I'd say the AP glass is still somewhat more than half full. Sure, the median score has declined over the last decade from about 3.05 to 2.85, but that's not a catastrophic decline considering the huge increase in passed tests. Sure, lots of kids who have no business taking the tests are taking them, but the percent getting at least a 2 out of 5 is still over 80%.

One interesting question is whether the changes are caused by what we called in the marketing research business: penetration vs. volume. In other words, are more tests being passed (or failed) because more people are taking the tests or because people are taking more tests on average.

For example, I took 4 AP tests in 1976, my elder son took six and I'd like my younger son to take 9 or 10 (Human Geography here we come!).

Perhaps the increase in failed tests stems from more people taking one AP test, while the increase in passed tests stems more from smart people taking more tests each on average?

Clearly, Jay Matthews' stupid Best High School in America metric in Newsweek encourages high schools to bundle too many kids into AP classes/tests, because it rewards high schools for having kids take AP tests, not pass them.

Still, I suspect that you will see the average number of AP tests taken by the top 20% or so of students to continue to increase for a few more years at least.

Every AP teacher I had in high school noted that the tests have gotten dramatically easier, and based on the practice tests they provided, I agree that the questions at least are easier. I do not know if the scoring has gotten correspondingly harder, but if it hasn't there's another factor accentuating your argument.

With kids who graduated high school in 2000 and 2008, I know that the high IQ students with ambition take a lot of AP courses or JC courses in high school than when I was in high school.

Looking at the graphs, it seems that the number of tests taken has gone up by about 6 fold, while the tests per high school student has gone up about 4 fold. While the numbers have gone up, the fraction of students scoring 5s or 4s has not changed. Either the pool of people who have the ability and work ethic to score at that level has expanded, or those who have the ability are just taking more tests.

I would bet it is a mixture of the two. I'm slightly older than Steve, but my high school did not offer AP classes, nor did our cross town rival, but some of us did manage to take a course (usually just one) at the local JC. Now, the number of schools offering APs has increased substantially, opening the AP option in both challenging courses, Calc, Chem, Physics, and some less demanding courses.

The additional courses make it possible for ambitious students to take multiple courses without leaving campus. For some, AP courses are the only option for intellectual challenge. The glut of the kinds of courses that are less demanding are running up the number of courses available to the less able as well. (Steve even has suggested a list of AP exams to take w/o having taken the course). Cheap tuition units for those with less challenging college majors.

Note the decline in the fraction of 3s and 4s being made up for by a rise in 5s from about 10% to about 20%. This may be assignable to Jay Mathews. After my older kids graduated from high school, the district when on a Jay Mathews binge, bringing in more AP classes and 'encouraging' students to take the tests. That is probably a factor in the increase in 5s. Indeed, I have been told by a very good teacher who saw the data, a significant number of students, knowing they got a GPA boost from taking the course and exam, just put their names on the test and didn't even bother to take the test seriously.

In some ways the education bubble is harder to understand than the housing bubble. It's reasonable to say that most people who took out subprime mortgages on overpriced houses honestly thought that there was no reason to worry. House values had been rising steadily for many years and by all indications they'd continue to do so. Of course some people were cautioning that prices could crash, but theirs was a minority viewpoint and could be ignored or dismissed.

In contrast, the evidence has been plain to see for years and years that the marketability of most nontechnical college degrees has been sinking like the Titanic. It's not something that a few contrarians are forecasting, but something in the here and now that's impossible to overlook. Yet millions of young people continue to flood into liberal arts programs thinking that they'll be different. Reality check: they won't be.

that doesn't even make sense. What would it even mean for an "education bubble" to burst? What, do you think people are going to drop out of college so they can be homeless and permanently unemployable? Absolutely nonsensical.

This entire post is premised on an extremely false analogy between economic bubbles and education. Bubbles form and pop depending on the return on investment at any particular time. But education from pre-K through professional school ALWAYS generates very high returns for the student. That is only become more true as low-skill jobs disappear. It doesn't matter whether the student "belongs" in higher education or not--in fact, the less qualified the student, the more he benefits from a degree.

This may make certain IQ elitists unhappy, but the only way we're going to save our economy over the next few decades if we improve the level of education for everyone, ESPECIALLY the stupid ones. That or build a lot more prisons.

Let's just hope that when it happens, it will turn out that hedge funds and investment banks won't have exposed themselves to all of this silliness, and that we won't be plunged into another multi-year recession.

Seems to me the most immediate economic effect of college education is to keep bright 18-24-year-olds out of the labor market, thereby raising wages for the rest of the pool. If these kids defect from college matriculation in large numbers, it should be bad for wages and employment for everyone else, but good for productivity.

No clue about how pervasive my experiences are, but from the semi-rural area where I attended high school, AP tests are increasing but are hardly being shoveled on unqualified students. When I entered high school (it would've been 1999), there were 5 AP classes (Calc AB, Stat, Biology and English Lit, with American history being taught through a distance learning setup with the state's academic magnet school). The prereq classes were structured such that you were really only able to take the AP classes your senior year with Calc and Stat usually being taught at the same time so taking both was out. By the time I graduated high school, they added a few more classes but all were distance learning and taught by less able teachers than the AP American history class. While in theory, there were 7 AP classes (Calc AB, Stat, Biology, English Lit, American History, Physics B, and Psychology), again the guidance counselors either were inflexible enough or the prereqs were structured so that taking more than 4 AP classes was unusual.

If these areas act in a slightly more reasonable manner, then there seems to be plenty of AP test takers from the high achieving groups that will be taking more AP tests than they have in the past.

