Greg Mankiw makes a case for graduate school education:
Apart from their bank accounts, Gallup finds education to be the greatest difference between the wealthiest 1% of Americans and everyone else. The Gallup analysis reveals that 72% of the wealthiest Americans have a college degree, compared with 31% of those in the lower 99 percentiles. Furthermore, nearly half of those in the wealthiest group have postgraduate education, versus 16% of all others.
But it’s not education that gets people into the 1%.
It’s IQ and hard work.
Education produces little more than signaling.
4 responses to “Is Membership In The 1% Club Education Or IQ?”
The correlation between IQ and income disappears when educational attainment is accounted for.
OK. Please read back what you just wrote and tell me how that makes sense. 🙂 Since Educational attainment is a function of IQ…..
The point is that while IQ is predictive of educational success it doesn’t predict success independent of educational attainment.
But does IQ predict educational attainment?
It does. IQ is not the ONLY predictor of educational or economic attainment. Class, character, impulsivity, and attractiveness also affect educational and economic potential.
Therefore, IQ is a predictor of both educational and economic attainment. It is just not the ONLY factor. It is the greatest factor. It is just not the only factor.
However the inverse is not true. People of low IQ do not achieve either economic or academic success, except as outliers – and outliers are not the topic of consideration in politics, academics, economics or ethics. That would be illogical.