>
> > > Other Ivy Leaguers have told me the same thing. I don't believe them.
> >
> > Why not?
> >
> > Jacob
>
> 1) Even though the SAT doesn't perfectly measure "smartness" any more than
> the Body Mass Index perfectly measures obesity, I'd expect groups with
> relatively high SAT scores to be smarter (i.e. there should be more
> relatively smart folks in the pool) than low SAT scoring groups just as
I'd
> expect groups with relatively high BMIs to be fatter than groups with low
> BMIs.
>
> 2) The average student in Michigan's Honors college (drawn from a pool
with
> very high SAT scores relative to the student body as a whole) does appear
> (in my experience) to be smarter than the average Umich student. Whether
> this also holds true among students in the top 1, 5, or 10% of the
> respective pools I don't know.
>
> -- Luke
Well, OK. It's a complicated issue. On the question of how well the intelligence of college students correlates with the perceived intellectual prestige of the institutions they attend, my experience jibes with Justin's. Graduate and professional schools are a different kettle of fish, and probably more closely approach the meritocratic ideal.
"Intelligence" is a notoriously elusive quality, anyway. We know it when we see it, and we know from our everyday experience that some people are brighter than others, but it's very hard to pin down and define. I would provisionally accept the notion that IQ scores at least "point to" something "real," but they are an extremely crude measure. SAT scores are even worse, correlating most closely with family income. These supposedly "objective" tests should not have nearly the weight that they do in determining people's life chances.
Joanna's original remark that got me thinking about this, though, had to do with how social practices and institutions that might seem to reflect some "objective" reality ("expensive colleges with a lot of inherited social prestige deserve their status because the kids who go there and the faculty who teach them are smarter and better") in fact serve to reproduce and perpetuate unjust and irrational class structures and class domination. In the immediate post-World War II period, perhaps the high point of egalitarianism in the 20th century, the Ivy league colleges, once unabashed pastions of class privilege, began to recast themselves as "meritocracies," but this only went so far. There has been some opening, but they are just as much reinforcers of class society now as they were when Franklin Roosevelt edited the Crimson. I was on the Princeton campus for a conference last month, and it was obvious at once that the undergradutaes around for the summer, to judge by their speech and dress and demeanor, were mostly "upper middle class" (a taboo phrase to some, I know, but everyone knows what I mean). Is "intelligence," is "merit" so strongly correlated with class? That's very hard to believe.
Jacob