Thursday, January 21, 2021

Does education increase IQ? The General Social Survey says no

The question was raised on Twitter the other day about whether more education causes increases in IQ. The General Social Survey can help a little with this. Below we have a chart of the mean years of schooling completed since 1977. The mean starts out at 11.71 and ends in 2018 at 13.89 years of education. Over the period, that is an increase of 19%. 










By contrast, here is the trend in IQ. In 1978, it was 97.45, and in 2018 it was 97.80--an increase of 0.3%. Basically, no change. US trends are consistent with the view that keeping people in school longer does not make them smarter. 




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2 comments:

  1. mobius10:31 AM

    Heh. Who'da thunk it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. AMac7810:44 AM

    I was wondering about the flatness of the second graph, considering the Flynn Effect. At ~3 IQ points per decade, it ought to be visible.

    Then I read about the more-recent Negative Flynn Effect, positing a similar-magnitude trend in the other direction, starting with cohorts born in the mid-1970s to mid-1990s.

    Maybe it's a wash.

    References:
    Flynn Effect as ~3 points/decade, B. Bratsberg & O. Rogeberg, PNAS, 2018.
    Negative Flynn Effect: Table 1 in E. Dutton, D. van der Linden, & R Lynn, Intelligence, 2016.

    ReplyDelete

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