Fascinating empirical-graph-rich essay. Here is my more discursive-ancdotal essay on similar theme:
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well - including this "excerpt from a dystopian imaginative piece about the prospect of ‘Permanent Education in 1984’ because I find it eerily prescient of our 21st c. Therapeutic Culture. “A child is born in the United States in 1984. He can never look forward to getting out of school. From the ‘infant school’ he starts attending at the age of six months to the ‘geriatric learning centre’ he dies in, he finds himself going to school all his life ‘for the good of society’......and so we bid goodbye to this lucky man, the minister chants, ‘firm in the conviction that he will go to heaven where he will attend a ‘school for angels.’”(John Ohliger)"
When it comes to the German educational system, I think there's a lot more to say (of course), but I'll try to keep it short (and very incomplete, of course).
First, it's quite telling that you refer to 2003 PISA data, which (of course) leaves unchecked the transformation that has taken place since then. My Abitur dates back to 2000; back then, already more than 25% (highly instructive: https://www.datenportal.bmbf.de/portal/de/Tabelle-2.5.85.html) of the year’s cohort of school leavers got the formerly so prestigious Abitur. It wasn't very elite in 2000 anymore, but it also wasn't a shallowly complimentary addition to a birth certificate like it is today. When I went through Germany's school system,
(1) You needed the elementary school's recommendation to enter the Gymnasium after elementary school;
(2) At the Gymnasium roughly (speaking anecdotally from memory), 60% of pupils didn't make it into the Oberstufe;
(3) Out of roughly 180 pupils in the 5th grade (6 classes à 30 pupils), 72 finished with the Abitur (69 of them ethnically European; by the way, there were very, very few non-Europeans at my school at all back then, and the Gymnasium got under attack more and more over time for being segregationist).
The Gesamtschule truly is a very big problem, which you rightfully describe as "beyond the scope of this discussion." But if you want to track the decline that has intensified explosively since 2000, it is the key to achieving the goal. Basically, the Gesamtschule is a horrific failure that became the ruling model, as it has to be when egalitarianism becomes not the norm but the fundamental law of justice.
If you want more data (derived from books), feel free to contact me. I'll give you just a slight hint based on Josef Kraus's book "Spaßpädagogik" (there's a lot more to say on a lot of aspects):
From the end of the 1960s into the 1990s, the percentage of pupils in Hauptschule decreased from 67 to 33 percent.
During the same time, the percentage of pupils in Gymnasium went up from 17 to 33 percent.
The statistical relation of pupils in Hauptschule and Gymnasium in 1996 was: 37,1% Hauptschule versus 29,4% (Baden-Württemberg), 39,8% vs. 27,7% (Niedersachsen), 37,9% vs. 30,2% (Rheinland-Pfalz).
Given the drastic reduction of standards on all levels in the education system, these 28,6% probably aren't capable of much more than a decent 6th grader in the 1970s. Today, 24% of kids basically fail elementary school: p. 67: https://www.cesifo.org/en/publications/2022/working-paper/global-universal-basic-skills-current-deficits-and-implications - It has always been this way, and ethnic differences are just a construct, right? Take a look at the Claus Moser report from 1999: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED465861.pdf, page 77, table 11.1 (numbers for 1997). You'll see pretty different numbers for Germany (representing the Germany I grew up in). - What should also be taken into account here is Dieter Zimmer’s book Ist Intelligenz erblich? Eine Klarstellung; it contains very spicy data.
How much school you need depends upon what you want to do. In the 1970's I was a worker in an industrial research lab - with my BS plus a year's graduate study in physics. I lost arguments because I didn't have my Ph.D., so I got it. And then eventually, the industrial research labs largely outsourced their work to universities. I found other tech work to do and am still working, in a different tech field at 72.
From what I have seen, I think the requirements and expectations of students in STEM are roughly equivalent to 50 years ago (My daugher did her MS in structural engineering 5 years ago, so I observed). And I think the same can be said for pre-med. But my kids comments about their liberal arts classes and their peer students suggest that standards are lower than I remember from my flagship statue university 50 years ago, and this is at the University of Washington, which seems to have a rough entrance restriction to the top 10% of students.
