How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
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How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
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Re: How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
#2Actual Title: "Education Isn’t What It Used To Be"
That's less clicky, but more descriptive of the article.
Re: How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
#3It's obviously anecdotical but I know both many smart persons without higher level education and many 'not-so-bright' persons with university degrees. However, all those with degrees have parents with degrees and those without come from lower class, for the lack of better term, families.
If your parents have never set foot in an university and worked manual labor all their live, you are less likely to even consider higher education. While doctors may want their children to pursue a good career, even if those children hold no interest in that education.
Re: How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
#4Interesting, I didn't know about this effect. However the analysis seems to implicitly assume that a person's IQ remains constant as they move up the educational ladder. This does not seem right, assuming that education system works as it should (ie, exposing students to harder and harder issues over time), and also because people should still naturally develop intellectually after high school.
Re: How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
#5Is IQ everything that counts?
Does the family's social class count or not? Does the socioeconomic situation of the state, country, neighborhood count or not? Does fashions, wars, crises, recessions, mass layoffs, drugs permitted by states, industrial changes, friends, political changes, city councils, police and judges, corruption, monetary funds, teachers, management of study centers, laws, banks and what not... count?
Living in Spain, more than 20 years working with Linux (self-learned from magazines, books, and modem-internet in the 90's), could not get a degree (by family situation, did start to work in fields unrelated to technology at 16's)... have found many persons with a degree and very low IQ in my career.
Still, interesting article. Here, even basic education is 100% worse than it was 20, 30, 40, 50, etc years ago.
Re: How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
#6It's obviously anecdotical but I know both many smart persons without higher level education and many 'not-so-bright' persons with university degrees. However, all those with degrees have parents with degrees and those without come from lower class, for the lack of better term, families. If your parents have never set foot in an university and worked manual labor all their live, you are less likely to even consider h…
> If your parents have never set foot in an university and worked manual labor all their live, you are less likely to even consider higher education.
That’s not what I have perceived in developing countries. Usually those kind of parents work very hard precisely to allow their children to go to university and have the life they didn’t have. They don’t want their children to work like their parents.
Re: How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
#7Not very, points at me.
Re: How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
#8These results are to be expected, if IQ is normally distributed, but we push more people into obtaining university degrees.
The value of a university degree has severely deteriorated since every white collar job essentially requires having one and it will continue getting worse.
I would assume that it's worse in the US than in Europe, because in EU it seems that education is less commercialized and you can get a degree for free if you are above average.
Re: How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
#9Is IQ everything that counts? Does the family's social class count or not? Does the socioeconomic situation of the state, country, neighborhood count or not? Does fashions, wars, crises, recessions, mass layoffs, drugs permitted by states, industrial changes, friends, political changes, city councils, police and judges, corruption, monetary funds, teachers, management of study centers, laws, banks and what not... cou…
You come out guns blazing about how IQ isn't the only thing, but then get twisted about "working with Linux" somehow being any way related to degrees and then claim to have found many degree havers to be very low IQ.
Kind a think you should take stock again and reconsider what you think IQ is and what it means. Hint: it has nothing to do with using Linux.
Re: How smart do you have to be to get a degree?
#10The article seems to consider a "degree" to be fungible across providers. At least in the UK, there's a definite hierarchy of universities and the value of their courses, even if a pretence of equivalence is sometimes maintained.