The average IQ of today’s undergraduates is about 102, barely above the population average of 100, according to a meta-analysis of 106 student samples tested since 1939.
Bob Uttl of Mount Royal University in Calgary, Victoria Violo of the University of British Columbia Okanagan and Lacey Gibson of Western University posted “Meta-analysis: On average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average” on PsyArXiv on February 10, 2024. The peer-reviewed paper was published in ScienceOpen Research later in 2024.
The paper had a bumpy route. Frontiers in Psychology accepted it on January 4, 2024 and posted its abstract, then rejected it on February 6, 2024, citing overstated claims and problems with reporting, methods and analysis that were raised after the abstract went online. The authors dispute that decision.
Where the 115 to 130 figure came from
Textbooks and popular articles have long put the IQ of university students or graduates somewhere between 115 and 130. The authors trace that belief to obsolete data from the 1940s and 1950s, when university was for a few.
Two forces should have pulled the figure down. IQ scores rise across generations by about 0.3 points a year, the Flynn effect. And higher education has expanded enormously: the share of Americans with four or more years of college rose from 4.6% in 1940 to 37.9% in 2021.
Test norms already show the shift. In the samples used to norm successive Wechsler tests, the full-scale IQ of college graduates fell from 115.3 in the WAIS-R norms to 107.4 in the WAIS-IV norms collected in 2007 and 2008.
What 106 samples show
The team searched PsycInfo, ERIC and MEDLINE up to December 31, 2022, screened 1,666 potentially relevant reports and added studies from reference lists. They found 106 samples of mostly undergraduate students in the US and Canada tested with versions of the Wechsler adult intelligence scales, covering 9,902 students.
In the US samples, average student IQ declined with the year of testing, by about 0.17 points a year in raw scores and 0.19 after adjusting for the Flynn effect. Today’s undergraduates average about 102.
IQ also varied across universities and correlated moderately with selectivity, measured by the SAT scores of admitted students (r = .37). The authors caution that SAT data were available for only 80 of the 106 samples and reflect 2021 admissions.
What the authors take from it
They argue that universities need to adjust curricula and academic standards for students who are no longer extraordinary but average, and that employers can no longer assume a degree signals higher ability than its absence.
They also warn clinicians against estimating a person’s earlier IQ from their education level, calling such estimates inaccurate and obsolete.
The most recent decades are thinly covered: only three samples used the current WAIS-IV, and 425 students were tested between 2010 and 2019.
Study Details:
- Title: Meta-analysis: on average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average
- Authors: Bob Uttl, Victoria Violo, Lacey Gibson
- Journal: ScienceOpen Research
- Publication Date: 2024 (preprint posted on PsyArXiv on February 10, 2024)
- DOI: 10.14293/S2199-1006.1.SOR.2024.0002.v1