But you don't have to take as much time as is typically done. Load up on math early - you need to be able to take calculus (needed for business, premed, and STEM) no later than 11 grade (in the US). Do the Running Start / College and High School route, and get your first 2 years of college done when you would have been in high school. Go to the university and complete your degree 2 years early (and save 2 years of education expenses). My son and daughter both had their masters by the time they were 21 and immediately headed into the tech workplace.
Thank you for this article. But one doubt crossed my mind, and it didn't seem to be addressed here: shouldn't the decrease in the IQ of academics and PhDs not be impacted by the larger accessibility to education? So in the end, whoever was higher in the scale, would get lower, as more people climbed the cognitive stairs.
This would create a contrast with older times, where there was a higher disparity in the offer of education.
So many interesting insights in your post, as always.
More than 2/3 of 25-29 yo Americans have “some college” education. Even assuming that every single person with IQ above the median went to college, it still means that 1/3 of people below the median did go to college. Maybe I’m wrong, but the fact that so many less intelligent students went to college almost guarantees that (1) there will be a lot of dropouts and (2) programs that are not as intellectually demanding need to be created to accommodate these students.
The retracted paper reminds me of the twice-retracted Hill’s 2017 paper on greater male variability. I wonder if this kind of retraction (where there is no evidence of fraud) is more frequent in intelligence research than other fields.
Btw, what would explain the lack of studies from the late 1960s to the 1970s?
When parents invest more in intellectually weaker siblings, what is the impact? Are there actual benefits? I think Warne has pretty convincingly shown that efforts to raise intelligence don’t work, except in extraordinary circumstances (eg high SES parents adopting a low SES child might raise IQ by 3-4 points). Also, when parents spend more time with their children, aren’t they more likely to prevent their children from developing some skills (eg solving problems on their own) thereby causing some of the high anxiety recently shown by late teens and young adults?
"More than 2/3 of 25-29 yo Americans have “some college” education. Even assuming that every single person with IQ above the median went to college, it still means that 1/3 of people below the median did go to college. Maybe I’m wrong, but the fact that so many less intelligent students went to college almost guarantees that (1) there will be a lot of dropouts and (2) programs that are not as intellectually demanding need to be created to accommodate these students."
Great points. As is prevalent across Western Civilization, avariciousness has dramatically increased. Around forty years ago, the higher education 'industry' decided to turn its business into a massive money maker. This was easy to do with the advent of government-backed student loans and the narrative that everyone should be able to attend college regardless of their aptitude or ability.
While this is an interesting read, there' is a serious problem in aspects that are being overlooked, and by extension the quality of the data collected.
More specifically, I'd say your argument is more aptly pointing out that the statistics can't be trusted, and I'd agree with that. Often people group outcomes by IQ, or socioeconomic status, but the collected data is where the real problem is, and its been done to hide failures as happens in any centralized system.
This is a subject near and dear to my heart, and I've done a lot of research looking into this to try and identify where most of the statistics go wrong. I'm based in the US so the two are not necessarily comperable systems but what I've seen is two-fold. Classes that are required GE classes for transfer or graduation often have bottle-necking where a high number of reattempts occur which are not reflected in the statistics because the class sizes are fixed and first attempt vs re-attempt students are not differentiated. In most cases, these class failures often occur as a result of fraud; but not a fraud that is easily provable, or correctable, and the people responsible for keeping this in check have no duty to investigate complaints, nor follow due process. Those, who I'll call administrators view themselves as co-workers and any investigation or action is viewed as creating a hostile work environment, so complaints fall on deaf ears.
