This unavoidable statistical fact undermines the main rationale of HCES: extremely high-IQ adults cannot be accurately selected as kindergartners on the basis of a simple test. This greater-regression problem can be lessened by the use of additional variables in admissions, such as parental IQs or high-quality genetic polygenic scores; unfortunately, these are either politically unacceptable or dependent on future scientific advances. This suggests that such elementary schools may not be a good use of resources and HCES students should not be assigned scarce magnet high school slots.

Secondly, and more seriously, the lack of accomplishment is inherent and unavoidable as it is driven by the regression to the mean caused by the relatively low correlation of early childhood with adult IQs—which means their sample is far less elite as adults than they believe. Using early-childhood/adult IQ correlations, regression to the mean implies that HCES students will fall from a mean of 157 IQ in kindergarten (when selected) to somewhere around 133 as adults (and possibly lower). Further demonstrating the role of regression to the mean, in contrast, HCES’s associated high-IQ/gifted-and-talented high school, Hunter High, which has access to the adolescents’ more predictive IQ scores, has much higher achievement in proportion to its lesser regression to the mean (despite dilution by Hunter elementary students being grandfathered in).

First, their standards fall prey to a base-rate fallacy and even extreme predictive value of IQ would not predict 1 or more Nobel prizes because Nobel prize odds are measured at 1 in millions, and with a small total sample size of a few hundred, it is highly likely that there would simply be no Nobels.

I suggest that there is no puzzle to this absence nor anything for HCES to be blamed for, as the absence is fully explainable by their making two statistical errors: base-rate neglect , and regression to the mean .

Genius Revisited documents the longitudinal results of a high-IQ/gifted-and-talented elementary school, Hunter College Elementary School (HCES); one of the most striking results is the general high education & income levels, but absence of great accomplishment on a national or global scale (eg a Nobel prize). The authors suggest that this may reflect harmful educational practices at their elementary school or the low predictive value of IQ.

Hunter College Elementary School (HCES) is a famously selective elementary school in New York City which since the 1940s has enrolled exclusively gifted children. Genius Revisited: High IQ Children Grown Up, by Subotnik, Kassan, Summers & Wasser 1993 is a short (142 pages) book reporting the results of a longitudinal/followup study in 1988 of 210 of the 600 1948–1960 alumni of HCES who had reached their 40s or so. (See also the brief more statistically-oriented report of the survey results in “High IQ children at midlife: An investigation into the generalizability of Terman’s genetic studies of genius”, Subotnik et al 1989; for a overview of gifted education with some mention of the HCES results, see Subotnik et al 2011.)

Hunter Elementary is a small elementary school in New York City enrolling ~50 students each year starting in preschool/kindergarten since the 1940s, who then typically enroll in the associated Hunter College High School, itself associated with Hunter College. Hunter Elementary is famous for extremely stringent admission based on IQ tests, yielding a student body with a mean IQ in the 150s (or around 1-in-10,000); the gifted students are taught a wide-ranging and enriched curriculum designed for gifted children. (If you’ve ever read about helicopter or tiger moms in Manhattan training their kids on IQ tests to get them into an elite kindergarten, Hunter Elementary is one of the kindergartens they have in mind.) As such, Hunter Elementary students might be expected to be extremely interesting and highlight the effects of great intelligence on one’s life: as they all are selected young and relatively systematically from NYC children, such a longitudinal study is going to be much more reliable than other attempts at studying high intelligence using cross-sectional or ad hoc recruitment from child psychologists.

Aside from trying to track down a reference for Murray’s Jewish claim (which turned out to not be mentioned in the book aside from the overall Jewish percentage), while a high school for the gifted makes sense, I had some doubts about whether such an elementary school made sense and was curious how it had turned out.

I came across Genius Revisited while looking into the question of inferring ethnic composition of the SMPY/TIP samples based on the high cutoff threshold and becoming intrigued by a mention by Charles Murray in his article “Jewish Genius” of a NYC elementary school with mean IQ >150 where 24 of the 28 highest scoring students were Jewish, an elementary school I didn’t remember ever seeing mentioned in discussions of high IQs/life outcomes, and ordered a copy. (Jewish overrepresentation is also mentioned by Terman in noting that even among the 3 grades of his selected high-IQ children, Jewish children were nevertheless 3x overrepresented in the top ‘A’ class; while Terman ascribes it to “heavy pressure to succeed, with the result that he [the Jewish child] accomplishes more per unit of intelligence than do children of any other racial stock” , this is equally explainable by measurement error, particularly of his early childhood IQ tests.)

Research strongly supports the high predictive power of IQ for adult accomplishment. We can also note in general that the NYC magnet high schools like Stuyvesant are justly famous for the accomplishments of alumni, as are the French schools like the Lycée Louis-le-Grand (feeders into the grandes écoles like ENS ) or the Russian Kolmogorov school ( Chubarikov & Pyryt 1993 ) at Moscow University; and the rate of alumni accomplishment only increases when one considers highly-intellectually-selective institutions of higher education like Caltech or MIT .

