I think that Charles Murray has hold of the wrong end of the stick in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The Roots of STEM Excellence”. Much of the op-ed is devoted to identifying young people capable of learning science, technology, and mathematics early by standardized testing and admitting them to top tier institutions of higher learning based on that. Here’s a snippet:
In the 1970s, Johns Hopkins psychologist Julian Stanley established the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth by administering the SAT to 12- and 13-year-olds. Some 2,000 of the participants have been followed throughout their careers.
Measures of productivity varied substantially within the top percentile, equivalent to an IQ of 135 or higher. Those in the top quartile of the top 1%, equivalent to IQs of 142 and higher, were more than twice as likely to earn a doctorate or be awarded a patent as those in the bottom quartile and more than four times as likely to publish an article on a STEM topic in a refereed journal. There was no plateau. Greater measured cognitive ability was correlated with greater adult accomplishment throughout the range.
These results suggest that we should be thinking in terms of at least the top half of the top percentile of ability when defining the set of people who have the potential to make major contributions in a STEM field. The U.S. has around 130 million people of prime working age: 25 to 54. For any given talent, therefore, about 650,000 are in the top half of the top percentile of ability. That’s a lot of people.
The task is to identify those with STEM talent when they are young. The good news is that standardized tests expressly designed to measure cognitive ability are an efficient way to do so. They are accurate, inexpensive, resistant to coaching and demonstrably unbiased against minorities, women or the poor. Those conclusions about the best cognitive tests are among the most exhaustively examined and replicated findings in all social science.
The bad news is that admissions offices of elite universities ignore this evidence.
I’ll present my reactions in the form of a number of bullet points followed by an anecdote or two.
- IQ testing does measure something real
- There is a correlation between the cognitive ability represented by IQ and the ability to learn science and mathematics
- There used to be a good correlation between SAT scores and IQ. That correlation no longer appears quite as strong.
- There are abilities other than IQ which are more closely correlated with success (however measured) in life than IQ
- There is a weak correlation between income and IQ
- Compensation, like most other prices, is determined based on supply and demand
- The rate at which jobs for physicists is increasing is less than the rate at which the population is, even the population of people with the cognitive abilities to be good physicists, and that has been true for 50 years
- Lawyers and physicians tend to have IQs above normal but by less than three standard deviations
- There aren’t a lot of jobs in mathematics and the sciences that pay enough to lead a middle class lifestyle
The smartest guy I know (he has an IQ four standard deviations above normal) is a brilliant mathematician. He has a doctorate in mathematics and an IQ four standard deviations above normal. After trying for years he finally gave up getting a tenure track position teaching in a university and became a computer programmer. One of the smartest guys I know is a successful creative writer. Before that he held minimum wage jobs. I don’t think these anecdotes are out of the ordinary. Extremely smart people tend not to be lawyers, physicians, or in finance. They find those positions too boring or require interpersonal skills other than those they have.
There are several things we could do to encourage “excellence in STEM” but we aren’t doing them. One of the most important is ensuring that the people capable of excelling at STEM earn enough to make it worth their while.
Faculty at large research universities generally are compensated at levels that put them in the top 10% of the income distribution. Even senior faculty at liberal arts college earn well above median income, and their benefits and retirement plans are substantially better than average.
Of the problem is we produce far more Ph. D.’s in every discipline than we can employ. That a Ph. D. holder in mathematics needed four years to get a faculty position is absurd, and working as a computer faculty is likely below his skill level.
China doesn’t have those problems. They make a major effort to identify talent in the STEM areas, and they give them very high quality educations and jobs worthy of their abilities. That gives China the leading role in almost all science and engineering disciplines. They now lead the world in new patents and refereed technology papers. All of that derives from their enormous lead in manufacturing: one third of the world’s total, all of it highly automated and AI/5G optimized.
Even Russia surpasses us in most (all?) STEM areas.
The American economic and social models are failures. Starting a nuclear war won’t cure that.