It would only be an education bubble if the number of jobs requiring college degrees were not increasing at a similar rate as the number of college graduates. I don't know if this is true. Does anybody have data?

You have to consider that society and the work force change over time and there may very well be more jobs (per capita) requiring college degrees today than in the 1970s, so the increase in college enrolment is justified.

Yeah, the population still has the same distribution of intelligence, even if the work force needs more intelligence today.

Interesting article agnostic, the only thing I felt that dragged was your continual use of the adjective "irrational".

Surely, "unjustified" could have been the more appropriate term in many cases. When you look at human cognitive biases, we are all irrational to some extent. Letting more dumb students take more AP tests doesn't strike me as the apotheosis of that, but rather a typical case of widespread wishful thinking.

Maybe I just have a problem in general with the was "irrational" get bandied about economics and sociology nowadays. Real irrationality is to be found in the mental hospital, otherwise you're just describing the foibles of human nature.

I earned AP credit in classes I did not take, by arranging to take the test with a counselor. An intelligent and ambitious kid does not need an AP class.

That said, I feel sorry for the spread of AP classes. My hardest AP class was also my most enjoyable, because kids who wanted an easy good grade went elsewhere. The most accessible AP class in my high school was also the least enjoyable (and least informative), for obvious reasons.

...it should be bad for wages and employment for everyone else, but good for productivity.

And thus good for wages and employment for everyone else.

raft,
the only way we're going to save our economy over the next few decades if we improve the level of education for everyone, ESPECIALLY the stupid ones.

I couldn't disagree with you more. I think any society than squanders its resources on the less able academically, versus the more able, is doomed to fail eventually.

Now some might say that those of higher IQ don't need any extra teaching resources, as they are largely self-taught, and while this is true in regards to self-teaching, I believe that special care should be taken of the very bright students, to nurture their full potential, as that will lift the whole economy/country - including the stupid ones - in the long run.

We are now in the Information Age, what will the next age be? ... maybe the Analysis Age, or whatever? ... but one thing is sure, there is going to be mighty competition between major trading blocks - China, India, EU and USA - for the super-brights among us. They will as now be the future stars, and any country that neglects these precious resource will suffer and deteriorate.

Big M,

I don't know how much demand for college grads there is now. I know so many people with degrees who are doing jobs that don't require degrees. Unless you study something that imparts useful knowledge, don't expect there to be a strong demand for it. So all of you spending yourselves into debt to get that English degree, uh, the Starbucks awaits.

The first shows the distribution of AP scores, where 5 is greatest. You can check the numbers for yourself in the previous link to the AP data, but there has been no change in the percent of all tests that received a score of 4 or 5 -- there have not been more and more smarties piling into AP classrooms, at least not since 1988. Therefore, everyone who deserved to be there was already there.

To reemphasize what Mike McK said, this is wrong. Since the percentage of 4s and 5s has stayed the same, the number of 4s and 5s has gone up in proportion with increased number of people taking the test. If the test scores can be trusted, there really has been more and more smarties piling into AP class rooms. It isn't hard to believe that smart kids were underserviced with AP classes in 1988.

I would support sending more kids to college if we could persuade them to major in technical and business-related fields. We do need more engineers, programmers, entrpranuers, and accountants. There's still quite a few smart kids out there that don't go the 4-year college route and we'd benefit if they did.

Less bright kids may not be able to complete an EE or finance degree at State U, but a 2-year degree is realistic for the overwhelming bulk of the population. Given the immense need for workers with technical and financial knowledge, getting kids to do more schooling is not a bad idea at all. I think as a society we'd be better off if the low IQ were pushed harder to learn the basics they need to operate in an advanced first world economy. I'm thinking understanding how to use Excel, the meaning of NPV, how to read a balance sheet, and some elementary level programming is within the grasp of the bulk of the populace. However, I think an emphasis on Asian-style rote memorization might be more useful for the low-IQ crowd than the current system.

I'm actually very happy to see more kids taking AP and would like to see the program broadened. In East Asia and India, the trend of competitive middle-class parents pushing academic rigor on their children has paid pretty good economic dividends. If more American kids are educationally ambitious, that's a good thing. A more educated worker is generally a more productive worker.

sg: those college graduates doing theoretically degree-less jobs got those jobs because THEY PUSHED OUT the degree-less people who would have theoretically had them. That is how dire the employment situation is in this country.

But a college degree is still a massive leg up against people with only high school educations or less, and going to college still greatly increases your chances of finding employment in almost any job you eventually choose.

pconroy: The market for unskilled labor (and not a few high-skill professions) in this country is shrinking fast. It's not going to be long before everything is done by robots. Unfortunately, just because the jobs disappear doesn't mean the people disappear. Now what do you think is going to happen when a >50% of the population is, quite literally, permanently unemployable? "Super-brights" won't save us from mass political and economic chaos. This result is to some extent inevitable but if we take aggressive steps now we can limit a lot of the damage.

raft,

What are you talking about, if as Agnostic mentioned, someone is below 110 IQ, and not really benefit from a college education, then why should resources be squandered on them, it's wasteful, and detrimental to the country as a whole.

On the other hand, no expense should be spared for those in the 145 IQ range and above range, as they have the potential to keep the economy going full steam, even if massive numbers of people have to be supported by receive unemployment benefits.

