People Really Do Learn Something In College

Here’s a group of outtakes from The Case For An Older Woman. These plot women’s answers to a handful of the more lighthearted “intelligence” measuring match questions on OkCupid. The lines track each age group’s percentage of correct answers.




We didn’t include these in the original post because, frankly, they didn’t support our point all that well. Older women do better than the youngest on only half the questions, and they’rewomen reach their intellectual peak immediately after college definitely not the highest-scoring group. Women in their mid-twenties slaughter all. In all four graphs, it really does look like women reach their intellectual peak immediately after college and then slowly recede into dust and oblivion. It’s like in The Lord Of The Rings, when Galadriel (youngest child of Finarfin, prince of the Noldor, and of Eärwen, who was cousin to Lúthien, natch) resists the temptation of Frodo’s offer of the Ring Of Power and says “I will diminish, and go into the West.” It’s a lot like that. The Ring Of Power is college, and the West is dementia, or possibly the suburbs. Also, elves are cool.

20 Responses to “People Really Do Learn Something In College”

  1. OKCUser01 says:

    This post was entirely too short! We demand more!

  2. John says:

    It would be interesting to see a plot of education attained vs. age for your sample. I’d be surprised if there were not also a correlation to education.

    Could it be that the mean amount of education in women in their late 20s is greater than the mean amount in women in their 30s? It’s a little hard to believe that the effect is due solely or even largely to age.

  3. Stephanie says:

    I literally, for the first time in months, Laughed Out Loud!

    You guys (or gals) totally rock! You put the fun in fundamentals of online dating. (I know it’s super corny isn’t it?)

  4. Bob says:

    Chances are, if you did this set of graphs for men you’d get the exact same result.

  5. Josh says:

    So obviously this article was written a little tongue-in-cheek. I’m sure people that as people hit 30 they don’t start forgetting that the sun is bigger than the earth or that dinosaurs existed. John is probably on the right track with this correlating more to education rather than early dementia. A couple more thoughts:

    1. I imagine that singles in their 30s are a smaller set than singles in their 20s, and a lot of the smart, beautiful women in their twenties are taken by 30. So what’s left is a set of women that are less attractive and less intelligent. Maybe they’re still single because they’re stupid, but they aren’t necessarily getting stupider. The stupidity just grows on the charts because the smart ones are taken.

    2. Maybe once women reach their 30s, they stop caring so much about impressing people with math questions. There must come a point in your life when you start thinking, “I don’t have time for this. Next question.”

  6. mandy01 says:

    It’s refreshing that no one seems to have thought of the fact that women might be playing dumb for the guys.

  7. Eldon says:

    Josh is partly right IMHO

    MO:

    If you want to find an intelligent woman, you need to get one early.
    Although some of the women I know who are intelligent will still be single at 30, most are not, and have settled for less intelligent alpha males. (high testosterone = lower IQ argument)

    the argument that once women hit 30 they care less about math could be true, if so then the same applies to just about everything else, so I doubt that this is true.

    Anyway, I’m convinced that if I want to find a woman who can read my cron jobs and find her files on by backup server without my help, i should start looking now… and not wait until I’m 30.

    agree?

  8. Doug says:

    Granted these are all women who are dating online so they all must have at least some degree of technical know how but I’d be willing to bet there would be an interesting correlation between the women in their mid-twenties who answered more questions correctly being more tech savvy and “Googling” their answers than their older counterparts.

    This is of course not meant to insult or take away from the intelligence level of women in their mid-twenties, especially since I’m a male in my mid-twenties looking for an intelligent female in hers. :)

  9. Janessa says:

    Interesting… But I also think that cross-referencing with “amount of education obtained” would make this correlation more legitimate.
    College these days is a given for a larger percentage of individuals than it was 10 or 20 years ago.

  10. 613 The Evil says:

    Dwarves are cool, elves suck.

