The Bell Curve Part 1 Chapter 1- The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite

In the nineteenth century the world was segregated into social classes defined in terms of money, power and status. By the twentieth century the ancient lines of separation based on hereditary rank, often accompanied by the sword or crown, were being replaced by educational credentials and, increasingly, talent. Social stratification based on educational achievement continued in the twentieth century and now, in the twenty-first century intelligence, with several notable exceptions (athleticism, artistic ability), is the sole engine that pulls the train. As Herrnstein and Murray point out, cognitive stratification produces different results for those who are smart and those who are not. In part 1 the authors deal with those who live in the upper echelons of the bell curve; in part 2 they delve into the consequences of not being born all that bright. As we learn daily from the press, isolation of the cognitive elite is already extreme and is growing more so with each passing day. Just consider New York city where the masses live in conditions akin to slums while the very wealthy few live in $50,000,000 pent houses 50 stories above the fray. Stratification by intellectual ability was not as significant in times past because the numbers of extremely bright people far outnumbered the number of specialized jobs requiring high intellect. Most bright people living in Cheop's Egypt, dynastic China and even Teddy Roosevelt's America were engaged in ordinary pursuits while mingling, working and living side by side with their less bright fellows. At that point in time social and economic stratification was extreme but cognitive stratification was, for practical purposes, nonexistent. To have a true cognitive elite there has to be a highly technological society such as the one we have in twenty-first century America. Chapter 1 Cognitive Class and Education, 1900-1990 As late as 1952 an exclusive school like Harvard was not to difficult to get into, two out of every three applicants were admitted and the admission rate rose to 90 percent if an applicant's father was a graduate of the school. At that time Harvard students were not all that brilliant, the mean SAT score of Harvard's freshman in 1952 was only 583. Historically a school primarily for the New England's elite, by 1962 Harvard was a far different place. In one decade the number of admissions to Harvard from New England dropped by a third and the average SAT score for incoming freshmen rose over 100 points to 678. Almost overnight Harvard had been transformed from a school for the northeastern socioeconomic elite into a school for the brightest of the bright, drawn from all over the country. The advance in educational opportunities for the unwashed masses, regardless of race, color, gender or creed is one of America's great success stories. But it also had a darker more sinister side because education and having the cognitive ability is a powerful divider and classifier. Education affects occupations and occupations divide. Most importantly cognitive ability and education affect income, possibly the biggest divider of all. In 1900 there was a significant social and economic gap between high school and college graduates, just as there is now, but this disparity was not accompanied by much of a cognitive gap because most of the brightest people in the country in the first decade of the twentieth century did not go to college; in fact, 50 percent of brightest people in the nation were house wives who had never gone to college. Things changed drastically as the twentieth century unfolded. Early in the century only 2 percent of the population achieved a college degree, by 1990 thirty percent of the 23-year old population has a bachelor's degree or better. At first glance one might conclude that education had become the great equalizer giving the poorest of the poor, and especially impoverished minorities, a chance to become educated and by so doing escape poverty. Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case because, as the century progressed it became increasingly difficult to get into one of the better colleges if you were not exceedingly bright. In the 1920s only 15 percent of the nations smartest high school students went on to college. This meant that 85 percent of the nations college students were no smarter than their non-college brethren. By 1960 eighty percent of the college slots were filled by high school students who were in the top IQ

(25 percent) of their high school class which meant that only 15 percent of the students in college could be considered to have average or below average intelligence. The IQ stratification in the elite Ivy League colleges today is even more pronounced. For example, at Harvard 55 percent of the incoming freshmen have a perfect 4.0 high school grade point. Possibly of more significance, students with SAT scores above 700 are 40 times more likely to be Yale and Harvard than a less well known state college wherever it might be. Having established the close association of intellect and higher education in the opening pages of The Bell Curve, Herrnstein and Murray devote the remaining pages of the book's first chapter to a discussion of basic statistics. They point out that a distribution is a bell shaped cure wherein, with respect to IQ, most people score in the middle range, the mean being set at 100, while the scores of a relative few can be found at the upper and lower ends or "tails" of the curve. If there were only one test of intelligence, such as the SAT, one could