http://qz.com/334926/your-college-major-is-a-pretty-good-indication-of-how-smart-you-are/
I’ve seen this before, mostly making the point about education majors. They routinely have the lowest SAT and GRE scores of any major field of study, and this is usually true of within-school comparisons as well - at a school with education majors, the education majors usually have the lowest achievement test scores.
I like his interpretation down bottom, where this is about what our society values. I actually think it’s more about values than about aptitude. I’ll be the first to admit to anyone that psychology is a pretty easy major, at least at the undergraduate level. I think that most of the humanities (English, history, philosophy especially taught in a rigorous theoretical way) are harder, and it doesn’t surprise me that humanities majors have higher overall scores than social sciences on most tests.
But. The cream will always rise to the top; top talent always gets a choice of the better careers with the better salaries and better future advancement prospects. Moreover, we know that SAT scores are highly correlated with family income, and income begets more income: kids with high-income parents are more likely to want to enter high-income careers themselves. Right now, the values in the U.S. are in science fields: tech is booming and makes money, so the engineering, physical, computer and mathematical sciences that are applicable to technology fields are well-paying. The smart and affluent kids are more likely to gravitate towards those fields, IMO, because they know that’s where the wind is blowing.
On the other end, many elite colleges don’t even have a teacher prep program. Most of them are housed at public universities. High-achieving kids, on average, don’t want to be teachers, because teachers are not well-compensated for their work - not in actual income and not in prestige and respect.
He is also putting together average verbal and math - the results might be different if they were separated.
That does make a lot of sense. I too have seen that stat before and I always thought it was strange that someone who didn’t naturally thrive in an academic environment would want to make academics their career. (The way most articles use the stat makes it sound as if people who weren’t that great in school flock towards education, where it probably makes more sense to read it as, ‘people who do great in school flock away from education’). If education and engineering were equally well compensated and valued, the measurements might come closer together since education would be able to keep a large portion of the top-scoring students.
Is the proportion of education majors that go to graduate school and need to take the GRE higher than that of engineering majors, or math and science majors? I would think so, since in some states, you need a masters to teach. But I don’t know enough to say for sure.
"High-achieving kids, on average, don’t want to be teachers, because teachers are not well-compensated for their work - not in actual income and not in prestige and respect. "
I wish this was different. My D intends to teach. She’s a high-achieving student and people ask her all the time why she wants to be “just” a teacher. Her school is filled with teachers who were excellent students who could have become engineers, doctors, or academics, but they’re “just” teachers, luckily for us. Children deserve to have bright, engaging people teaching them-they are the ones who will make the future. Teachers deserve the pay and respect that they do not get and that’s a shame. D is determined, though, to continue with her plan-lucky for some future elementary schoolers!
And people still wonder why American schools are not doing well.
I do not see a necessary correlation with salary and the data. I do see that the STEM grads must have comparatively better verbal skills than other majors have math skills (or the combined would average out to the same). I suspect more STEM people could do other fields but choose the more demanding fields.
A long time ago there were teachers’ colleges in WI which then morphed into state U’s. A long time ago teachers did not all have the college degree to teach the below HS grades. I think it is great that the teachers get more than just job skills in their education, just as nonprofessional majors require. Teaching is a profession but needs different skills than some other fields considered more difficult. Elementary-secondary teachers need abilities to handle children and to teach them academic skills. This is different than the skills needed in many other college degrees.
Relating to children and 90% of students may be easier for those closer in “intelligence” than for those who do not understand what it is like to be more average. Some of the most intelligent people do not have the patience to deal with people who require the usual amount of repetition et al to learn.
There are reasons society puts its values on different fields. Think supply and demand. A lot more people can potentially do some jobs than others- very easy to find workers at a given pay scale.
None of this explains why some in the business world earn megabucks- those at the very top earn many times more than they actually produce! But- what the market will bear determines their “worth”.
So we like average teachers, then get upset when the kids turn out to be … average?
@warbrain - Probably, but the stats hold true for undergraduate measures too (SAT scores, ASVAB scores, etc.)
@sseamom - I agree! I think we need to reform K-12 public education in a lot of ways, but one of the ways might be to increase teacher pay and autonomy so as to attract more high-achieving college graduates who would otherwise go to other careers. And maybe allow them to teach without a master’s degree for at least 5-10 years, and paying for that master’s when they return. Because if trying to repay undergraduate debt on a $35-45K salary isn’t bad enough, now they’re expected to pay out of pocket for a graduate degree too and repay that debt with very little bump in salary.