Look the way I see it, we are going into the next phase of the Global Economy, where some countries and regions will become more specialized in certain sectors and industries. So for instance, "Detroit style" car manufacturing is dead in the US, and people who worked there will be unemployed. Should we desperately try and make auto assemblers into financial advisors, no - let them do what I did, and everyone else in the world does - relocate or emigrate to somewhere that their skills will be rewarded. That's the solution.

raft makes a partially good point about teaching people to do what they can do. However, there is no really good argument for their going all the way through high school before they begin training. They should begin in 8th or 9th grade. How much literature, foreign language, history, math, science does a mechanic or child care worker really need to learn? Not 12 years. 9 or 10 should be plenty for the rest of us to trust them to go to work. If they decide later they have an insatiable curiosity, they can go to the library or back to college.

The reason that AP is even a topic is that the rest of the curriculum is so dumbed down to try to get everyone to pass.

The law requires a free, appropriate public education be provided to students. The current high school program is not appropriate to the needs of students nor society. It doesn't allow enough for differences in abilities to match to appropriate goals for students to be successful in the jobs that are available. Wouldn't we all be better off if Jonny were well trained during high school to fix air conditioners, than to frustrate him to death with an endless regime of classes he can't pass and that don't lead to a job even if he does pass?

In other words, are more tests being passed (or failed) because more people are taking the tests or because people are taking more tests on average.

I thought of looking for data on the population size of AP test-takers, but figured the number of tests taken gave more information -- like, rather than getting a home loan or not, *how much* did you get? This picks up not only those who are there and shouldn't be, but also those who could handle maybe an AP class or two, but are getting in over their head by taking 5 or 6.

Raft -- based on your track record so far, I suggest taking your meds before commenting, or else I'll delete your comments.

What would it even mean for an "education bubble" to burst?

For example, if people below an IQ of about 115 no longer went to college. Perhaps because they realized they were getting hosed in student loans and lost time that could've been spent getting good job training, advancing up the ladder, getting paid, and so on. See, it wasn't so hard to see what it would mean, was it?

But education from pre-K through professional school ALWAYS generates very high returns for the student.

Just like the stock market and housing prices can only go up, up, up, right? Take someone with an 85 IQ -- they get nothing from college, and their employers recognize by now that their degree from Outer Buttfuck University is a joke. They'll hire someone with an 85 IQ who hasn't wasted 4 to 10 years in college, who has training and experience.

And again, the one who didn't waste time in college will have been earning money rather than going into debt.

Since the percentage of 4s and 5s has stayed the same, the number of 4s and 5s has gone up in proportion with increased number of people taking the test.

Yeah, I didn't word that right. What I tried to say was just what you see in the graph: that the fraction of smarties is the same, while the middle is being eroded and a greater fraction are dummies. It's more bimodal now, the haves and have-nots taking the same tests.

sg,

Exactly! In Ireland and other European countries, students are "streamed" fairly early, in the UK it was the 11+ exam, in Ireland usually at 12 yo, where you entered an academic HS or a technical/vocational HS. In vocational HS's you learned real hands-on practical skills, like carpentry, welding, and then were sent on apprenticeships afterwards - no need for Calculus, Latin, or any other superfluous subjects for a good paying skilled job.

Back in the 1950's in Ireland, my uncle didn't like school, dropped out at 16, had no skills apart from farming, emigrated to Liverpool at 17, where after a stint as a sewer worker, apprenticed himself to a plumber. A few years later he emigrated to Sydney, Australia as a qualified plumber. There he got into servicing air conditioners, and being a top employee, his boss made him a partner in his business, and one thing led to another, such that by age 32 my uncle was manufacturing industrial air conditioners, in his own factory, and was a multi-millionaire. In his 40's he purchased almost a million acres of outback somewhere in the Murray-Darling basin. True story!

An additional factor is the growing popularity of dual-credit courses. Sometimes a high school student can take a class at the high school that counts as credit by a local 2-year college. There is now some competition between AP courses and dual-credit courses. If the student takes an AP course, he/she has to pass the AP test to get college credit for the class. In a dual-credit class, he is taught by an adjuct professor of the college, and must only pass the class for college credit. Most colleges will accept the credit for transfer, but perhaps not quite as many as the AP test.

Which is better, the AP class or the dual-credit class? The AP test has the clear advantage of being objective, and most people know what a 4 on the AP test means. On the other hand, some skills just can't be tested well on a multiple choice exam. (close to home for me--you can't test ability in the chemistry lab with a multiple choice exam) It is easy to dumb down a dual-credit class in order to increase "student retention", but in the long run that is bad for education. However, some posters say that the AP test has also been dumbed down. I'm agnostic on this issue (no pun intended).

I second tdaxp. I was required to take either Home Ec or Microeconomics in high school. I took the latter and did homework for other classes while the teacher was talking but was able to take both that AP test and the macroeconomics one (which wasn't even offered at my school). I wish more AP tests had been available, I got more credit through them than my first year of college. There was a requirement for a non-western social science/humanities course that couldn't be fulfilled through AP and that prevented me from achieving my goal of graduating without taking any bogus courses at college.

I recall there being a "natural experiment" that showed raising the dropout age for highschool actually does improve earnings. Do we have any similar experiments showing that college is doing the lower quartiles any good?

agnostic -- generally an interesting post, and i agree with the concept of the education bubble which I think is valuable. however, a few suggestions...

1. it would be great to change the title of the second graph from "amount" to "fraction", and to include a table underneath which shows the time evolution of count data (by multiplying the N values from the first graph by the fractions in the second graph).

as others have noted, that would show that the fraction of people getting 4's & 5's is constant, but the fraction of people getting 1's is increasing.