I think most of your points here are good. Also, Murray is behind the times as the elite universities, of those who dropped SAT scores, are going back to them. We should especially be aware that high test scores/IQ doesnt necessarily lead to success which should be the goal rather than just high scores. Management theory spends a lot of time on managing specialists, ie the really bright folks who are laser focused on their own particular area. They may be bright but many dont have the communications skills, writing skills or just the interest in working with other people.
As an aside son started as a physics major then added math when he got invited to a special program. All 4 years the physics major had to attend a regular forum on finding a job with a physics degree. They were very aware that academic positions were rare and not many people are looking to hire people with a physics degree to do physics.
Steve
I called that out in the body of the post. IMO there is a necessary tension here and it will get worse. In order to master the material innate capacity is needed but that innate capacity does not translate into success for the reasons you noted. Intellectual quotient (IQ) and socio-emotional quotient (EQ) are different factors and finding them in the same individual at high levels is actually quite rare.
I’m not sure whether the right word for my reaction to, say, Bill Clinton’s intelligence was that I found it frustrating or ironic. Probably both. The available evidence suggests that his IQ was pretty typical for a member of the professional class (probably between 100 and 115) but his EQ was off the charts.
I would expect Clinton to be a bit higher in the IQ range. Once you exclude the legacy admissions, affirmative action people, athletes, etc you need a higher IQ to get into and succeed at the more elite schools. By my reading that generally puts you into the 120-129 range, which seems to correlate with estimates i have seen for people chosen for Rhodes scholarships. Also, I am not entirely sure how memory correlates with IQ but think it may at least partially and by anecdote he had a very good memory.
At any rate, I think there are threshold effects with IQ which mean you need a certain minimum IQ to succeed at a given career but a couple of points either way in IQ, or test scores since we choose SATs as a proxy so often, is much less important than other factors.
Steve
Steve
More musings:
“Extremely smart people tend not to be lawyers, physicians, or in finance.”
I think that’s a light comment, and flat damned wrong. The single smartest person I have ever known is a former partner who cut his chops at Booz Allen, then CS First Boston, and then PE at my firm. (And in my line of work, traveling in NY circles, I have met an awful lot of smart people) Unfortunately, he was mostly brains, and low EQ, however you define that. Also, ther is something I’ll address later. I think there is a tendency to overweight the creatives. That’s creativity, not intellect. Keith Richards and Eddie Van Halen are two of the most creative guitarists ever. I don’t think we need their opinions on the Iran/Israel conflict.
I think Bill Clinton at 119 or so is low. He was smart. Crooked, morally corrupt? Yes. But smart. And high EQ? Absolutely.
Just personal experience, but I have found memory, especially instant recall, and logical capabilities to be different traits. Just one man’s opinion.
I think experience, judgment and intuition are vastly underrated.
Vastly. Extraordinary intellects, in my experience, tend to wait too long to see all facts or evidence come in. It sounds so intellectually pure; on the side of the angels. It makes them useless in quite a few professions. Save it for the astrophysicists. The ability to synthesize your experience, judgment and intuition into an ill-defined and amorphous ability to render a judgment in the face of imperfect and incomplete information is real world.
A last thought.
Don’t you have to go to one of the national labs, the CIA or Wall Street to make any money as a physicist?
Drew, a Ph. D. physicist will earn upper middle income at any college or university. On the other hand, such jobs are relatively scarce. B. S. and M. S. degrees are not very valuable, and people with those degree levels are out of science.
All STEM degrees have some connection to manufacturing, so the surest way to increase STEM degree holders is to increase manufacturing. Russia and China have numerous. people with science and engineering, because they have large manufacturing bases. On a per caput basis, Russia’s manufacturing sector is 3/4 larger than ours. (70% of our sector on 40% of our population.
