By the world? Yeah, obviously. The average IQ at a good state school is about 120. In the Ivies, it's about 125. The standard deviation at each is about 13 points, so the 95th-percentile state school student would be 89th-percentile at an Ivy. That's not a huge difference. It's a lot smaller than the difference in job opportunities.
Here's the biggest (and underdocumented) advantage of having an elite pedigree: when you're presumed smart, you can put 100% of your energies into social polish. You don't have to (a) prove your intelligence, and (b) make the investor/patron feel important and just-slightly superior. You can focus on (b) alone, because (a) was taken care of. That's a huge advantage, because you're not serving two masters.
Within a couple hundred words of conversation, I can prove, to anyone intelligent, that I'm smarter than 90 to 99+% of the pedigreed (depending on how we define "pedigreed") people out raising seed rounds, but it's hard to do that without being a show-off and seeming like an arrogant prick.
It's like the decorative swords that noblemen used to wear. It was valuable to wear one, but unsheathing it and proving you knew how to use it was not always considered acceptable behavior.
Where are you getting that IQ data from? I go to one of the Ivies and have never had an IQ test nor have most of my peers I would imagine.
(That said I agree with your premise, my peers at school aren't significantly more intelligent than my high school classmates who went to good, but not great, private and state colleges).
I had an unhealthy obsession with IQ testing. A phase long ago. I remember reading that the average Harvard IQ tested at 130 and the other Ivies in the mid-120s. You can guess based on SAT figures, noting that extracurricular factors (paradoxically) decrease the IQ/SAT correlation (people who beat a top school's extracurricular game are more likely than average to have prepped for SATs and have scores that overstate their IQs). So a 1500 average SAT (out of 1600) ends up mapping to a group average IQ around 130, even though a typical individual with a 1500 SAT is probably around 140 IQ.
These numbers fluctuate and it's quite possible that the increasing usage of socioeconomic/extracurricular criteria has decreased the gap.
Ah interesting. Did you find any notable results? My understanding is that IQ (as a proxy for intelligence) matters up to a certain cutoff and beyond that its importance drops off (i.e. you might want the person who writes the software for the airplane you're riding to have a 130 IQ, but beyond that the quality of the work doesn't improve much).
By the world? Yeah, obviously. The average IQ at a good state school is about 120. In the Ivies, it's about 125. The standard deviation at each is about 13 points, so the 95th-percentile state school student would be 89th-percentile at an Ivy. That's not a huge difference. It's a lot smaller than the difference in job opportunities.
Here's the biggest (and underdocumented) advantage of having an elite pedigree: when you're presumed smart, you can put 100% of your energies into social polish. You don't have to (a) prove your intelligence, and (b) make the investor/patron feel important and just-slightly superior. You can focus on (b) alone, because (a) was taken care of. That's a huge advantage, because you're not serving two masters.
Within a couple hundred words of conversation, I can prove, to anyone intelligent, that I'm smarter than 90 to 99+% of the pedigreed (depending on how we define "pedigreed") people out raising seed rounds, but it's hard to do that without being a show-off and seeming like an arrogant prick.
It's like the decorative swords that noblemen used to wear. It was valuable to wear one, but unsheathing it and proving you knew how to use it was not always considered acceptable behavior.