Bell Curve

Chapter 1Cognitive Class and Education,1900-1990In the course of the twentieth century, America opened the doors of its collegswider than any previous generation of Americans, or other society in history,could have imagined possible. This democratization of higher educationhas raised new barriers between peopk that may prove to be more divisive andintractable than the old ones.The growth in the proportion of people getting college degrees is the mostobo~ious result, with a fifteen-fold increase from 1900 to 1990. Even moreimportant, the students going to college were being selected ever more efficientlyfor their high IQ. The crucial decade was the 19.50~~ when the percentageof top stthnts who went to college rose by more than it had in thepreceding three decades. By the beginning of the 1990s' about 80 percent ofall students in the top quartile of ability continued to college after high school.Among the high school graduates in the top few percentiles of cognitive ability,the chances of going to college already exceeded 90 percent.Perhaps the most important of all the changes was the transformation ofAmerica's elite colleges. As more bright youngsters went off to college, the collegesthemseleles begun to sort themselves out. Startingin the 1950s, a hand.ful of institutions became magnets for the very brightest of each year's newclass. In these schools, the cognitive level of the students rose far above therest of the college population.Taken together, these trends have stratified America according to cognitiveability.Aperusal of Harvard's FreshmanRegister for 1952 shows a class lookingvery much as Harvard freshman classes had always looked.Under the photographs of the well-scrubbed, mostly East Coast, aver-