Some real-world deceitful examples would be, introducing system's properties of causality into a series of exams that constitute your grade. A physics course in Kinematics which I attended had this 3-question exam, 3 exams makes your grade. The percentage of passes every year would be roughly the same (~10%), but the failures would always be first-attempt people and it was a required class to progress. The people who passed were the ones buying/selling exam answer keys. To pass the class with academic integrity you could only get the last question wrong on any test, and you had to pass at least 1 test perfectly. The distribution skew in this makes it a class where you are perfect or you fail. The professors did this by altering how significant digits were handled between multiple questions on the same test. This was the structure present in 7/9 classes taken between 2004 and 2012 (different colleges and teachers). Normally rounding is done at the end of a multi-step problem to reduce error propagation, but in a series where question 2 depends on the correct answer to question 1, the error would propagate unless you rounded only on the last problem, but that would cause the teacher's answer which you are checked against to be wrong, and when brought to their attention they would refuse to correct the issue; and certain people during office hours would be told during the professors office hours the nonstandard form of rounding he was expecting on the test. This is fraud, but what first-year student can possibly explain it, and even when escalated to chair/dean investigating and the teachers standing is a seniority problem.
Other dirty tricks which I've seen include non-determinism properties on testing materials. Either as a result of intentionally mismatched learning materials between homework and exams, or non-sequitur answers being tested that are not communicated, or ways of being tested are not communicated. For example, if you follow the process in early math classes it doesn't matter if you get the correct answer, they test on process, but in a later class which in a progression may be several classes later in reality, your tested on whether you got the answer correct and not just the process; but because its a foundational issue and you passed the intermediary classes the teacher doesn't know enough to tell where you are failing.
These deceitful tricks appear intentional for the purpose of gatekeeping knowledge because most science-based material is only taught using math as the teaching method without intuitive understandings. The support for this can be found if you exam books published prior to 1970. They focus on doing things, and while they do have math its largely only used after an intuitive understanding is built. When you look at books published post-1970 its all about how both parties can be both right and wrong at the same time (logically false, non-sequitur, irrational).
Also more recently there has been other interference via the publishers/autograders where they may embed dark patterns in their platforms being used by institutions. Patterns such as despair frustration spirals (i.e. you take an online test, for every question you get wrong it pops up a red warning that you got it wrong requiring you to click to confirm, and no confirmation or warning is necessary for correct answers. You get 3 or more in a row from poorly crafted questions and the literature says your critical thinking shuts down exponentially as is demonstrated in the classical experiment that was done regarding student outcomes where teachers were told their students were gifted or not in randomized fashion, and the outcomes showed correlation between the ones that were told they were gifted or not (regardless of that actually being the case that they were gifted).
This also includes other things such as promoting features that prevent teachers from identifying problems in a misleading way, giving them a plausible explanation for a failed student (capitalizing on laziness/poor teaching/lowest common denominator inherent in such systems). This shows up in randomizing every exam on a per student basis from a pool of questions they can't personally vet. If only one person in the class has the issue, because only one person in the class got the question; is the teacher going to change it especially if they can't look up the question in its entirety? Signal to noise ratios in communication and practice.
Needless to say, these are just a few forms of gatekeeping in US systemically at colleges in the US. Other forms may include focusing on teaching material during one class that you then need to disentangle and unlearn in later classes, this is blatant in most General Chemistry -> OChem classes with regards to Valence Shell theory (which doesn't cover resonance), and Molecular Orbital Theory.
Subtle things that impact outcomes. Administrators and Board of Trustees don't collect the information that would show the problem because the problem is inherent in the system, and their standing would suffer if it became known.
I'm a relatively high IQ person myself (~140), despite overcoming challenges such as chronic mercury poisoning from dental fillings put in when I was 15, that took awhile to get a correct diagnosis and remediation (10 years). Initially when I was young I was in classes for gifted people and was in the gifted range for IQ 156 iirc, had a perfect ASVAB and a 1600 on the SAT when it was required. I've certainly lost a step, but by no means am I low IQ. and I'm a perfect example of how these systems fails intelligent people.
