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</p>
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As he and his wife well know, there is no way in the world that they would have even gotten in the front door to get white collar jobs, much less the sort of positions they have held during their lives, without their education and their degrees.
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</p>
<p>They needed Ivy League degrees to get into the front door for white collar jobs?</p>
<p>While Ivy degrees were not needed a nice percentage of U.S. presidents have them.</p>
<p>25 of the 44 (~57%) U.S. presidents hold JDs</p>
<p>T-14 JDs</p>
<p>Harvard law - Obama & Rutherford Hayes
Yale: Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton
Richard Nixon - Duke
Franklin Roosevelt -Columbia
Obama</a> is the Second US President with a Harvard Law Degree | ABA Journal - Law News Now</p>
<p>Bush- HBS</p>
<p>Those who withdrew from Professional schools:</p>
<p>Wilson- UVA law (but has a doctorate from JHU)
Teddy Rosevelt- Columbia law
Johnson- Georgetown Law
Harrison - Penn (med)
Kennedy- Stanford</p>
<p>With the exception of Cleveland and Truman, every president since 1869 holds an undergraduate degree. 11 U.S. Presidents have received received their undergrad at either HYPS. When you count in the 7 grads of Military academy, Amherst, Williams, Mich. Georgetown, ~40% of the U.S. presidents have received their undergrad degrees from an "elite" school.</p>
<p>"While Ivy degrees were not needed a nice percentage of U.S. presidents have them."</p>
<p>Is POTUS a white collar job?</p>
<p>calmom said that a higher education is the only way out for minorities. As a minority kid that made it out without a college degree, I find that insulting and condescending.</p>
<p>What other color collar would POTUS fall under?</p>
<p>College is not the only way out but historically its been a very successful way out of poverty, for whites and minorities. </p>
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A large majority of young people do not have the intellectual ability to do genuine college-level work...
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</p>
<p>Oh, please. There are so many things wrong with the sentence that I don't know where to start. The authors takes a perfectly good discussion and ruins it with this pseudo-intellectual b.s.</p>
<p>I'll go out on a limb and say that the Obama's Ivy League degrees made it far easier for them to get where the wanted to go in life. I suspect that's why they chose the schools in the first place.</p>
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</p>
<p>That's a very interesting question, and this thread nicely illustrates the shock evoked even by suggesting that some people can be successful, happy, good citizens without attending college. The author of the opinion article cited in the the opening post points out that however we look at the issue, the majority of the current generation of young people will not end up completing a four-year college degree program. Don't they count? Shouldn't they enjoy opportunity to find gainful employment just as college graduates do?</p>
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[quote]
Does he have any evidence to support this idea? Any at all?</p>
<p>Odious. Just odious. I agree that college should be a choice, not an automatic "well, I ought to go," but it doesn't have to do with any belief in the immutability and innateness of intelligence.</p>
<p>One wouldn't have thought Charles Murray could get more odious with time, but apparently he hasn't become less odious.
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People with less than a ~110-115 IQ should not go to college. We are educating people who most likely will not use their knowledge ever...and it's really expensive. Much better to push people into vocational programs and get them learning actual skills which will let them provide for themselves.</p>
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The offspring of wealthy white people may be able to slide by in life on the strength of their charm or whatever, but a higher education has always the only ticket out of a life of poverty or physical labor for minorities.
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That is so hilariously wrong.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Oh, please. There are so many things wrong with the sentence that I don't know where to start. The authors takes a perfectly good discussion and ruins it with this pseudo-intellectual b.s.</p>
<p>I'll go out on a limb and say that the Obama's Ivy League degrees made it far easier for them to get where the wanted to go in life. I suspect that's why they chose the schools in the first place.
