I think I did the sums the last time this did the rounds and, taking into effect the Flynn Effect, which this story actually mentions but doesn't seem to understand, the average college student today is smarter than the average back then, it's just that everyone is smarter, and the group of students is a bigger part of the whole so the average IQ, which is a relative measure compared with your cohort, is closer to 100.
Few who refer to the Flynn effect understand exactly what it entails. From Ulric Neisser's 1997 survey article "Rising scores on intelligence tests"[0]:
We are indeed very much smarter than our grandparents where visual analysis is concerned, but not with respect to other aspects of intelligence.
Are you saying IQ isn't equal to smart, or even raw IQ type scores without the cohort based adjustments isn't equal to smart, or something else?
I'd kind of agree with both of those, but not sure if that's were you're going with this.
I was commenting in the context of "IQ has gone down for a growing subgroup over 8 decades" and suggesting that the Flynn effect means that any member of the modern subgroup teleported back in time would score on average about 25 points better, which reverses the factoid in the headline even before you talk about the group growing larger.
