half of them graduating from high school is about what we should expect. Consider Jews who, as a group have an average IQ of 115, so we should expect that most of them graduate from college, and they do. And a disproportionate number of them are awarded the Noble Prize. Back to Hillary's proposal: how does she plan on getting everyone to graduate from college? Reducing the difficulty of the curricula would seem to be the only way. But what would this accomplish since college degrees would then be meaningless? The world is not really like "the Wizard of Oz," just giving them a diploma will not make them capable of success in the real world. (According to some work, it takes an IQ of about 106 to work at any level in the modern business world.)

1 Comments:

Blogger -bRad said...

While I don't dissagree with the statistics, and it makes sense that we would expect the trend of blacks graduating high school to be about 1/2 of the population of blacks, I don't think that means that we should accept it.

I'm also not suggesting that we lower the standards. I'm suggesting that we don't listen to other people tell us that we cannot do something. The average black kid may have to work harder than the average Jewish kid, but that doesn't mean we should squelch their hope of going to college and having a better life.

4:21 PM  

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