[/quote]
Obama likely has a 140+ IQ. I don't see how his situation relates, at all, to people who have a ~105 IQ.</p>
<p>Obama's IQ appeared as 132 during the election. I don't know if this number is accurate or not.</p>
<p>@Jakor -- sure, have the high schools hold students to a higher standard. Improve high schools. That would be great. I don't have control over that part of the process.</p>
<p>If high schools improved that would negate the argument in a different way.</p>
<p>IQ scores are indicitive of nothing when it comes to the ability to learn. They are just a cheap and lazy short cut to actual student evaluation. Well, except when they've been used to discriminate entire groups of people. Then I supposed they were perversely "useful."</p>
<p>That article was not about prestige degrees -- it was about any 4 year degree and was advocating, essentially, that more high school students should be discouraged from pursuing a bachelors of any kind. In any case, that's what I was responding to.</p>
<p>I think the difference between the impact of a 4 year degree on the prospects of minorities vs. whites was evident in the campaign by the way so many tried to question or belittle Obama's Columbia/Harvard credentials, suggesting that we didn't know "enough" about Obama without his transcripts -- while at the the same time overlooking McCain's bottom-of-class standing and Sarah Palin's erratic path to a 4 year degree.</p>
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IQ scores are indicitive of nothing when it comes to the ability to learn.
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My entire educational experience within my engineering program showed me this is not true. Advanced math requires advanced intelligence. If you don't have it you will not pass. It's as simple as that.</p>
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[quote]
They are just a cheap and lazy short cut to actual student evaluation. Well, except when they've been used to discriminate entire groups of people. Then I supposed they were perversely "useful."
[/quote]
This just in: Jews have an average IQ of 115. Oh yeah, they are also massively overrepresented in virtually every sort of high IQ activity. Law, Medicine, Physics, Math, need I go on?</p>
<p>You can go on all you like. IQ scores do not measure the ability to learn. </p>
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[quote]
My entire educational experience within my engineering program showed me this is not true. Advanced math requires advanced intelligence. If you don't have it you will not pass. It's as simple as that.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>What does that have to do with the validity of IQ tests? What do you mean by "advanced intelligence?"</p>
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[quote]
What does that have to do with the validity of IQ tests?
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Ummm, because people that score high on IQ tests do better in these endeavors? Are you serious? I'm not even sure what is up for debate.</p>
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[quote]
What do you mean by "advanced intelligence?"
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A high general intelligence ability. In the top ~5% of the population.</p>
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</p>
<p>Did your engineering program require any courses in psychology or biology? You really should defer to molliebatmit when talking about malleability of human intelligence, which appears to be a topic you haven't read much about. </p>
<p>All IQ test items are samples of learned behavior. </p>
<pre><code>Professor Alan S. Kaufman, a designer of one edition of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children and of the Kaufman Assessment Battery for Children, writes frequently about the issue of “intelligent testing,” understanding what IQ tests are and how to interpret them correctly. As he lists issues to keep in mind when interpreting IQ test scores, he says that the scores are based on “what the individual has learned,” and are “samples of behavior and are not exhaustive” (Kaufman 1994, pp. 6-7). IQ test scores reflect the learning opportunities available to the test-taker and the cultural context in which the test-taker grew up. The many aspects of human behavior that are not sampled by an IQ test may not be well predicted by the test score, which therefore should not be taken as a global estimate of the test-taker’s intellectual functioning (Kaufman 1994, p. 7).
</code></pre>
<p>IQ scores change for individuals over the course of life. </p>
<pre><code>IQ scores are sufficiently stable from one time of taking an IQ test to the next that most psychologists conclude that what is estimated by an IQ test can be regarded as a “trait” rather than a “state” of an individual test-taker. And yet IQ scores, especially in childhood, do vary over the course of a test-taker’s life, sometimes varying radically. Deviation IQ scoring was originally developed to make for more stability of scores over the course of childhood. Nonetheless, deviation IQs for children can also change considerably over the course of childhood (Pinneau 1961; Truch 1993, page 78; Howe 1998; Deary 2000, table 1.3). “Correlation studies of test scores provide actuarial data, applicable to group predictions. . . . Studies of individuals, on the other hand, may reveal large upward or downward shifts in test scores.” (Anastasi & Urbina 1997 p. 326).