  11. IvanKaramazov says:

    Two-thirds of women don’t know what “wherefore” means. Probably also true for men. Fascinating.

    I wonder what influence (if any) being unskippable has on the data. (The first and fourth above are skippable; the second and third are not.)

  12. Renegade Researcher says:

    Hooray for Josh! His Point 1 is the winner here.

    I can’t reiterate too often that these differences usually don’t mean a change in people’s characteristics as a change in the population being tested.

  13. You forgot to mention that Galadriel is the grandmother of Arwen, who married Aragorn, a descendent of Elros, Elrond’s brother and great grandchild of Luthien. ;)

  14. What about women’s access to the correct answers? I know I’m guilty of a Google search or two during these types of questions, just to make sure I got it right. It seems to me like women that are college-aged and a little bit older are more likely to look an answer up on the internet than more mature women would be. My mother’s generation tends to shrug off questions that they can’t answer, whereas my girlfriends and I always look things up online when we’re not sure.

  15. Susan says:

    Yes, you do learn something in college but who’s to say that you wouldn’t learn as much traveling? U may not have the advice in direction from a more experienced person but there’s something to be said for learning on your own through real life experiences.
    A person who reads more is more apt to have a bigger, more advanced vocabulary.

    Why aren’t there any games here? Or maybe a merging of okc & a shareware game site could benefit from offering breaks from the other.

    Ima shutup now.. there’s a game calling my name .. I think.. yeah.. it knows my name..

  16. Phil says:

    you’re neglecting data bias… the most important implicit fact of the graph(s) is that it is primarily “non-attached” women that are posting here, not ALL women.
    The graph doesnt show that older women in general, answer the questions less correctly than the 20-year-olds.. it says that the “AVAILABLE” older women answer the questions less correctly.

    Which implies that after 20, the “smart ones” rapidly find themselves a lasting relationship, leaving the less smart ones scrambling.

    So much for “men arent interested in intelligent women”….

  17. chloe says:

    I happen to fall into the cohort of women who didn’t know the question about centred triangular numbers. I googled the series to find out the answer. The reason for women of my age not getting this one right is NOT because we are dumb but because it was not part of our mathematical education. The answer to this series cannot be determined by looking merely to the given intergers which any woman of my age group would be able to do and probably more easily than younger women because we came up when calculators were NOT allowed eg. sums or differences, squares etc. That the answer would be the total of nested points of an inverted triangle just was not part of our math education. So, while your statistics do tell a story, the story is not always the simple one you describe.

  18. bladerunner_2 says:

    I’m getting frightened by the suggestions about college education and cross-referencing this with “amount of education obtained”.
    All of these questions (except maybe the Shakespeare quote) are high school level.
    The fact that 10-18% of people in ANY age cohort or education level get the Earth/Sun question wrong is terrifying.
    Do we need a Jeff Foxworthy “You might not be smarter than the average OKC dater if…”

    As to “Did dinosaurs exist?”, why not crosstabulate that with religion, religious fervor, and state/country?

  19. aimeedanger says:

    I think another factor nobody is considering is that women in their early-to-mid 20s just got out of college while women in their 30s have been away from college for 10 years or so. How well do YOU retain information? Anybody care to take their SAT right now to see how high their score is?

    Granted, some of the questions are a bit obvious (sun vs. earth… wow) but still. I wonder how much greater the drop-off is for women/men in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.

  20. wakka wakka says:

    It’s well established that raw cognitive ability declines steadily in all people beginning in the mid-late twenties. The series question is probably a good test of that–either you can figure it out, or you can’t. It has little to do with education.

    The other questions, however, point toward a selection bias or cohort effect. Unlike raw ability which is best in the twenties, knowledge doesn’t begin to decline until late old age (some studies say never). There’s no reason why older people should have a harder time recalling the meaning of wherefore if they had been previously exposed to it. There’s probably a huge drop off in educational achievement among active OKCupid users after 30 or so.