I was originally going into Aerospace Engineering, and I've been actively attempting to complete a college degree since 2001. First 10 years was focused on engineering only but had to give that up after 9 attempts to pass that 3 question test (which wasn't just a single professor), but I hit a stonewall, then I compromised with Business (stonewall), and finally I'm trying to get any degree; but I haven't been able to do that because of the inherent corruption and fraud. Fortunately, I've done quite well without formal education in IT, (and certifications have the same inherent fraud problems), largely because I'm an autodidact. Having MIT OCW videos available certainly helped, but not in getting a degree.
TL;DR Many people today are no longer seeking higher education because their parents attempted it, had the smarts but could not ethically compromise themselves to void academic integrity to cheat on tests that were fraudulent to begin with.
When a generation passes (20 years), one has sufficient knowledge to speak from experience and have it carry weight, and as a whole higher education has failed, and at that point it doesn't matter who is lying or how they are lying, just that they were and if I had known I wouldn't have invested all that money in trying to get through that hamster wheel. In many respects that additional unstated financial burden set my life on another trajectory with no children, and no retirement.
Those with options (and intelligent people always have options), they do something else and that's a lost opportunity cost for society.
Inevitably, though it may take time that logarithmic error in these systems results in resource mismanagement of strategic systems causing failing because qualified people can't be found and mistakes that would have never been allowed occur. This is because they systems have weeded out and eliminated the intelligent rational people. Destruction and collapse usually follows thereafter from a historical perspective.
Most of these inherent issues and their outcomes are described by Mises in his writing from the 1930s, so we rationally can't pretend that these are not predictable outcomes, since we were forewarned and those warnings went unheeded.
Fascinating empirical-graph-rich essay. Here is my more discursive-ancdotal essay on similar theme:
https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well - including this "excerpt from a dystopian imaginative piece about the prospect of ‘Permanent Education in 1984’ because I find it eerily prescient of our 21st c. Therapeutic Culture. “A child is born in the United States in 1984. He can never look forward to getting out of school. From the ‘infant school’ he starts attending at the age of six months to the ‘geriatric learning centre’ he dies in, he finds himself going to school all his life ‘for the good of society’......and so we bid goodbye to this lucky man, the minister chants, ‘firm in the conviction that he will go to heaven where he will attend a ‘school for angels.’”(John Ohliger)"
Again a very good essay by Cremieux!
When it comes to the German educational system, I think there's a lot more to say (of course), but I'll try to keep it short (and very incomplete, of course).
First, it's quite telling that you refer to 2003 PISA data, which (of course) leaves unchecked the transformation that has taken place since then. My Abitur dates back to 2000; back then, already more than 25% (highly instructive: https://www.datenportal.bmbf.de/portal/de/Tabelle-2.5.85.html) of the year’s cohort of school leavers got the formerly so prestigious Abitur. It wasn't very elite in 2000 anymore, but it also wasn't a shallowly complimentary addition to a birth certificate like it is today. When I went through Germany's school system,
(1) You needed the elementary school's recommendation to enter the Gymnasium after elementary school;
(2) At the Gymnasium roughly (speaking anecdotally from memory), 60% of pupils didn't make it into the Oberstufe;
(3) Out of roughly 180 pupils in the 5th grade (6 classes à 30 pupils), 72 finished with the Abitur (69 of them ethnically European; by the way, there were very, very few non-Europeans at my school at all back then, and the Gymnasium got under attack more and more over time for being segregationist).
The Gesamtschule truly is a very big problem, which you rightfully describe as "beyond the scope of this discussion." But if you want to track the decline that has intensified explosively since 2000, it is the key to achieving the goal. Basically, the Gesamtschule is a horrific failure that became the ruling model, as it has to be when egalitarianism becomes not the norm but the fundamental law of justice.
If you want more data (derived from books), feel free to contact me. I'll give you just a slight hint based on Josef Kraus's book "Spaßpädagogik" (there's a lot more to say on a lot of aspects):
From the end of the 1960s into the 1990s, the percentage of pupils in Hauptschule decreased from 67 to 33 percent.
