Theme: Measurement

IQ BY MAJOR (COLLEGES DO NOT PRODUCE THIS DATA ON PURPOSE)

There are five different measures we use to answer this question:

1) the iq of high school students applying for university (we have their iq scores from standardized tests)

2) the sat scores of college students by major

3) the gre scores of grad students by major

4) the long term tracking of students from high school to life.

5) the lifetime performance of all degree holders by socio economic status.

Most of these tests show volatility because 1) weschler is the best measure but only available in high school students, 2) mathematics appears to be the best functional test of intelligence at the high end, and ‘verbal ability’ was added to raise the measure of girls/women on tests, 3) the personality trait ‘industriousness’ is so influential on performance 4) sat scores test education, gre scores select upward, 5) colleges and universities vary vastly in the capability of students they attract and the difficulty of the major they provide. 6) smaller numbers of men go to college and tend to have higher abilities, and larger numbers of women go to college regardless of their abilities. 7) girls mature much earlier, and boys much later, so IQ stabilizes in adulthood (and any advances evaporate), and we have no means of IQ testing after 23 when this stabilization occurs other than lifetime performance.

The numbers in the the OP reflect an effect which is well understood in the data: more women go to college than men by far now, and that lowers the score of women to the median because of regression to the mean at scale.

Moreover, some degrees have a negative impact on lifetime earnings (social work, sociology, education).

This is important for the simple reason that most published proxies for intelligence of gender and occupation use the number of degrees independent of major as a proxy for IQ which tends to vastly overstate or understand the biological intelligence, functional intelligence, of demographic areas.

None of which is complicated. But the reminder needs to be out there constantly that this is how aggregates are produced.