Neuroscience and psychology
The IQ of college students is plummeting
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MPH, MSc
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There is a belief that university students have a higher IQ than the general population. A recent meta-analysis has addressed this issue (Uttl et al., 2024), analyzing the average IQ scores of 9,902 students tested using intelligence tests (Weschler) in the United States and Canada, grouped by decades from 1939 to the most recent one beginning in 2019. The data sets reviewed show an approximate decline of 0.2 points in the IQ of university students per year, falling to a current IQ of 102, i.e., the level of the general population without a university education. Furthermore, following a normal distribution curve, a very high percentage of university students are actually below the average intelligence of the non-university population. In other words, teachers are faced with the challenge of teaching a growing number of students who are below the average intelligence of the population. Despite the decline in IQ, grades have been rising and the number of low grades has been falling, and yet "students think they are very intelligent and deserve the highest grades."
"Our findings validate the opinion of many university professors that students are less intelligent, less prepared, and work less."
The massification of universities means filling classrooms with people who are less intellectually competent, but also with people who are not interested in studying. This has made the simple act of teaching more difficult. Teachers are forced to reduce the course load and inflate grades, say the authors. In turn, the decline in educational standards reduces the training of intellectual capacity, which translates into a decline in students' intellectual ability. Therefore, university education cannot be superior. The fact that spending four years studying higher education does not translate into greater intellectual performance compared to not studying shows a harsh reality.
The Flynn effect, particularly in the 20th century, reflects the increase in IQ among the general population due to greater access to language (press, etc.) and greater exposure to symbolic signals in the environment (instructions, operations with mechanical devices, screens, etc.). In other words, IQ and logical reasoning have grown more outside the university than inside it. Intuitively, this effect should be greater in the 20th century than in the 21st century. In fact, the decline of this effect in our times is being studied, that is, the general decline in IQ in the population in the 21st century. This would again support the view held by many teachers that there has been a decline that has accelerated in recent years. However, the authors find a high variability in IQ, with some degrees maintaining an IQ above the population average. On the other hand, entrance exam scores correlate rather modestly with IQ, although in trait psychology it is well known that intelligence and discipline are different aspects.
The authors cite other sources of evidence consistent with the lower level of effort required by universities today, noting that students spend fewer hours studying than in previous decades. University is no longer a place where one must demonstrate a certain level of competence in order to pass. Neither degrees nor grades today reflect the academic reality of a student, nor do they reflect a person of high ability or competence, much less high intelligence. The decline in IQ, however, has been going on for longer than many teachers realize, although it may be bottoming out in recent years.
Overqualified and the most prepared generation in the history of the universe
That there are millions of highly educated people with years of higher education, top grades, highly competent for the job, etc., but that no one wants to hire them on a permanent basis... is quite difficult to reconcile.
There is a correlation between devalued degrees, devalued jobs, and devalued salaries. However, many people seem not to understand this. A degree is essentially a document that provides information about certain skills (reading comprehension, ability to solve certain types of problems, certain knowledge in an area, etc.). But real qualification is the competence acquired by the person during the training process and their subsequent ability to perform at work, not the piece of paper hanging on the wall. This is confusing the sign and the reality. Once degrees fail to back up real skills, even if a person can write a letter to a client without making three spelling mistakes in a single paragraph, the inevitable consequence is that the degree becomes worthless. It loses its only value as a piece of paper: to provide information about the person. A university degree no longer says much about the intellect or competence of any individual. This is what happens with currency. Economists know that issuing banknotes without productive backing causes their value to devalue until they are literally used as toilet paper in some places.
The media discourse on the "overqualification" of university graduates is intended to give a misleading view of what is happening, omitting the degradation of intellectual competence that the education system is capable of providing. In recent years, many companies are changing course in their hiring practices toward older workers, even middle-aged ones, despite the fact that they are less technologically savvy and have more trouble adapting to computer use. This is quite telling. The degrees one accumulates are not empirical skills, nor do they constitute the "overqualification" that so many people generously award themselves. It also overlooks the fact that the reality of the material production system differs from the sign economy in which people want to participate, to use Baudrillard's terminology. In other words, what is truly important for the productive system is not determined by the growing number of creative university degrees, nor by the desires of each individual, nor by what is fashionable.
Everyone has welcomed the festival of degrees obtained with little effort, as well as the excitement of receiving sky-high grades. Great. But the consequences of the party must be accepted.