During the same time, the percentage of pupils in Gymnasium went up from 17 to 33 percent.
The statistical relation of pupils in Hauptschule and Gymnasium in 1996 was: 37,1% Hauptschule versus 29,4% (Baden-Württemberg), 39,8% vs. 27,7% (Niedersachsen), 37,9% vs. 30,2% (Rheinland-Pfalz).
Between 2005 and 2019, the number of people finishing with a Hauptschule diploma went down from 42,1% to 28,6%. (https://www.bpb.de/kurz-knapp/zahlen-und-fakten/soziale-situation-in-deutschland/61656/bildungsstand-der-bevoelkerung/)
Given the drastic reduction of standards on all levels in the education system, these 28,6% probably aren't capable of much more than a decent 6th grader in the 1970s. Today, 24% of kids basically fail elementary school: p. 67: https://www.cesifo.org/en/publications/2022/working-paper/global-universal-basic-skills-current-deficits-and-implications - It has always been this way, and ethnic differences are just a construct, right? Take a look at the Claus Moser report from 1999: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED465861.pdf, page 77, table 11.1 (numbers for 1997). You'll see pretty different numbers for Germany (representing the Germany I grew up in). - What should also be taken into account here is Dieter Zimmer’s book Ist Intelligenz erblich? Eine Klarstellung; it contains very spicy data.
How much school you need depends upon what you want to do. In the 1970's I was a worker in an industrial research lab - with my BS plus a year's graduate study in physics. I lost arguments because I didn't have my Ph.D., so I got it. And then eventually, the industrial research labs largely outsourced their work to universities. I found other tech work to do and am still working, in a different tech field at 72.
From what I have seen, I think the requirements and expectations of students in STEM are roughly equivalent to 50 years ago (My daugher did her MS in structural engineering 5 years ago, so I observed). And I think the same can be said for pre-med. But my kids comments about their liberal arts classes and their peer students suggest that standards are lower than I remember from my flagship statue university 50 years ago, and this is at the University of Washington, which seems to have a rough entrance restriction to the top 10% of students.
But you don't have to take as much time as is typically done. Load up on math early - you need to be able to take calculus (needed for business, premed, and STEM) no later than 11 grade (in the US). Do the Running Start / College and High School route, and get your first 2 years of college done when you would have been in high school. Go to the university and complete your degree 2 years early (and save 2 years of education expenses). My son and daughter both had their masters by the time they were 21 and immediately headed into the tech workplace.
Very minor point, but the AI goof in the picture of the clock goes really well with your essay. :)
Thank you for this article. But one doubt crossed my mind, and it didn't seem to be addressed here: shouldn't the decrease in the IQ of academics and PhDs not be impacted by the larger accessibility to education? So in the end, whoever was higher in the scale, would get lower, as more people climbed the cognitive stairs.
This would create a contrast with older times, where there was a higher disparity in the offer of education.
So many interesting insights in your post, as always.
More than 2/3 of 25-29 yo Americans have “some college” education. Even assuming that every single person with IQ above the median went to college, it still means that 1/3 of people below the median did go to college. Maybe I’m wrong, but the fact that so many less intelligent students went to college almost guarantees that (1) there will be a lot of dropouts and (2) programs that are not as intellectually demanding need to be created to accommodate these students.
The retracted paper reminds me of the twice-retracted Hill’s 2017 paper on greater male variability. I wonder if this kind of retraction (where there is no evidence of fraud) is more frequent in intelligence research than other fields.
Btw, what would explain the lack of studies from the late 1960s to the 1970s?