Drew brings up a good point about creativity or at least with my guys I often refer to at as vision. Those people are pretty rare and valuable in my estimation. That ability to look outside your own box/field, predict where you should be in the future, how to make things better now and know how much of that is doable with the people you have or who you need to hire. I think this partially, maybe mostly, related to intelligence but not entirely. Risk taking is in there somewhere too but that isn’t really tied to intelligence AFAICT, just stop into any ER at 3 AM.
Steve
Bob –
I have both a BS and MS in engineering. I didn’t think that much of my MS. What I really did was augment my understanding of fracture mechanics/failure analysis, joining technologies…………..and get a 4.0 to get me into University of Chicago. I’ve often thought if I wanted to work more, I’d try to get into the aircraft failure analysis business. I watch the shows on TV and find the people doing the analysis to be, well, uh, tepid.
I think you are 100% correct on manufacturing. If we don’t do it, we lose the national skillset.
steve
I would only say, there is a difference between having the balls to make a decision, and the inputs into that decision. As I have commented before, many people are cocksure experts when they are advisors; many fewer when they have the responsibility – hero or goat – for the decision. I take your ER 3AM point.
My wife has a PhD in nuclear engineering, and we are close friends with many other science types. One of them worked in the admissions department at a service academy.
The biggest issue is that being competitive in STEM programs requires a long lead time and preparation, starting in middle school. Kids need to start algebra in middle school so that they can, at the very least, get pre-calc done before graduating high school. To get into a competitive STEM program, kids must have completed Calc 1 and 2 in high school and have good grades. Getting kids algebra-ready by middle school requires a school district where that is even possible (many don’t offer algebra in middles school).
So it’s not only about IQ (which I think measuring accurately is sketchy at best) but also about planning (usually by the parents), and soft skills like executive function, initiative, drive, etc. A lot of that can also come from parental intervention.
It’s no surprise that almost half the new class at MIT (and many other high-tier STEM schools) are Asians – it’s not because they are smarter; it’s because their families have ensured all those gates were met starting from when they were very young. Poor kids with uneducated parents in a school district that doesn’t offer the right classes at the right times and struggles to get kids to meet minimum standards don’t have a chance no matter what their IQ is. We laud the exceptions to become elites in their professions despite those disadvantages, but those exceptions are extremely rare.
In my family’s case, we tracked our oldest daughter to meet those gates, but she’s decided that she’s interested in international relations and languages instead. We were unsuccessful in getting our oldest son through those gates because he had ADHD and was academically wrecked by a year of COVID lockdowns. By the time we got him into an appropriate alternative school he could do well in, he was already way behind for any jump to STEM after graduation. He wants to be an engineer, so now he’s catching up on all the math and physics at the local state college and hopes to transfer to the state university (CU) for mechanical engineering. That probably means 5-6 years of college. Meanwhile, our best friend’s kid with a tiger mom is graduating in 3 1/2 years from a top 20 Chemical Engineering program, thanks largely to having completed most of his first year program requirements in High School.
Murray’s obsession with IQ is only one factor – and it’s a lot easier to somewhat accurately measure the IQ of adults than it is for children who need to start tracking for STEM in elementary school.
Along with my more advanced classmates I took two years of college mathematics in high school. My high school math teacher used to talk about “mathematical maturity”. Some people develop it early; some never do.
I was fortunate in that I had been part of a special program and began algebra in elementary school.
We’re talking more than 60 years ago. It’s that much more difficult now.
I would add that not all college and high school calculus is the same. Son did calculus at our local engineering school but as a high school student he was only allowed to take a general calculus course. At the local private high school, and many of the other privates along with the better school systems like in New Jersey or MA kids can take a higher level of calculus. It made his first semester of calculus at college rough but he caught up and was invited to join their math program. In short, going to the right high school is a big advantage.
Drew- Good point. I also think time is a big factor. If you wait long enough choices can become obvious, but too late. Sometimes you need to make decisions with imperfect information and then you need the ability to make your decisions work.
Steve