Inflated grades, inflated egos
Grades should be honest feedback that allows students to self-correct and improve. When grades are used for purposes other than providing honest feedback to the individual, the result is that the self-correction process that allows for intellectual growth is eliminated, and students are given a misleading view of themselves and their abilities. Inflating grades and giving away passing marks has created the opposite of what is being sold under the guise of cheap pedagogy: a competition of narcissists obsessed with the inflated grades they receive, incapable of self-criticism, with no interest in the learning process, and without the psychological capacity to overcome setbacks or face adversity. The humility of effort has been replaced by an inflated sense of self-importance. The teacher's grade has thus become something like a "like" on social media, used to boost the ego.
The university has been transformed into a consumer product, however "public" it may be, in which obtaining a degree is taken for granted with enrollment. The student is no longer a student who must develop a skill, but a user who must be kept comfortable to avoid complaints. The way to keep students quiet is, of course, to lower the standards so that every last one of them passes comfortably. Once all this becomes the norm, it is the teacher who becomes the anomaly. Particularly the competent teacher. To the point where it is now impossible to ask university students to do a simple assignment without receiving a flood of papers copied from the internet, as a teacher recently complained in an article published in the press. This is the reality that everyone prefers to keep quiet about. I won't even mention "final degree projects."
I'll tell you how far this goes: I have students who believe that failing is illegal. They go crazy when they see a failing grade. They have been living in such a delusion for so many years that they go to a lawyer because their work copied from the internet has not been approved. This is no joke. It is the result of so many people's actions having no consequences. They believe that this is how the world works. Let it be clear that I am talking about people in their twenties and thirties in postgraduate programs, not 15-year-old high school students. Students wait for their degrees as if they were ordering a package from Amazon. If the teacher gets in the way, they are systematically coerced, threatened, defamed, etc. This is no coincidence; it has been actively legislated to be this way. The successive "educational reforms" need no further comment.
Academic, psychological, and ethical collapse
Many of us who work in this field see not only an intellectual collapse, but also a psychological one (35-year-olds crying in the middle of a tantrum like an 8-year-old) and an ethical one (the replacement of an ethics based on behavior with an ethics based on emotionally intense language). Many teachers feel that for some time now they have been teaching people whose mental age does not correspond to that of an adult, people who are very different from what they saw perhaps 10 or 15 years ago. In the classroom, we see a process of psychological infantilization in the youngest students, but also in people in their 30s and even 40s, so it is not simply a problem of one generation or another.
Perhaps the collapse of education and ethics is something that has interested someone. Expectations of what most people will achieve in their lives have been inflated, the usefulness of work has been distorted, and the productive system has been distorted. Contributing something tangible to the community through work has become a competition of egos. The constant sponsorship and exhibition of vulgar and tacky young people in the media has this intention: to remind us that what is important is to show off success, without intellect, ethics, or contributing anything productive to others. Add to this the massive consumption of technology and idle time, etc. All of this has produced epidemic levels of narcissism, with a massive loss of all sense of ethics, except for a utilitarian opportunism and signaling of moral desirability through audiovisual displays on social media.
The loss of humility is very visible, and many students, simply because they have a piece of cardboard, believe themselves to be things they are not. The problem with self-deception at the individual level is that it is incompatible with reality in a dose-dependent way. No one dares to tell the truth to people who have spent their entire lives in a bubble. I'll tell you: your teachers are deceiving you, your parents are deceiving you, the education system is deceiving you, the press is deceiving you, politicians are deceiving you, and you are deceiving yourself. A person's inflated perception of themselves is confronted with often poor achievement in real life, and this psychological conflict increases the need to defend the ego, producing a feedback loop. This whole spiral leads not only to failure at work, but also to the psychological problems experienced by millions of young people, which stem from this pedagogy aimed at emotional comfort, which attempts to cover up academic, psychological, ethical, and vital failures from childhood onwards. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt is a serious author with extensive published research and several books on the misconception of emotional comfort and cheap, frivolous, vulgar, and erroneous pedagogy as a substitute for a balanced psyche. I will not elaborate here.
I will conclude with a comment that is crystal clear to me after having taught thousands of students and corrected and tutored thousands of papers. The education system does not educate anyone. People who want to be educated educate themselves. Few words have been bandied about with such vulgarity as the word education. It is not a problem of classes, but of types of people, as Ortega rightly said. For most people, "education" is only a process of institutionalization, simple Foucauldian mechanics through the inertia of bodies whose consciousness has been nullified. The student has become a mere user who is interested in remaining institutionalized, and that is the only interest; the rest is discourse that serves as rationalization to justify the fiction that conceals the expansion of the mechanized apparatus. What this protects is the real interest behind it all: the machinery of institutionalization. People who deny what is happening with comments such as "you were young once too, you just don't remember," "that's always been said about young people," etc. You have a lot of work ahead of you to try to cover up what is happening.