Parallel to the Hunter Elementary students, but much better known are the Terman study (young, relatively low IQ), Anne Roe’s studies of world-class scientists (generally in their 40s or 50s), and the SMPY and TIP longitudinal studies (almost identical cutoffs but measured in middle school ~12yo using SATs, similar to Hunter High admission); some relevant publications:

To summarize the results: contrary to stereotypes that “bookish, nerdy, socially inept, absentminded, emotionally dense, arrogant and unfriendly, and that they are loners”, high IQ children are physically and psychologically healthy, if not healthier; they are often socially capable; adult accomplishment and eminence increase with greater intelligence, with no particular ‘threshold’ visible at places like IQ 130, and even with extremely high ability in all areas, people tend to eventually specialize in their greatest strength which is their comparative advantage; happiness is not particularly greater; male and female differences in achievement exist but are at least partially driven by other sex-linked differences in preferences, particularly choice of field and work-life balance; particular ethnicities are under or overrepresented as one would calculate using the normal distribution from the study-specific cutoffs and ethnic means; and overall educational credentials are much more common in the later groups than the earlier ones.

So what does Genius Revisited report? In general, it is surprisingly light on detailed quantification or analysis. Income and education are reported only cursorily; adult achievements are not gone into any sort of detail or categorization only than vague generalizations about there being lots of doctors, professors, and executives etc. They do not report adult IQs, or attempt any statistical analysis to compare IQs at admittance, graduation, or when contacted as adults, whether some subtests predict adult accomplishment better than others, whether there were differential regressions to the mean or whether there was any regression to the mean observed by graduation , or comparison of any dropouts/transfers with the students who graduated Hunter Elementary and continued to Hunter High; the questionnaires are based on the old Terman questionnaires and don’t seem well focused to investigate modern concerns in gifted education or individual differences psychology. For reporting on a study of a school whose entire raison d’être is that it is a high-IQ school, the discussion of IQ is remarkably unsophisticated and naive, neglecting the most basic considerations, like adjusting for measurement error or considering that stringent selection on any variable implies extremely large regression to the mean. (The phrases “regression to the mean” or “measurement error” appear nowhere in the book.)

From this perspective, the book is quite a disappointment, as there are not many high IQ longitudinal datasets around—yet they waste the opportunity. Some further details and more fine-grained categorization of a few of the hundred variables collected are reported in Subotnik et al 1989 but the treatment is much less than it could have been.

What it does do is attempt as a sort of narrative ethnography by piecing together many quotes from the students about their Hunter Elementary experience and later life. This is interesting to me on a personal level because my parents had considered sending me to the Long Island School for the Gifted but ultimately decided against it; so in a way, reading their memories is a glimpse of a path not taken. The picture that emerges confirms in many respects the portrait of children in Terman/SMPY/TIP: the children are healthy, well-socialized, enjoy outdoor sports (particularly hiking); girls tend to not prefer the stereotypical childhood activities like dolls (which is interesting given SMPY results related to testosterone); reading is, of course, everyone’s favorite hobby, especially to help with researching their other hobbies; the burden of being labeled a ‘genius’ or ‘prodigy’ bothered some but apparently not most of them; students remembered Hunter Elementary extremely fondly and were glad to have gone there rather than regular school, although opinions on how Hunter Elementary could have been better are amusingly equally divided in Subotnik et al’s recounting (a good compromise leaves everyone unhappy); teachers likewise regarded teaching there as a “plum assignment”, as the students were highly cooperative, enthusiastic, almost always well-behaved, soaked up material like sponges, and would happily go off on tangents like debating the strategic value of Australia during WWII (in other words, what any would-be teacher dreams of teaching, instead of getting a class of bored, sleepy kids who act out and forget things the second you explain them); many students deliberately did not pursue the most demanding adult careers to have a work-life balance, particularly the women, with the usual differences in subject-area preferences; women were, as predicted given the later era than Terman, far more likely to pursue higher education and some sort of employment; students are highly successful, but none seemed particularly extraordinarily successful.

There is also a short comparison with Hunter Elementary in the 1990s; apparently much the same as in the 1960s, with the main interesting change that Hunter Elementary has added a racial quota for black students, but Subotnik et al claim that the mean IQ scores have not fallen substantially. It would be interesting to know exactly how much it has fallen, how many of the black students have immigrant parents, and how many students are now of East Asian descent.

Overall, the writing is clear and there is, if anything, insufficient technical jargon. Some dry humor appears in spots (eg in Subotnik et al 1989, a wry comment on rent control and the difficulties of longitudinal studies: “the only addresses on file were those of the parents while the child attended the school. Fortunately, given the state of the New York City housing market, checking those addresses against the 1988 Manhattan phone book proved to be fairly productive”).