simply compare the SAT score of one person to that of another to determine the relative intelligence of the two. However, there are many different tests of intelligence and a simple assessment of the scores from the various tests tells you little about the relative intelligence of those that took two or more tests of intelligence. The authors were masters at making the difficult understandable by sighting examples to make their points. In this instance they point out it would be difficult for most people to compare the height of horse and the length of a snake if the height of the horse were measured in hands and the length of the snake were measured in rods. If inches were used to measure both there would be no problem. In statistics the standard deviation is akin to the inch, an all purpose measurement that can be used for any distribution. More importantly, in studies designed to measure the various components of intelligence, standard distributions can be used to compare the results of differing assessments of IQ. For example, how do you compare Joes ACT score of 24 with Tom's SAT-Verbal of 720? In the case of the horse and the snake a common denominator, the inch, was used to allow an assessment of the variables you were attempting to compare. Similarly, we can use standard deviation methodology to compare Joe's and Tom's tests of intelligence. If you were told that Joe's ACT score of 24 was .7 standard deviations above the mean (average) and Tom's SAT-Verbal of 720 was 2.7 standard deviations above the mean you would conclude that Joe was pretty smart but Tom was brilliant. Guess who is going to get into Harvard and who is most likely to be going to Humboldt State University? In tests of intelligence just how big is a standard deviation? If a student's score is one standard deviation above the average he is in the 84th percentile of those who took the test. This means that he scored higher than 83 percent of the people who were tested. Alternately, if a person's score was one standard deviation below the mean he would be in the 16th percentile having a score that was only higher than lowest 15 percent of those who were tested. In this case, 84 percent of those who took the test would have scored better than he did. Unless this person were a superb athlete, or perhaps black, what are the chances, do you think, of that candidate being accepted at UC Berkeley, USC or Stanford. The answer , of course, is slim to none. Returning to the subject at hand, two standard deviations from the mean mark the 98th and 2d percentiles above and below the average score while three standard deviations from the mean mark the top and bottom thousandth of a distribution. Yes, Tom was pretty damn smart! One way of looking at the significance of intellectual partitioning (segregation of the smart from the dull in the population as a whole) is to compare the overlap ( percentages of people with similar IQs) in high school graduates without a college degree with those who graduated from college. In 1930 college graduates had a mean IQ about .7 standard deviations above those who did not go to college; however, so few people were going to college at that time it didn't matter. As a result, there was a large overlap in the medium IQ of those who went to college and those who didn't. Joe the plumber was likely to be just as bright as the branch manager of the local bank. By the 1990s things had changed drastically primarily because so many bright people were going to college. This, of course, resulted in there being significantly fewer smart people in the general population. Yes, there still are a lot of really smart people who do not have a college degree but there are far fewer of them today than there were in the 1930s. The median overlap (those with similar IQs) between those with only a high school education and college graduates is now only 7 percent. The overlap in IQ between high school graduates who do not go on to college and Ph.D.s, M.D.s or LL.Bs is now only 1 percent. To make things worse, only 21 percent of those with only a college degree have similar IQs to those with Ph.D.s, M.D.s or LL.Bs. So, what difference does it make? The answer to that question will unfold over the course of this book, The Bell Curve. But for now realize that the social fabric of the nation is severely altered when the most talented children of the middle and working class in every generation are effectively extracted to live in other worlds, leaving only the less capable behind. It is difficult to exaggerate how different the graduates from the 12 or so elite colleges are from the population at large. The news with respect to the association between intellect, education and achieving success in the high-tech world we live in today is both heartening and disheartening. Heartening, because the nation is now providing a college education to most of those who could profit from it, regardless of ethnic or economic background. Frightening, because so many of those with limited educational potential are left behind being sealed off from the world of the cognitive elite. In chapter two Herrnstein and Murray address the effects of cognitive partitioning by occupation. Comment: I hope the reader is beginning to see how important intellect is to those who are born into today's high-tech world where education is everything. Unless a child is born with extreme artistic or athletic ability he will have a difficult time competing unless he or she is lucky enough to be born bright. As the pages of this book unfold you also begin to understand how important inherited intelligence is in our modern high-tech world.