Excellent question, flyer (and why I brought up the issue of IQ-based discrimination).
There is a fair amount of research showing that IQ does correlate with overall academic success and socio-economic status later in life, but some are questioning whether or not success later in life is directly related to IQ/educational achievement, or whether it’s more related to the allocation of educational resources and how those with higher IQs tend to get access to greater resources due to this discrimination.
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“There is so much more emphasis on IQ testing than ever before. So we started to wonder is innate cognitive ability behind the IQ-job performance link, or is it that society gives advantages and resources to people who have higher IQ scores?” said Eliza Byington, lead author of the study published in the journal Research in Organizational Behavior.
Byington and her colleague Will Felps — both of whom are from the Netherland’s Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University — say students who perform well in IQ reflective tests (e.g. GMAT, GRE and SAT) have access to a greater range of developmental resources.
Advanced classes, professional training and other tools all build on a student’s early abilities, Byington says, handing them opportunities to further enhance their skills and career prospects.
Not only is the allocation of these resources creating high performers, Byington and Felps argue, they may also be creating wider gaps between high and low scoring students.
In a study of the relationship between the contributions of physicists and biologists (based on such criteria as patents granted and the number of publications), Harmon (1963) found that individuals receiving high ratings as professional scientists could not be predicted from any of the academic proficiency information. He also discovered that for nearly half of the correlations computed, the direction of the relationship between these traditional measures of academic success and professional accomplishments was negative. In two studies of professional mathematicians, Helson (1971), and Helson and Crutchfield (1970) found no significant IQ score differences between mathematicians judged by their peers as performing particularly good research and a control group of low productive mathematicians. There were, however, differences between the groups on a variety of personality measures purporting to assess proclivities for creative behavior. Similar results have been reported in studies of chemists and mathematicians (Bloom, 1963), psychologists (Marston, 1971), research scientists (MacKinnon, 1968), artists (Barron, 1963), and architects (MacKinnon, 1968).
In an extremely comprehensive review of occupational studies dealing with traditional indicators of academic success and postcollege performance, Hoyt (1965) concluded that traditional assessments of academic success have at best a modest correlation with various indicators of success in the adult world. The review included forty-six studies in seven occupational areas including business, teaching, engineering, medicine, scientific research, journalism, government, and the ministry. The criteria for determining the level of accomplishment varied from salary level to numbers of publications to behavioral performance ratings. Hoyt asserted that sufficient evidence had been aggregated to warrant a conclusion that “there is good reason to believe that academic achievement (knowledge) and other types of educational growth and development are relatively independent of each other” (p. 73). Similar conclusions were reached in analogous studies conducted by Ghiselli (1973), Creagar and Harmon (1966), and Baird (undated paper).
A study conducted by the American College Testing (ACT) Program titled, Varieties of Accomplishment After College: Perspectives on the Meaning of Academic Talent (Munday & Davis, 1974), resulted in the following conclusion:
The adult accomplishments were found to be uncorrelated with academic talent, including test scores, high school grades, and college grades. However, the adult accomplishments were related to comparable high school non-academic (extra curricular) accomplishments. This suggests that there are many kinds of talents related to later success which might be identified and nurtured by educational institutions (abstract).
