Congoids and Engineering

by David Sims

THERE ARE ABOUT 98,000 bachelor’s degrees in engineering given annually in the United States, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. As an article in the journal Black Enterprise, 3,500 (3.57%) of them are given to Blacks, who comprise 12.5% of the US population. The reason for the disparity isn’t “racism,” nor is it poverty. Throwing money at this kind of “gap” will do no good at all. Indeed, if you throw money at it, you will incentivize the kind of corruption that brought about the 2010 CRCT cheating scandal in the Atlanta Public Schools.

There’s a kind of honesty test in politics. Those who affirm that IQ tests are good predictors of the capacity for acquiring intellectual skills and of the overall level of performance in mentally demanding jobs are honest. Those who deny it, or who waffle about “uncertainties,” are dishonest.

A century’s worth of intelligence testing has consistently demonstrated that the races are, generally speaking, unequal in metrics used to measure intelligence, the most important of which is IQ.

According to a study* using the Revised Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children test (the WISC-R), the average intelligence for White males is 103.08 ±14.54. Meanwhile, studies of IQ among Blacks resident in the United States have mostly clustered around a mean value of 85.0 with a typical standard deviation of 13.0**.

( * Arthur Jensen and Cecil Reynolds, “Sex Differences on the WISC-R,” Person. Individ. Diff., Vol 4, No. 2, pp. 223-226, 1983.)

( ** Ibid; and Gulf Coast Commentary for 3 March 2013.)

The math should be very simple for people who are qualified to be engineers.

The fraction, f, of a race having an average IQ of x̄ and a standard deviation in IQ of σ, which is above the minimum IQ of μ.

f(μ) = [σ√(2π)]⁻¹ ∫(μ,∞) exp{ −[(x−x̄)/σ]²/2 } dx

Taking advantage of the normal distribution’s symmetry, we make it more easily integrable.

f(μ) = ½ − [σ√(2π)]⁻¹ ∫(x̄,μ) exp{ −[(x−x̄)/σ]²/2 } dx

You can avoid integrating the probability density function if you have a handy error function to call.

f(μ) = 1 − ½ { 1 + erf [(μ−x̄)/(σ√2)] }

Let us say that an employer wants to hire engineers. He decides that a minimum IQ of 130 is required for satisfactory job performance. He lives in a demographically average part of the United States, where the ratio of Whites to Blacks is 5.50. Using the normal distributions for Whites and Blacks shown above, we can find the fraction of Whites and of Blacks in the local labor pool who would be mentally qualified to take the job.

We’d expect that 3.205% of the Whites would have IQs of 130 or more.

We’d expect that 0.02685% of the Blacks would have IQs of 130 or more.

Were the local population evenly divided in number between Blacks and Whites, we would find in it 119.4 times more qualified Whites than qualified Blacks. However, since there are 5.5 Whites for each Black in the local population, the employer will, if he uses no “racial bias” whatsoever, hire 656.5 times more Whites than Blacks.

Now let’s suppose that it takes an IQ of 115 or more to earn a bachelor’s degree in engineering — and I mean earn it honestly. We’d expect that 20.62% of Whites and 1.051% of Blacks would be capable of this feat. Since Whites outnumber Blacks in the US by a ratio of 5.5, we can say that the ratio of Whites to Blacks who will honestly earn a bachelor’s degree in engineering should be close to 108. Excluding other races for simplicity, that means slightly under 1% of bachelor’s degrees in engineering should be going to Blacks.

As mentioned above, currently 3.57% of bachelor’s degrees in engineering are going to Blacks. That means that either or both of two things must be true: 1) a lot of Black “engineers” got their degrees with a certain amount of CRCT-cheating-scandal dishonesty; or 2) the curriculum for a bachelor’s degree in engineering has been significantly watered down (so that persons having IQs of only 101.0 or higher can attain the degree).

The goal recently set by the National Society of Black Engineers, of 10,000 bachelor’s degrees earned by Blacks, can be achieved only under one or more of the following conditions: 1) Blacks in general desire engineering as a profession at rates they heretofore have not exhibited; 2) the college curriculum for engineering degrees is much further simplified, likely to the point where most of the “graduates” would be useless for actual engineering purposes; or 3) Blacks in undergraduate engineering programs begin cheating more than they already do.

Fun Fact: the average IQ of both White and Black SAT-takers is 13 points higher than the average IQ for his/her race. The average IQ for US-resident Whites is (about) 100, but the average IQ for white SAT-takers is 113. The average IQ for US-resident Blacks is 85, but the average IQ for black SAT-takers is 98.

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