Bell Curve

38 The Emergence of a Cognitive Elite Cognitive Class and Education, 1900-1990 39lege, it became radically more efficient at sorting the brightest of thebright into a handful of elite colleges.The Case of Ivy League and the State of Pennsybania: The 1920sVersus the 1960sPrior to World War 11, America had a stratum of elite colleges just as ithas now, with the Ivy League being the best known. Then as now, theseschools attracted the most celebrated faculty, had the best libraries, andsent their graduates on to the best graduate schools and to prestigiousjobs. Of these elite schools, Harvard was among the most famous andthe most selective. But what was true of Harvard then was true of theother elite schools. They all had a thin layer of the very brightest amongtheir students but also many students who were merely bright and a fairnumber of students who were mediocre. They tapped only a fragmentof the cognitive talent in the country. The valedictorian in Kalamazooand the Kansas farm girl with an IQ of 140 might not even be going tocollege at all. If they did, they probably went to the nearest state universityor to a private college affiliated with their church.One of the rare windows on this period is provided by two littleknownsources of test score data. The first involves the earliest SATs,which were first administered in 1926. As part of that effort, a standardizedintelligence test was also completed by 1,080 of the SAT suhjects.In its first annual report, a Commission appointed by the CollegeEntrance Examination Board provided a table for converting the SATof that era to IQ s~ores."~' Combining that information with reports ofthe mean SAT scores for entrants to schools using the SAT, we are ableto approximate the mean lQs of the entering students to the Ivy Leagueand the Seven Sisters, the most prestigious schools in the country atthat time.["'Judging from this information, the entering classes of these schoolsin 1926 had a mean IQ of about 117, which places the average studentat the most selective schools in the country at about the 88th percentileof all the nation's youths and barely above the 115 level that has oftenbeen considered the basic demarcation point for prime college tnaterial.In the same year as these SAT data were collected, the CarnegieFoundation began an ambitious statewide study of high school seniorsand their college experience in the entire state of Pennsylvania.12 Byhappy coincidence, the investigators used the same form of the Otis IntelligenceTest used by the SAT Commission. Among other tests, theyreported means for the sophomore classes at all the colleges and uni.versities in Pennsylvania in 1928, Pennsylvania was (then as now) alarge state with a wide variety of public and private schools, small andlarge, prestigious and pedestrian. The IQ equivalent of the average ofall Pennsylvania colleges was 107, which put the average Pennsylvaniastudent at the 68th percentile, considerably below the average of theelite schools. But ten Pennsylvania colleges had freshman classes withmean IQs that put them at the 75th to 90 percentiles.[131 In other words,students going to any of several Pennsylvania colleges were, on average,virtually indistinguishable in cognitive ability from the students in theIvy League and the Seven Sisters.Now let us jump to 1964, the first year for which SAT data for a largenumber of Pennsylvania colleges are available. We repeat the exercise,this time using the SAT-Verbal test as the basis for analysis.[141 Two importantchanges had occurred since 1928. The average freshman in aPennsylvania college in 1964 was much smarter than the average Penn.sylvania freshman in 1928-at about the 89th percentile. At the sametime, however, the elite colleges, using the same fourteen schools representedin the 1928 data, had moved much further out toward the edge,now boasting an average freshman who was at the 99th percentile ofthe nation's youth.Cognitive Stratification Throughout the College System by the 1960sThe same process occurred around the country, as the figure belowshows. We picked out colleges with freshman SAT+Verbal means thatwere separated by roughly fiftypoint intervals as of 1961.'"' The specificschools named are representative of those clustering near eachbreak point. At the bottom is a state college in the second echelon of astate system (represented by Georgia Southern); then comes a large stateuniversity (North Carolina State), then five successively more selectiveprivate schools: Villanova, Tulane, Colby, Amherst, and Harvard. Wehave placed the SAT scores against the backdrop of the overall distributionof SAT scores for the entire population of high school seniors(not just those who ordinarily take the SAT), using a special study thatthe College Board conducted in the fall of 1960. The figure points tothe general phenomenon already noted for Harvard: By 1961, a large