2. That in itself is not evidence for a bubble. HOWEVER, the other thing that people mentioned -- the reduction in difficult in AP tests -- is more interesting.

What if AP tests are being re-calibrated to keep the fraction of 4's and 5's constant ? That is, a steady dropping of standards? I'm not sure if that's true, but the right way to test it would be to give an older AP test to the current cohort.

3. this gets to the largest point. I think the strongest evidence for a bubble in education is not the AP tests but rather the boom in college education. How can mean IQs be dropping like a stone[1] yet enrollment & prices be constantly rising? Seems like a very similar, albeit longer term phenomenon with about order of magnitude less in cost (~$50k for educational loans vs. $500k for a house).

With the exception of people doing engineering and mathematics, the vast majority of people neither need nor benefit from 12 years in public school, let alone four more years at college. Think about how little, if anything, you retained from K-12. All you really learned you learned on your own. Outside of highly technical disciplines, the majority of the white collar workforce needs 105+ IQs, moderate literacy, and computer skills. The blue collar workforce needs 95+ IQs, basic literacy, and a lack of physical incapacitation.

What they don't need is 12 years of dioramas, "social studies", "phys ed" and "health". Second language instruction doesn't stick without immersion and for the masses history is learned from movies, not books. And as for math & computer science -- "The power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous."

Once PC falls, we will look at the obsession over "education" with a far more skeptical eye.

[1] Meaning because of immigration, discounting the Flynn effect for now (my understanding is that it is a secular rise that does not correlate with outcome variation -- though may be wrong on that)

WTF is AP?

[AP = Advanced Placement. College level high school courses. -- JM]

A kid with a 90 IQ that makes it through 2-year or 4-year college shows an employer that he has discipline, persistence, and work ethic. He also would pick up some amount of valuable knowledge while at school that'd enhance his overall productivity.

These days an employer is reluctant to hire a non-degree worker for a lucrative job and is even more reluctant to promote. If you want to get a job where you can learn skills and form the connections neccessary to climb up, having the degree credential is pretty important. From my experience, employers are reluctant to take on even experience people if they don't see the degree. If I were a 90 IQ kid with a strong work ethic, I'd do my best to get some type of degree at a relatively non-elite university rather than head out into the labor force early. I think back a few decades ago, climbing into the middle or upper class was easy for the less educated. Today that's not the case. Anybody that wants a successful career should not pass up college.

If you don't have a degree and you have a low IQ, there's a decent chance you'll end up stuck in the manual laborer class and make around minimum wage for the rest of your life. Given that a lot of employers are willing to hire and retain dumb people as long as they see that degree, getting through college could be a life saver for an otherwise dull kid.

If the East Asian educational system represents the point of saturation, we have a long way to go before the bubble bursts.

"All you really learned you learned on your own."

If you have an IQ over 130 then you can learn non-science material better on your own than in a classroom. If your IQ is over 140 then you can learn basic science and math better on your own. If your IQ is over 150 you can learn all undergraduate university subjects better on your own. People with very high IQ's pretty much assume that school is worthless because it didn't help them.

The US military might be an excellent model for US education. They track by ability. They only teach topics that are important for career success. They have rigorous standards for success. They have monitoring and feedback to improve training.

Hmmm, here is a modest proposal. Let the grade schools operate as they do now. Let the US military educate students with IQ's less than 130 for grades 7-12. Students with IQ's over 130 would teach themselves under the guidance of experts in various fields. Those students would take online tests to demonstrate competence in the basic subjects. At 18, the average students would have a good basic education and be prepared to enter a trade or begin training for a profession. The very bright students would begin an apprenticeship with a practicing expert, much as graduate students work with their advisor. The expert could be a lawyer, doctor, engineer, scientist, business manager, etc. and the student would learn by doing.

McGraw,

You, like "raft", are arguing that low IQ people should be spared from manual labor and encouraged to get 4-year degrees - this is nonsense, pure and simple.

What is your basis for saying:
Given that a lot of employers are willing to hire and retain dumb people as long as they see that degree

By forcing people incapable of academic work into 4-year colleges, you burden the less able with crippling debt and do NOT help them get a job they could thrive in, rather then end up with no marketable skills and default on their student loans. This reduced the pool of available money for student loans, and destroy the education aspects of the classroom, for those who are able - so a LOSE-LOSE proposition.

raft, McGraw,

You know, years ago I went to CUNY, Hunter College in New York, so I know first hand of what I speak. You had to pass basic Math and English tests to be admitted - not like SAT, but like the level of a 10 yo. There ware only about 20 to 25 questions on each test and they were ridiculously easy. Yet, as I later found out about 60% of students failed to pass one or both of the tests! So about 60% of students were required to complete remedial courses, before they could go on to 100 level courses. Some students were assigned up to 12 remedial credits, because they were so poor. Later the African-American dominated student government, tried to force the college to not "discriminate" against those who took remedial courses, and have them counted towards their degree total!!!!

I'm talking about Math like:
A person goes into a store and sees that apples are 50 cents each, or 3 for a dollar. What is the maximum number of apples a person could purchase with $1.60? ANS: A, B, C, D...

Fly,

I agree with your system, and know it would work. I remember having a similar discussion with a friend decades ago in Ireland, whereby he proposed that in return for low cost loans or grants, towards college fees, a student might agree to mentor a younger student. So that the penniless, but brilliant student could build up academic credits, while also earning mentoring credits, to offset against the cost of the academic ones...