When parents invest more in intellectually weaker siblings, what is the impact? Are there actual benefits? I think Warne has pretty convincingly shown that efforts to raise intelligence don’t work, except in extraordinary circumstances (eg high SES parents adopting a low SES child might raise IQ by 3-4 points). Also, when parents spend more time with their children, aren’t they more likely to prevent their children from developing some skills (eg solving problems on their own) thereby causing some of the high anxiety recently shown by late teens and young adults?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States#General_attainment_of_degrees/diplomas
"More than 2/3 of 25-29 yo Americans have “some college” education. Even assuming that every single person with IQ above the median went to college, it still means that 1/3 of people below the median did go to college. Maybe I’m wrong, but the fact that so many less intelligent students went to college almost guarantees that (1) there will be a lot of dropouts and (2) programs that are not as intellectually demanding need to be created to accommodate these students."
Great points. As is prevalent across Western Civilization, avariciousness has dramatically increased. Around forty years ago, the higher education 'industry' decided to turn its business into a massive money maker. This was easy to do with the advent of government-backed student loans and the narrative that everyone should be able to attend college regardless of their aptitude or ability.
Good stuff. Agreed we should release people when they may no longer benefit from additional schooling.
Thoughts on gregory clark's new paper finding no returns to education on earnings after correcting for publication bias?
https://www.ehes.org/wp/EHES_249.pdf
While this is an interesting read, there' is a serious problem in aspects that are being overlooked, and by extension the quality of the data collected.
More specifically, I'd say your argument is more aptly pointing out that the statistics can't be trusted, and I'd agree with that. Often people group outcomes by IQ, or socioeconomic status, but the collected data is where the real problem is, and its been done to hide failures as happens in any centralized system.
This is a subject near and dear to my heart, and I've done a lot of research looking into this to try and identify where most of the statistics go wrong. I'm based in the US so the two are not necessarily comperable systems but what I've seen is two-fold. Classes that are required GE classes for transfer or graduation often have bottle-necking where a high number of reattempts occur which are not reflected in the statistics because the class sizes are fixed and first attempt vs re-attempt students are not differentiated. In most cases, these class failures often occur as a result of fraud; but not a fraud that is easily provable, or correctable, and the people responsible for keeping this in check have no duty to investigate complaints, nor follow due process. Those, who I'll call administrators view themselves as co-workers and any investigation or action is viewed as creating a hostile work environment, so complaints fall on deaf ears.
Some real-world deceitful examples would be, introducing system's properties of causality into a series of exams that constitute your grade. A physics course in Kinematics which I attended had this 3-question exam, 3 exams makes your grade. The percentage of passes every year would be roughly the same (~10%), but the failures would always be first-attempt people and it was a required class to progress. The people who passed were the ones buying/selling exam answer keys. To pass the class with academic integrity you could only get the last question wrong on any test, and you had to pass at least 1 test perfectly. The distribution skew in this makes it a class where you are perfect or you fail. The professors did this by altering how significant digits were handled between multiple questions on the same test. This was the structure present in 7/9 classes taken between 2004 and 2012 (different colleges and teachers). Normally rounding is done at the end of a multi-step problem to reduce error propagation, but in a series where question 2 depends on the correct answer to question 1, the error would propagate unless you rounded only on the last problem, but that would cause the teacher's answer which you are checked against to be wrong, and when brought to their attention they would refuse to correct the issue; and certain people during office hours would be told during the professors office hours the nonstandard form of rounding he was expecting on the test. This is fraud, but what first-year student can possibly explain it, and even when escalated to chair/dean investigating and the teachers standing is a seniority problem.
Other dirty tricks which I've seen include non-determinism properties on testing materials. Either as a result of intentionally mismatched learning materials between homework and exams, or non-sequitur answers being tested that are not communicated, or ways of being tested are not communicated. For example, if you follow the process in early math classes it doesn't matter if you get the correct answer, they test on process, but in a later class which in a progression may be several classes later in reality, your tested on whether you got the answer correct and not just the process; but because its a foundational issue and you passed the intermediary classes the teacher doesn't know enough to tell where you are failing.
These deceitful tricks appear intentional for the purpose of gatekeeping knowledge because most science-based material is only taught using math as the teaching method without intuitive understandings. The support for this can be found if you exam books published prior to 1970. They focus on doing things, and while they do have math its largely only used after an intuitive understanding is built. When you look at books published post-1970 its all about how both parties can be both right and wrong at the same time (logically false, non-sequitur, irrational).