</code></pre>
<p>For example, young people in the famous Lewis Terman longitudinal Genetic Studies of Genius (initial n=1,444 with n=643 in main study group) when tested at high school age (n=503) were found to have dropped 9 IQ points on average in Stanford-Binet IQ. More than two dozen children dropped by 15 IQ points and six by 25 points or more. Parents of those children reported no changes in their children or even that their children were getting brighter (Shurkin 1992, pp. 89-90). Terman observed a similar drop in IQ scores in his study group upon adult IQ testing (Shurkin 1992, pp. 147-150). Samuel R. Pinneau conducted a thorough review of the Berkeley Growth Study (1928-1946; initial n=61, n after eighteen years =40). Alice Moriarty was a Ph.D. researcher at the Menninger Foundation and describes in her book (1966) a number of case studies of longitudinal observations of children's IQ. She observed several subjects whose childhood IQ varied markedly over the course of childhood, and develops hypotheses about why those IQ changes occurred. Anastasi and Urbina (1997, p. 328) point out that childhood IQ scores are poorest at predicting subsequent IQ scores when taken at preschool age. Change in scores over the course of childhood shows that there are powerful environmental effects on IQ (Anastasi & Urbina 1997, p. 327) or perhaps that IQ scores in childhood are not reliable estimates of a child’s scholastic ability. </p>
<p>Anastasi, Anne & Urbina, Susana (1997). Psychological Testing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. </p>
<p>Deary, Ian J. (2000) Looking Down on Human Intelligence: From Psychometrics to the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. </p>
<p>Howe, Michael J. A. (1998). Can IQ Change?. The Psychologist, February 1998 pages 69-72. </p>
<p>Kaufman, Alan S. (1994). Intelligent Testing with the WISC-III. New York: Wiley. </p>
<p>Moriarty, Alice E. (1966). Constancy and IQ Change: A Clinical View of Relationships between Tested IQ and Personality. Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas. </p>
<p>Pinneau, Samuel R. (1961). Changes in Intelligence Quotient Infancy to Maturity: New Insights from the Berkeley Growth Study with Implications for the Stanford-Binet Scales and Applications to Professional Practice. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. </p>
<p>Shurkin, Joel N. (1992). Terman's Kids: The Groundbreaking Study of How the Gifted Grow Up. Boston: Little, Brown. </p>
<p>Truch, Steve (1993). The WISC-III(R) Companion: A Guide to Interpretation and Educational Intervention. Austin, TX: Pro-Ed.</p>
<p>Really? So there is only one kind of intelligence and the IQ test is an acurate measure of it? I'd love to see your evidence on that. I can fish out my research paper on IQ testing to provide you with some resources that prove otherwise but in the meantime I'd like to see what it is that has so persuaded you that you feel ther is no room for debate.</p>
<p>I'm especially curious to know IQ score one should haveto have to be an engineer. Or an author, mechanic, pilot, teacher or any profession. And if these scores are so acurate in predicting ability to learn, why not just test the little darlings in third grade and sort them out then?</p>
<p>Jeez... I am reminded of Mayuri's line in Bleach (I can put an anime or video game reference into any serious arguement) where he says how people keep making such a big deal over such trifling details. </p>
<p>Really, when someone says that people with an below IQ 110-115 will probably struggle with a serious liberal education, they really mean that people with a learning ability that an IQ of below 110-115 should indicate (a learning ability in the bottom 60-65% of the population), not litereally people who actually scored 110-115 on an actual IQ test. I thought this was understood...</p>
<p>
[quote]
A high general intelligence ability. In the top ~5% of the population.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>So your arguement is that only those who score in the top 5% on the IQ test can hope to successfully complete an engineering program?</p>
<p>And if these souls are in possession of such awesome intelligence, why can't some of them write a coherent sentence or put an engine together even with training?</p>
<p>I wanted to add that as an aspiring Special Education teacher, it would make my future career much easier if IQ tests did what they claim to do. But they simply do not work in the way they claim to work which is why they are falling out of favor.</p>