Anecdotally, almost 30 years ago, I did a few years of a Computer Science degree in University College Dublin (Ireland), and about 20 years ago, repeated it all again in Hunter College - as the African-American student evaluator refused to give me proper credit for courses "taken on some island". The difference in standards was night and day. I never learned anything technical in Hunter at all. I was the victim of repeated academic racial discrimination and witnessed the PC bullshit that goes along with it.

But in my last semester there, I took out loans and found a very good non-paying internship - where my mentor was a recent Chinese immigrant from Hong Kong, who worked as a consultant there. I worked for free during the day, and in the evenings - when the office was empty - I setup computer systems and built networks to teach myself networking. Then studied programming on my own at night. After 3 months, I was basically running their IT dept, with the Chinese guy working as consultant - and they offered me a job at $39K, at the end of the semester. I accepted, but kept learning at night, and after 5 more months I left to become a consultant for $65K. After 10 months I was head-hunter from there by another consultancy to work for over $100K.

So yes, if you've got the right IQ and work ethic, you only need a little guidance here or there and some luck, to be successful.

I think that the home schooling for IQs over 150 plan, while it has a certain appeal, is a little too simplistic.

School serves a lot of purposes besides education, especially the K-12 part. While there are a lot of problems in our school systems at both the low end and high end of achievement, these can be fixed but only if those high achievement students and their families remain in contact and lobby for what they need.

The socialization aspects of school are, to my mind, just as important as the education. My experience in the dark ages (1961 graduate of HS) was outstanding. I was taught calculus after parents lobbied for it and I basically taught myself chemistry because the class was too slow and would not be done in time for the Chemistry SAT. I had teachers who were willing to put up with my seeming flouting of the rules because they knew I could do the work.

But the real education was learning how to deal with others, especially those who did not share my views on learning and knowledge. It allowed me to learn when to fight back (literally) and when to run, lessons that have served me well the rest of my life. In addition I was able to bounce ideas off of peers and teachers and learned how to present these ideas in a fashion that would not automatically cause a knee jerk reaction. (I joined the wrestling team automatically placing a number of otherwise indifferent athletes on my side. I helped them with homework, they beat up anyone who thought I was a nerd.)

Granted, this is anecdotal, but I have heard the same thing from others. Yes, a bright student can learn on his or her own but they miss the interactions with teachers and other students. Home schooling will put such a student at a social disadvantage no matter how bright they are unless there is some compensating factor which is missing in the formulation above.

You can check the numbers for yourself in the previous link to the AP data, but there has been no change in the percent of all tests that received a score of 4 or 5 -- there have not been more and more smarties piling into AP classrooms, at least not since 1988. Therefore, everyone who deserved to be there was already there.

I don't follow this argument. Maybe I'm missing something.

If the percentages remain the same but the total number of students has increased it must mean that more people are getting 4s and 5s than they did in 1988.

There are a few possibilities
1)Some people who wouldn't have gotten high scores in 1988 are getting them now.
2)Some of the new people do deserve to be there
3)A combination of reasons 1) and 2)

School is very useful. Even if your IQ is 150, you can stand to learn a lot from your professors and equally bright peers. There are quite a few concepts that need to be elaborated on, outside of book instruction, to be truly grasped. If you've got an IQ that high and aren't going to school, there's something seriously wrong with you.

I didn't say giving low IQ people office jobs was the optimal outcome for society. However, if I was giving advice to a low IQ kid that wanted a good life, I'd tell him to go the college route and get a cushy, high-paying office job. Even with a low IQ, the presence of a college degree can get you into mid level management somewhere. Sure you'll probably be a relatively bad manager and might have to change jobs a few times, but you're better off making 50K/yr than 20K/yr. No way is anyone better off without a college degree.

I would be willing to bet that plenty of those AA kids didn't study. Low IQ can be compensated for through sheer work ethic, but low IQ and no work ethic is a lethal combination. There has to be a mechanism in place to weed out kids that don't want to learn. Maybe keeping attendance and assigning regular HW would do that.....

"...admissions boards began to scrape deeper down into the sludgebucket of society." When snot-nosed posters at gnxp use derogatory language like this to refer to less educatable people, I imagine those less educatable people won't be very interested in groking much from those posters.

Mikeyes,
School serves a lot of purposes besides education, especially the K-12 part.

I'm sure that's true, in my case I went to a tiny rural school, with one other boy in my class, who literally couldn't even tie his shoelaces at about 10 years of age... so book were my friends.


McGraw,
Even if your IQ is 150, you can stand to learn a lot from your professors and equally bright peers.

If your IQ is 150 or above (mine is 157), you most likely WILL NOT be in a classroom with equally bright peers - unless you are at MIT or somewhere. At the state college level (CUNY etc), in term of IQ, you will stand head and shoulders above professors, and head, shoulders and torso above students. Or as gcochran likes to say, you will stand "knee deep in dwarves".

So, while you might learn how to hide or mask your ability, so as not to seem too "weird" to neuro-typical types, you certainly won't learn how to interact with intellectual peers, far from it. I've only learned to interact with intellectual peers on sites like this one, where the average IQ is probably 130 or thereabouts.

Coincidence: this NYT op-ed reports the results of an apparently successful charter school experiment in Harlem.

"Successful" as in, +1.4 SD on standardised tests, and going from 39th to 74th percentile - in maths. Or at least, the op-ed says so - but apparently they're quoting from competent economists who did a full-fledged study, so there might be something real there.

toto,

I don't see any data in that article - just opinion.

Where does it list IQ of children or their parents??