"The teacher who insists on work is said to be authoritarian." Erich Fromm.
"Our findings validate the opinion of many university professors that students are less intelligent, less prepared, and work less."
The massification of universities means filling classrooms with people who are less intellectually competent, but also with people who are not interested in studying. This has made the simple act of teaching more difficult. Teachers are forced to reduce the course load and inflate grades, say the authors. In turn, the decline in educational standards reduces the training of intellectual capacity, which translates into a decline in students' intellectual ability. Therefore, university education cannot be superior. The fact that spending four years studying higher education does not translate into greater intellectual performance compared to not studying shows a harsh reality.
The Flynn effect, particularly in the 20th century, reflects the increase in IQ among the general population due to greater access to language (press, etc.) and greater exposure to symbolic signals in the environment (instructions, operations with mechanical devices, screens, etc.). In other words, IQ and logical reasoning have grown more outside the university than inside it. Intuitively, this effect should be greater in the 20th century than in the 21st century. In fact, the decline of this effect in our times is being studied, that is, the general decline in IQ in the population in the 21st century. This would again support the view held by many teachers that there has been a decline that has accelerated in recent years. However, the authors find a high variability in IQ, with some degrees maintaining an IQ above the population average. On the other hand, entrance exam scores correlate rather modestly with IQ, although in trait psychology it is well known that intelligence and discipline are different aspects.
The authors cite other sources of evidence consistent with the lower level of effort required by universities today, noting that students spend fewer hours studying than in previous decades. University is no longer a place where one must demonstrate a certain level of competence in order to pass. Neither degrees nor grades today reflect the academic reality of a student, nor do they reflect a person of high ability or competence, much less high intelligence. The decline in IQ, however, has been going on for longer than many teachers realize, although it may be bottoming out in recent years.
Overqualified and the most prepared generation in the history of the universe
That there are millions of highly educated people with years of higher education, top grades, highly competent for the job, etc., but that no one wants to hire them on a permanent basis... is quite difficult to reconcile.
There is a correlation between devalued degrees, devalued jobs, and devalued salaries. However, many people seem not to understand this. A degree is essentially a document that provides information about certain skills (reading comprehension, ability to solve certain types of problems, certain knowledge in an area, etc.). But real qualification is the competence acquired by the person during the training process and their subsequent ability to perform at work, not the piece of paper hanging on the wall. This is confusing the sign and the reality. Once degrees fail to back up real skills, even if a person can write a letter to a client without making three spelling mistakes in a single paragraph, the inevitable consequence is that the degree becomes worthless. It loses its only value as a piece of paper: to provide information about the person. A university degree no longer says much about the intellect or competence of any individual. This is what happens with currency. Economists know that issuing banknotes without productive backing causes their value to devalue until they are literally used as toilet paper in some places.
The media discourse on the "overqualification" of university graduates is intended to give a misleading view of what is happening, omitting the degradation of intellectual competence that the education system is capable of providing. In recent years, many companies are changing course in their hiring practices toward older workers, even middle-aged ones, despite the fact that they are less technologically savvy and have more trouble adapting to computer use. This is quite telling. The degrees one accumulates are not empirical skills, nor do they constitute the "overqualification" that so many people generously award themselves. It also overlooks the fact that the reality of the material production system differs from the sign economy in which people want to participate, to use Baudrillard's terminology. In other words, what is truly important for the productive system is not determined by the growing number of creative university degrees, nor by the desires of each individual, nor by what is fashionable.
Everyone has welcomed the festival of degrees obtained with little effort, as well as the excitement of receiving sky-high grades. Great. But the consequences of the party must be accepted.
Inflated grades, inflated egos
Grades should be honest feedback that allows students to self-correct and improve. When grades are used for purposes other than providing honest feedback to the individual, the result is that the self-correction process that allows for intellectual growth is eliminated, and students are given a misleading view of themselves and their abilities. Inflating grades and giving away passing marks has created the opposite of what is being sold under the guise of cheap pedagogy: a competition of narcissists obsessed with the inflated grades they receive, incapable of self-criticism, with no interest in the learning process, and without the psychological capacity to overcome setbacks or face adversity. The humility of effort has been replaced by an inflated sense of self-importance. The teacher's grade has thus become something like a "like" on social media, used to boost the ego.