@wis7 - Salary is only one component of the choice, I believe. It’s not just about salary - I also mentioned career development and advamcement as well as prestige and recognition.
Our value placed on certain fields sometimes has to do with supply and demand and sometimes has nothing to do with supply and demand. Professors, for example, enjoy prestige and relatively high pay, but there’s a big oversupply of PhDs in the majority of fields (yes, in STEM too). Lawyers also enjoy prestige despite the huge glut. MBAs are another one - people think an MBA garners instant cash, but the average starting salary for an MBA from a low-ranked school might not be more more than a BA-level salary.
Nature had an article about that: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110420/full/472276a.html
Of course, it is not to hard to see the numbers here: each existing faculty member at a research university supervises dozens of graduate students to PhDs over his/her career, meaning that s/he “produces” far more PhDs than needed to replace him/her when s/he retires. This means that the “excess” PhDs need to find other jobs in their fields. Some may be academic type jobs in other schools (non-PhD-granting universities, LACs, community colleges, high schools, sometimes as adjuncts). Some may be in industry for those few fields where PhDs are readily hired into industry (engineering and CS are typical examples). Others may have to work in other fields – sometimes “good” jobs (like math and physics PhDs moving into computer and finance jobs) but sometimes not.
That seems consistent with the view that JD and MBA prestige and job prospects are highly school-prestige related.
I’ll add that there are 3.7 million teachers in the US. We can’t demand that teachers all be smart, we need too many of them. I’ll also add that there’s perhaps very marginal benefit from having a 90th percentile in intelligence nationally teacher than a 30th or 40th percentile intelligence nationally teacher teaching a class of 2nd graders, and it’s perhaps not worth increasing pay to the levels it would need to be to attract the best and brightest to teaching because it just doesn’t make that much difference.
Doesn’t matter what you do, your kids will still be average, on average.
Check the definition of average.
As an early childhood/special education major, I did have to agree that the requirements to get into my school’s education program are mediocre AT BEST. All that was needed was a 2.5 GPA and to pass an entrance exam. In order to be exempted from that exam, all one needed was a combined score of either 1000-SAT or 43- ACT. In my cohort of 30, maybe 1 or 2 other people besides myself had that.
“The cream will always rise to the top; top talent always gets a choice of the better careers with the better salaries and better future advancement prospects”
-here is my D’s comment in regard to notion of talent: “I am not talented, I am very hard working” I tend to agree 100% with the second. I do not know about her talent and in fact anybody else’s talents. However, witnessing her working very very hard, I can tell that hard working ethic will reach the skies, guarantee. We still need to see about D’s ultimate goal, but as of now this “not talented” by her own admission person has never had a single B in kindergarten thru graduation from college and graduating from Med. School in about 3 months. She did not see a single person around her who was able to achieve all of these without extremely hard work, genius or not we do not know, we cannot assess this. By the ultimate goal I ment the residency placement that we do not know yet.
I have been saying this on CC for a long time now and it was generally not well received. Getting into an elite does not impress me anywhere as much as what the major is. The author of the piece could be more specific, imo. Among social sciences, I find the smartest to be economics majors. Among economics majors, the smartest are people in econometrics. In the humanities, it has to be analytical philosophy and the philosophy of science in the philosophy department. In the sciences I would give the nod to physics over mathematics, and those majoring in theoretical physics are the sharpest of them all.
Some years ago Charles Murray expressed a similar sentiment:
If “intellectually gifted” is defined to mean people who can become theoretical physicists, then we’re talking about no more than a few people per thousand and perhaps many fewer. They are cognitive curiosities, too rare to have that much impact on the functioning of society from day to day.
The correct answer is “many fewer”. The number I heard is one in 100 thousand that is capable of doing good work in the field. Humbling, isn’t it?
Should be the opposite of humbling…
However, the number of physics PhDs is still larger than the number of physics jobs. Fortunately for the “excess” physics PhDs, some other types of employers are willing to hire them to decent paying jobs (computing, finance, some types of engineering).
If we assume that other countries have broadly similar needs for K-12 teachers as percentages of their populations, and note that the general academic achievement levels of students going into K-12 teaching may be significantly higher or lower than in the US, this particular numbers game does not appear to be the reason.
Rather, it is more like the attractiveness of the job (in pay, working conditions, and social standing) relative to other jobs may be what attracts or repels the better students from going that direction. The inertia of what exists currently in K-12 education may also affect whether better students are attracted to that as a career (and, with something this big, changing it for the better can be a difficult (including politically) job that takes years of committed effort by many).