Also more recently there has been other interference via the publishers/autograders where they may embed dark patterns in their platforms being used by institutions. Patterns such as despair frustration spirals (i.e. you take an online test, for every question you get wrong it pops up a red warning that you got it wrong requiring you to click to confirm, and no confirmation or warning is necessary for correct answers. You get 3 or more in a row from poorly crafted questions and the literature says your critical thinking shuts down exponentially as is demonstrated in the classical experiment that was done regarding student outcomes where teachers were told their students were gifted or not in randomized fashion, and the outcomes showed correlation between the ones that were told they were gifted or not (regardless of that actually being the case that they were gifted).
This also includes other things such as promoting features that prevent teachers from identifying problems in a misleading way, giving them a plausible explanation for a failed student (capitalizing on laziness/poor teaching/lowest common denominator inherent in such systems). This shows up in randomizing every exam on a per student basis from a pool of questions they can't personally vet. If only one person in the class has the issue, because only one person in the class got the question; is the teacher going to change it especially if they can't look up the question in its entirety? Signal to noise ratios in communication and practice.
Needless to say, these are just a few forms of gatekeeping in US systemically at colleges in the US. Other forms may include focusing on teaching material during one class that you then need to disentangle and unlearn in later classes, this is blatant in most General Chemistry -> OChem classes with regards to Valence Shell theory (which doesn't cover resonance), and Molecular Orbital Theory.
Subtle things that impact outcomes. Administrators and Board of Trustees don't collect the information that would show the problem because the problem is inherent in the system, and their standing would suffer if it became known.
I'm a relatively high IQ person myself (~140), despite overcoming challenges such as chronic mercury poisoning from dental fillings put in when I was 15, that took awhile to get a correct diagnosis and remediation (10 years). Initially when I was young I was in classes for gifted people and was in the gifted range for IQ 156 iirc, had a perfect ASVAB and a 1600 on the SAT when it was required. I've certainly lost a step, but by no means am I low IQ. and I'm a perfect example of how these systems fails intelligent people.
I was originally going into Aerospace Engineering, and I've been actively attempting to complete a college degree since 2001. First 10 years was focused on engineering only but had to give that up after 9 attempts to pass that 3 question test (which wasn't just a single professor), but I hit a stonewall, then I compromised with Business (stonewall), and finally I'm trying to get any degree; but I haven't been able to do that because of the inherent corruption and fraud. Fortunately, I've done quite well without formal education in IT, (and certifications have the same inherent fraud problems), largely because I'm an autodidact. Having MIT OCW videos available certainly helped, but not in getting a degree.
TL;DR Many people today are no longer seeking higher education because their parents attempted it, had the smarts but could not ethically compromise themselves to void academic integrity to cheat on tests that were fraudulent to begin with.
When a generation passes (20 years), one has sufficient knowledge to speak from experience and have it carry weight, and as a whole higher education has failed, and at that point it doesn't matter who is lying or how they are lying, just that they were and if I had known I wouldn't have invested all that money in trying to get through that hamster wheel. In many respects that additional unstated financial burden set my life on another trajectory with no children, and no retirement.
Those with options (and intelligent people always have options), they do something else and that's a lost opportunity cost for society.
Inevitably, though it may take time that logarithmic error in these systems results in resource mismanagement of strategic systems causing failing because qualified people can't be found and mistakes that would have never been allowed occur. This is because they systems have weeded out and eliminated the intelligent rational people. Destruction and collapse usually follows thereafter from a historical perspective.
Most of these inherent issues and their outcomes are described by Mises in his writing from the 1930s, so we rationally can't pretend that these are not predictable outcomes, since we were forewarned and those warnings went unheeded.
"Are schools failing us? Are we getting dumber?"
Going to school does not raise your IQ. One goes to school to learn how to gain knowledge.
Universities have lowered their standards.