The university has been transformed into a consumer product, however "public" it may be, in which obtaining a degree is taken for granted with enrollment. The student is no longer a student who must develop a skill, but a user who must be kept comfortable to avoid complaints. The way to keep students quiet is, of course, to lower the standards so that every last one of them passes comfortably. Once all this becomes the norm, it is the teacher who becomes the anomaly. Particularly the competent teacher. To the point where it is now impossible to ask university students to do a simple assignment without receiving a flood of papers copied from the internet, as a teacher recently complained in an article published in the press. This is the reality that everyone prefers to keep quiet about. I won't even mention "final degree projects."
I'll tell you how far this goes: I have students who believe that failing is illegal. They go crazy when they see a failing grade. They have been living in such a delusion for so many years that they go to a lawyer because their work copied from the internet has not been approved. This is no joke. It is the result of so many people's actions having no consequences. They believe that this is how the world works. Let it be clear that I am talking about people in their twenties and thirties in postgraduate programs, not 15-year-old high school students. Students wait for their degrees as if they were ordering a package from Amazon. If the teacher gets in the way, they are systematically coerced, threatened, defamed, etc. This is no coincidence; it has been actively legislated to be this way. The successive "educational reforms" need no further comment.
Academic, psychological, and ethical collapse
Many of us who work in this field see not only an intellectual collapse, but also a psychological one (35-year-olds crying in the middle of a tantrum like an 8-year-old) and an ethical one (the replacement of an ethics based on behavior with an ethics based on emotionally intense language). Many teachers feel that for some time now they have been teaching people whose mental age does not correspond to that of an adult, people who are very different from what they saw perhaps 10 or 15 years ago. In the classroom, we see a process of psychological infantilization in the youngest students, but also in people in their 30s and even 40s, so it is not simply a problem of one generation or another.
Perhaps the collapse of education and ethics is something that has interested someone. Expectations of what most people will achieve in their lives have been inflated, the usefulness of work has been distorted, and the productive system has been distorted. Contributing something tangible to the community through work has become a competition of egos. The constant sponsorship and exhibition of vulgar and tacky young people in the media has this intention: to remind us that what is important is to show off success, without intellect, ethics, or contributing anything productive to others. Add to this the massive consumption of technology and idle time, etc. All of this has produced epidemic levels of narcissism, with a massive loss of all sense of ethics, except for a utilitarian opportunism and signaling of moral desirability through audiovisual displays on social media.
The loss of humility is very visible, and many students, simply because they have a piece of cardboard, believe themselves to be things they are not. The problem with self-deception at the individual level is that it is incompatible with reality in a dose-dependent way. No one dares to tell the truth to people who have spent their entire lives in a bubble. I'll tell you: your teachers are deceiving you, your parents are deceiving you, the education system is deceiving you, the press is deceiving you, politicians are deceiving you, and you are deceiving yourself. A person's inflated perception of themselves is confronted with often poor achievement in real life, and this psychological conflict increases the need to defend the ego, producing a feedback loop. This whole spiral leads not only to failure at work, but also to the psychological problems experienced by millions of young people, which stem from this pedagogy aimed at emotional comfort, which attempts to cover up academic, psychological, ethical, and vital failures from childhood onwards. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt is a serious author with extensive published research and several books on the misconception of emotional comfort and cheap, frivolous, vulgar, and erroneous pedagogy as a substitute for a balanced psyche. I will not elaborate here.
I will conclude with a comment that is crystal clear to me after having taught thousands of students and corrected and tutored thousands of papers. The education system does not educate anyone. People who want to be educated educate themselves. Few words have been bandied about with such vulgarity as the word education. It is not a problem of classes, but of types of people, as Ortega rightly said. For most people, "education" is only a process of institutionalization, simple Foucauldian mechanics through the inertia of bodies whose consciousness has been nullified. The student has become a mere user who is interested in remaining institutionalized, and that is the only interest; the rest is discourse that serves as rationalization to justify the fiction that conceals the expansion of the mechanized apparatus. What this protects is the real interest behind it all: the machinery of institutionalization. People who deny what is happening with comments such as "you were young once too, you just don't remember," "that's always been said about young people," etc. You have a lot of work ahead of you to try to cover up what is happening.
"The teacher who insists on work is said to be authoritarian." Erich Fromm.
References:
Bob Uttl, Victoria Violo and Lacey Gibson. Meta-analysis: On average, undergraduate students' intelligence is merely average. ScienceOpen Preprints. 2024. DOI: 10.14293/PR2199.000694.v1
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