Free The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein, Charles A. Murray

elite schools. They all had a thin layer of the very brightest among their students but also many students who were merely bright and a fair number of students who were mediocre. They tapped only a fragment of the cognitive talent in the country. The valedictorian in Kalamazoo and the Kansas farm girl with an IQ of 140 might not even be going to college at all. If they did, they probably went to the nearest state university or to a private college affiliated with their church.
    One of the rare windows on this period is provided by two little-known sources of test score data. The first involves the earliest SATs, which were first administered in 1926. As part of that effort, a standardized intelligence test was also completed by 1,080 of the SAT subjects. In its first annual report, a Commission appointed by the College Entrance Examination Board provided a table for converting the SAT of that era to IQ scores. 10 Combining that information with reports of the mean SAT scores for entrants to schools using the SAT, we are able to approximate the mean IQs of the entering students to the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters, the most prestigious schools in the country at that time. 11
    Judging from this information, the entering classes of these schools in 1926 had a mean IQ of about 117, which places the average student at the most selective schools in the country at about the 88th percentile of all the nation’s youths and barely above the 115 level that has often been considered the basic demarcation point for prime college material.
    In the same year as these SAT data were collected, the Carnegie Foundation began an ambitious statewide study of high school seniors and their college experience in the entire state of Pennsylvania. 12 Byhappy coincidence, the investigators used the same form of the Otis Intelligence Test used by the SAT Commission. Among other tests, they reported means for the sophomore classes at all the colleges and universities in Pennsylvania in 1928. Pennsylvania was (then as now) a large state with a wide variety of public and private schools, small and large, prestigious and pedestrian. The IQ equivalent of the average of all Pennsylvania colleges was 107, which put the average Pennsylvania student at the 68th percentile, considerably below the average of the elite schools. But ten Pennsylvania colleges had freshman classes with mean IQs that put them at the 75th to 90 percentiles. 13 In other words, students going to any of several Pennsylvania colleges were, on average, virtually indistinguishable in cognitive ability from the students in the Ivy League and the Seven Sisters.
    Now let us jump to 1964, the first year for which SAT data for a large number of Pennsylvania colleges are available. We repeat the exercise, this time using the SAT-Verbal test as the basis for analysis. 14 Two important changes had occurred since 1928. The average freshman in a Pennsylvania college in 1964 was much smarter than the average Pennsylvania freshman in 1928—at about the 89th percentile. At the same time, however, the elite colleges, using the same fourteen schools represented in the 1928 data, had moved much further out toward the edge, now boasting an average freshman who was at the 99th percentile of the nation’s youth.
Cognitive Stratification Throughout the College System by the 1960s
     
    The same process occurred around the country, as the figure below shows. We picked out colleges with freshman SAT-Verbal means that were separated by roughly fifty-point intervals as of 1961. 15 The specific schools named are representative of those clustering near each break point. At the bottom is a state college in the second echelon of a state system (represented by Georgia Southern); then comes a large state university (North Carolina State), then five successively more selective private schools: Villanova, Tulane, Colby, Amherst, and Harvard. We have placed the SAT scores against the backdrop of the overall distribution