Ok. I suppose you might benefit from going to MIT or Cal Tech, but you do not benefit from dropping out of school and working early. At a minimum, the credentials you obtain through 4 years of college outweigh any cost of schooling.

As I said earlier, I feel that everyone would benefit from 2-4 years of technical and business/finance education. Our current system is not utilizing human capital well enough. There are too many people that would rather get a blue collar job or go on welfare rather than study. For a country that wants to maintain an advanced, highly technological economy, it's appalling how many kids don't want to study. Looking at the academic rigor in South Korea or India, it's a pretty safe bet that we're falling behind and need to do something.

More spending? No. More discipline in the schools, rote memorization, fact drilling, longer and more school days, and emphasis on math/science? Yes. It works in East Asia, it works in India, and it'll work here.

I imagine those less educatable people won't be very interested in groking much from those posters.

Who cares? -- they're not smart enough to find us, or process what we say, even in principle.

That's the first thing that popular science writers learn. Paraphrasing Steven Pinker: "Don't bother trying to make the book accessible to truck drivers because they don't read books. Aim it at the smart layperson."

"They found that the Harlem Children’s Zone schools produced “enormous” gains. The typical student entered the charter middle school, Promise Academy, in sixth grade and scored in the 39th percentile among New York City students in math. By the eighth grade, the typical student in the school was in the 74th percentile. The typical student entered the school scoring in the 39th percentile in English Language Arts (verbal ability). By eighth grade, the typical student was in the 53rd percentile.

Forgive some academic jargon, but the most common education reform ideas — reducing class size, raising teacher pay, enrolling kids in Head Start — produce gains of about 0.1 or 0.2 or 0.3 standard deviations. If you study policy, those are the sorts of improvements you live with every day. Promise Academy produced gains of 1.3 and 1.4 standard deviations. That’s off the charts. In math, Promise Academy eliminated the achievement gap between its black students and the city average for white students"



"Basically, the no excuses schools pay meticulous attention to behavior and attitudes. They teach students how to look at the person who is talking, how to shake hands. These schools are academically rigorous and college-focused. Promise Academy students who are performing below grade level spent twice as much time in school as other students in New York City. Students who are performing at grade level spend 50 percent more time in school."

Exactly. You discipline kids, push them hard, and force them to work hard and you get results. In America, we call that groundbreaking research. In East Asia and India, they call that common sense.

One downside to all this is that most American kids of any race, except Asians and Indians, don't study all that much or get pushed all that hard. So applying this model to every school would produce great improvements for everyone and maybe even take us into the East Asian academic stratosphere, but the black-white gap would probably remain. However, at least we'd be maximizing utilization of our cognitive capital.

agnostic, Grey Trouble gave the wrong reason why your "sludgebucket" remark was inappropriate, but that doesn't mean you're right.

Our society will face a choice within the next few decades between constructively dealing with our education/IQ problem, and descending toward Idiocracy. You may think that an informed society cannot choose option #2. But you would be wrong. There are things that a rational person can be more disgusted by than Idiocracy, and one of them is a world where your expressed level of contempt for the vast majority of humanity is fully accepted. Put yourself, if you can, in the shoes of a highly intelligent person with an only slightly-below-average level of Agreeableness, who stumbles upon GNXP for the first time. Upon reading the "sludgebucket" sentence, are you more or less inclined to take GNXP seriously?

This isn't Roissy in DC. Entertainment value is not the primary metric by which your writing here will be judged. I'm not saying that we need to be 100% serious 100% of the time. But I am saying that we are fighters in a civilization-scale war, and you do our cause a disservice when you drive away capable potential recruits.

But I am saying that we are fighters in a civilization-scale war, and you do our cause a disservice when you drive away capable potential recruits.

how do you know his aims are your aims anyhow? you presume quite a bit by that very assumption. in any case, on a per-post basis assman probably brings the most virally driven web-traffic besides jason malloy with his culture-quant analyses, and so introduces the wider public to GNXP ideas. i tends to rub me the wrong way when people who don't generate a lot of web traffic themselves lecture those who do on the details of delivery.* perhaps we could turn this into a polished webzine with a style guide and a list of "must do's" and "must don'ts," become to HBD what reason is to libertarianism? but at that point we'd have to start paying people, and the shift from simply giving a free hand to bright young scholars who just want a place to publish unedited prose. i'm sure the style critics around these parts are ready to start offering up their labor hours to organizing a new money losing opinion journal? :-)

* though to be fair i've admitted that i'm rather happy that GNXP hasn't grown too much since 2004 since growth tends to result in dilution of the cognitive potency of the audience.

how do you know his aims are your aims anyhow? you presume quite a bit by that very assumption.

I am judging him against what I perceive to be GNXP's overall aims rather than my own, but I admit that the latter probably biases my perception of the former.

So, taking your point into account... I still have trouble coming up with mature aims for him that justify his gratuitous public nastiness. There is no limit to how rational and hardheaded we can be without resorting to that.

in any case, on a per-post basis assman probably brings the most virally driven web-traffic besides jason malloy with his culture-quant analyses, and so introduces the wider public to GNXP ideas. i tends to rub me the wrong way when people who don't generate a lot of web traffic themselves lecture those who do on the details of delivery.* perhaps we could turn this into a polished webzine with a style guide and a list of "must do's" and "must don'ts," become to HBD what reason is to libertarianism? but at that point we'd have to start paying people, and the shift from simply giving a free hand to bright young scholars who just want a place to publish unedited prose. i'm sure the style critics around these parts are ready to start offering up their labor hours to organizing a new money losing opinion journal? :-)

Fair enough; I won't argue with web traffic statistics.

