I found a Slate article on China’s university entrance exam. This exam probably does a really good job at weeding out those students simply not smart enough for university, since the Chinese don’t propound the political correct nonsense we have here in the States.
The average university graduate’s IQ in the States is 105, while Charles Murray argues that a student needs roughly a 115 IQ to succeed.
I found a short blog post on the Charles Murray’s idea.
[Update: 20 January 2009] Here is a quote from the Murray piece that discusses the 110-115 IQ floor. The basic point is that in a real, traditional, liberal (not political) education, you come across material, texts, concepts, disciplines, that cannot be fully comprehended without a necessary level of intelligence:
. . . In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one’s inability to recognize one’s own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.
There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college–enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.
Personally, what Murray says is certainly true for teaching introductory philosophy courses.
“Charles Murray argues that a student needs roughly a 115 IQ to succeed”
He doesn’t give any reasons why 115 is the cutoff.
I’ve now added an update that explains the cutoff.