But we don't just want others exposed to our ideas, we want as large a fraction as possible to walk away with both a positive impression and a better understanding of the facts, and as small a fraction as possible to be so disgusted that they close their minds to HBD, right? Not all publicity is good publicity here?

But we don't just want others exposed to our ideas, we want as large a fraction as possible to walk away with both a positive impression and a better understanding of the facts, and as small a fraction as possible to be so disgusted that they close their minds to HBD, right? Not all publicity is good publicity here?

this is a fair point. and that's why GNXP has a back channel forum for regular longtime contributors; to hash out these standards and concerns :-) if you do have concerns, you could email them to the author specifically, or to me even and i can pass the concerns on.

meta-discussions initiated by readers in public aimed at bloggers are generally not useful. if assman was a writer being paid, and this was a journal to which you were a subscriber, you have a stake and vested interest in the content being generated in a concrete manner. as it is, assman is giving of his marginal labor to generate content which you consume gratis. as someone who gives of his marginal labor with little return aside from some link-fame and constructive commentary, what would you expect his reflexive response to be to stylistic and meta-critique? granted, you are not an anonymous commenter, your presence on this weblog precedes assman's and you have even posted here, so i think that gives your opinion some weight. but at the end of the day i have little sympathy for opening up the floor on these comment boards to meta-opinionating because most people offering the opinions are nobodies. i've seen it happen on other weblogs, and it quickly turns into a farce like the cultural revolution as every nobody has an opinion on "meta" if not the primary substance of the weblog.

i am not totally laissez-faire in regards to style or nature of content. but obviously this is the sort of thing best done behind the scenes. i actually have asked that posts be removed on occasion when i've been away from the computer and multiple people send me emails to complain about them (usually people who are valued readers).

but at the end of the day i have little sympathy for opening up the floor on these comment boards to meta-opinating because most people offering the opinions are nobody's. i've seen it happen on other weblogs, and it quickly turns into a farce like the cultural revolution as every nobody has an opinion on "meta" if not the primary substance of the weblog.

Understood. I'll stick to private emails in the future when it comes to these sorts of concerns.

Oh please. I don't want readers who lack all sense of humor -- "sludgebucket" is true, makes you crack a smile, and sounds wonderful. You will never read that word in the flaccid bureaucratese that we're forced to read and write all day. You'd have to cobble together a Greek prefix and Latin root, plus another Latinate word to make a compound. Ah, and don't forget the final step -- turn it into an acronym!

Seriously, if remarks like that drove audiences away, why do stand-up comedians have so many followers? Hell, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who didn't think of society as a sludgebucket.

I am sympathetic to Razib's point that the ideas behind a post should be the focus of the comments and that moreover posters are giving their time and thoughts freely. So I won't bring up this kind of comment again. (But since this line of comments has already begun, I'll continue this time).

I also see Agnostic's point about the fun in using colorful language. I'm all for it. But the ideas on gnxp are offerred for serious consideration and may one day have serious consequences. For this reason, I don't think the comparison to comedians makes sense.

Ultimately, terms like "sludgebucket of society" make gnxp posters themselves look uncivilized and lends validity to the most common argument against the kind of HBD ideas often discussed on gnxp, which is that they lead to the dehumanization of one group by another group that feels itself superior and therefore should not be pursued. You know what I'm getting at.

Using derogatory language to refer to whole swaths of humanity plays into the hands of people who makes these arguments. Why give them any firepower than they already have?

Dog of justice has a point about contempt for people who aren't as bright as others. Really, I don't see agnostic as having contempt for the unable, except when they see themselves as really smart based on their "I think therefore it's true" pronouncements. He reminds me more of what Asimov said, "those who think they know everything are annoying to those of us who do." Honestly, when you see the crap out there ( which agnostic regularly exposes based on readily available data, sometimes even the data cited by the fool he is exposing) and these fools are considered "reliable" or "respected" sources, you can't really wonder at his annoyance.

Anyway back to the contempt for the people who occupy the bottom of the IQ bucket where the sludge would likely fall. When I was in high school, I told friends that you could evaluate people on four factors: Looks, Brains, Personality and Money. It's crude but makes sense. Think of the cleaning lady who is ugly, poor and stupid, but she is sweet and polite and does a good job, cheap. She is actually more pleasant than a smart, rich super model type who is nasty to everyone that doesn't kiss her butt. Not that you would want either for a girlfriend. Personality more than intelligence is the big factor for most. Sometimes dumb people who are nice are fine to be around. However ignorant, arrogant, people are probably the most annoying to people who more carefully consider topics. Then you consider the college administrators recruiting ever more students with less and less ability, one can't help but be annoyed at the irrational expectations.

darynr
You can check the numbers for yourself in the previous link to the AP data, but there has been no change in the percent of all tests that received a score of 4 or 5 -- there have not been more and more smarties piling into AP classrooms, at least not since 1988. Therefore, everyone who deserved to be there was already there.

I don't follow this argument. Maybe I'm missing something.

If the percentages remain the same but the total number of students has increased it must mean that more people are getting 4s and 5s than they did in 1988.

There are a few possibilities
1)Some people who wouldn't have gotten high scores in 1988 are getting them now.
2)Some of the new people do deserve to be there
3)A combination of reasons 1) and 2)

He/ she has voiced my thoughts exactly.

My daughter is just graduating from HS and going to Harvard and my son is a sophmore in hs taking amongst other BC calc. I am pretty involved with what they do at school. While i cannot comment on calculus etc -too many years since i last studied in Hs myself,-the general comment i have about stuff like history and economics ( subjects i am completely self educated in - having never taken courses in HS - grew up in India - diff system)is that the stuff is too easy. If a 50 yr old w no formal eduacation in the subject can geta 5 level score, the test and instruction have been or always were dumbed down.

I feel the basic trend is everywhere. I am a physician and feel that passing boards too has been dumbed to the point of no return as well.

There is a real societal problem with this: and that is that for the potential employeror /future college, there is no good way of separating the grain from the chaffe. this is bad because it inherently causes misallocation of precious societal resources.

I would also like to add, there is and will be in the foreseeable future a need for the " low IQ" kind of manual labor jobs. Robotics is not going to make this go away- in fact the opposite- in the words of a AI guy whose article i read a long time ago- What we thought would be easy is mind numbingly hard and what we thought would be hard is turning out to be surprisingly easy.

in short it is more than likely that tech will eliminate white collar jobs at a much higher rate that than it will eliminate your friendly neighborhood plumber or mason.

So the pool of people who would have been successful plumbers, go and do a 4 yr degree course at the local JC/ state school, and spend most of their time playing beer pong and getting into debt taking completely useless courses, requiring neither intellegence or effort. When these young people graduate they feel themselves overqualified for being a mason or assembly line worker or whatever. And in addition are saddled with debt. It leads to adverse economic consequences for them. And for society at large, as the need for plumbers or truck drivers or aseembly line grunts is not going away soon- we have a shortage or a misallocation of resources. leading to the following consequences: 1. small pool of potential blue collar workers leads to wages being unsustainably high - see chrysler/ gm.
2. you need to import unskilled labor from abroad, with its inevitable consequences.

In short, the education bubbles bursting is long overdue.
and given the economic mess we are in now and for the foreseeable future, I see this bursting relatively rapidly, as college loan defaults ( can they do this), along with credit card, commercial real estate and more residential housing defaults are pretty much assured in the next few months.

I have no reason to think that the article is incorrect about there being an education bubble in college education, but I think it has more to do with the relative value of $200,000 BA in Anthropology.

As far as AP goes, it's popularity is a symptom of the vast inequities between schools. We lack a national curriculum and national exam system that measures actual knowledge. AP is wonderful because it allows us to see that while some schools may offer a course called AP English, and some students may get an A, if all of their scores are in the 1&2 range, we can effectively disregard the grades.

Frankly, AP (or SAT II, etc.) or an equivalent is desperately needed at many levels of education so that we have a handle on real knowledge and learning, and not the chimera of grades.

So- what the poor AP scores are revealing is not the educational bubble, but rather that there are many, many schools across the USA that have very low standards. In reality, no one at many schools should be getting an "A" grade, but that is not palatable to the people of those localities.

"Bubble" (with all it's negative connotations) perhaps is the wrong way to refer to something like education. If more people (even if it is more of the "stupid" people as *you* call them) are deciding to go in for education, it probably is overall a good thing. Isn't it?

Vic,

in short it is more than likely that tech will eliminate white collar jobs at a much higher rate that than it will eliminate your friendly neighborhood plumber or mason.

I agree for certain White Collar job functions, especially those requiring a great deal of knowledge about a limited subject area. Such as certain kinds of medical diagnosis, based on a preponderence of symptoms. Certain kinds of graphical processing, like analysis of x-rays; or certain routine architectural or mechanical designs. Mostly though I think AI will initially act in a consultative capacity, like giving a second opinion, or developing a rapid prototypes or models of systems.

On the other hand, whole swaths of factory work will be eliminated, as robots are more reliable and can work in more hazardous conditions, without benefits.

"On the other hand, whole swaths of factory work will be eliminated, as robots are more reliable and can work in more hazardous conditions, without benefits."

KIVA warehouse robots: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul08/6380
MIT greenhouse robots: http://gadgets.softpedia.com/new...rs-2026- 01.html

In the last twenty years processors, sensors, and software have gotten much better and much less expensive. The time is now ripe for automation of many unskilled jobs. We are presently in a transition stage where unskilled humans are still needed for most jobs. However, many of those jobs are being restructured so that robots work together with unskilled laborers. One unskilled laborer + 5 robots can do the work formerly done by several unskilled laborers while also reducing response time and errors. In another decade the robots will be far better and cheaper and more jobs will have been restructured for robots.

Personally I have no idea how a young person should prepare for a modern career.

Plumbers and handymen should still be needed. However, the entry barriers to such jobs are low and my guess is that as low skilled workers lose jobs in manufacturing and agriculture they will move into other low skill jobs and reduce wages. E.g., suppose I'm a skilled plumber with my own business. In the new job market I can hire many unskilled labors. With their help I can complete far more plumbing jobs. These workers will take on more and more of the skilled work. Eventually I will be managing many low paid semi-skilled plumbers. My low cost plumbing business will lower the wages paid to other plumbers. (This already happened in the landscape business.) So low wages should spread from one low skilled occupation to the next.

I'm not sure doctors will fare much better. Suppose a doctor specializes in breast radiology. Medical advances lead to molecular diagnostics that detect early stage cancer from protein markers in the breath or blood. Advanced chemo or immune therapy then cures the cancer. The $250,000 a year breast imaging specialist is no longer needed.

Within a few decades no one, no matter how smart or how well educated, will be able to keep up in a job market where old occupations rapidly disappear or drastically change.