Disappointingly average Subotnik et al generally seem to hold what has been called the ‘resource’ model of gifted education: high IQ children have much better odds of growing up into the great movers & shakers and thinkers of the world who have disproportionate influence on what happens (definitely); that special measures such as enriched education, schools with peers in intelligence, and accelerated courses will increase the yield of great (maybe); and that the increase justifies the upfront expenses (uncertain). By success, they have high standards; Gallagher’s foreword speaks for the rest of the book when it says: The authors were disappointed to discover that although this sample succeeded admirably in traditional terms, with its share of physicians, lawyers, and professors, there were no creative rebels to shake society out of its complacency or revolutionize a field. Further: Norbert Wiener, in his book The Autobiography of an Ex-Genius [actually, Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth & I Am Mathematician], detailed his unhappy family life with a domineering father and enough personal problems to be in and out of mental institutions. Yet, it was this Norbert Wiener who gave the world cybernetics that revolutionized our society. What if he had had a happy family life with a warm and agreeable father? One is left to wonder whether Wiener would have had the drive and motivation to make this unique contribution. The same question can be posed for these Hunter College Elementary School graduates. Are many of them too satisfied, too willing to accept the superior rewards that their ability and opportunity have provided for them? What more could they have accomplished if they had a “psychological worm” eating inside them—whether that worm was low self-concept or a need to prove something to someone or to the world—that would have driven these people to greater efforts. What if their aptitudes had been challenged in a more hard-driving manner, like Wiener’s experience, into the development of a specific talent? This book raises many significant, sometimes disturbing issues… The authors raise some disturbing issues regarding the purposes of schools for the gifted. Indeed, just what is the contemporary rationale for funding schools or programs for the highly gifted student? If one is looking to such an institution as a source of leading students towards societal leadership (or, as the authors suggest, “a path to eminence”), then the Hunter College Elementary School of the past failed to realize such an aspiration. Indeed, this goal may well be beyond the reach of any elementary school…the [Hunter College] High School seeks to enhance students’ commitment to intellectual rigor and growth, develop opportunities for specialization, and commitment to caring and compassion. Will such a rationale foster more students down the path towards genius? The research literature and the current study would indicate that such a condition is a necessary but not sufficient condition to move students into making ground-breaking discoveries or toward professional eminence. Does it follow then that such schools should not exist? Or at least, not at public expense? I would vigorously argue against both reactions. This appraisal of failure has been echoed by people citing Genius Revisited like Malcolm Gladwell. This fits with the general description of the Hunter Elementary cohort on pg3–4: The mean IQ of the Hunter sample was 157, or approximately 3.5 standard deviations above the mean, with a range of 122 to 196 on the L-M form. …Each class at Hunter College Elementary School from the years 1948 to 1960 contained about 50 students, yielding a total possible population of 600 graduates…35% of the total population of 1948–1960 HCES students (n=210) completed and returned study questionnaires …Religious Affiliation: The Hunter group is approximately 62% Jewish, although they describe themselves as Jews more in terms of ethnic identity than religious practice. The group, as a whole, is not religious. Educational Attainments: Over 80% of the study participants held at least a Master’s degree. Furthermore, 40% of the women and 68% of the men held either a Ph.D, LL.B., J.D., or M.D. degree. Occupation and Income: Only two of the HCES women identified themselves primarily as homemakers. 53% were professionals, working as a teacher at the college or pre-college level, writer (journalist, author, editor), or psychologist. The same proportion of HCES men were professionals, serving as lawyers, medical doctors, or college teachers. The median income for men in 1988 was $75,000 (range = $500,000) and for women $40,000 (range = $169,000). Income levels were significantly different for men and women, even when matched by profession. For example, the median income for male college teachers or psychologists was $50,000 and for females, $30,000 By regular standards, this is a remarkably high degree of accomplishment. Even now, only a small fraction of the population can be said to hold a “Ph.D, LL.B., J.D., or M.D.”, but in the Hunter Elementary cohort, you could hardly throw a rock without hitting a professor (16% of men), who would then be able to turn to the person standing next to them to have their wound treated (18% doctors), and turn to the person on the other side in order to sue you for assault (20% lawyers). For this cohort, the education baseline would be more like <7%, not >80%. Subotnik et al 1989 breaks it down a little more precisely in Table 2 “Highest Degree Attained”: for men, 4% not available, 20% Bachelors, 43% Masters, 40% Ph.D/L.L.B./J.D./M.D. The income levels are also sky-high: in 1988, median household income would’ve been ~$50,000, and the ranges like $500,000 indicate that Hunter Elementary incomes stem from life choices and career preferences as much as any limits from ability. But it doesn’t fit the definition of great accomplishments. They mention no one winning a Nobel, or a Pulitzer, or being globally famous. Thus, in a real sense, Hunter Elementary has failed, and with it (the authors imply), the idea that IQ is the driving force behind greatness; thus, Subotnik et al spend much of the book, and other publications, pondering what is missing. If IQ is merely a necessary factor or threshold, but one that still leaves such a high chance of an ordinary life, what really makes the difference? Is the crucial ingredient a drive for mastery? Did Hunter Elementary accidentally quash students’ ambitions for a lifetime by de-emphasizing competition and grades? Or (as the other half of surveyed students maintained), did it have too much competition and broke the students mentally? Was Hunter Elementary too well-equipped a cocoon, leaving students unprepared for Hunter High and the real world, or not enough? Did the home environment determine this, or the curriculum? Did the broad academic curriculum leave students ‘a mile wide and an inch deep’ and lacking in fundamentals acquired by drilling and repetition?

Sample size But should we declare it a failure, considering the parallel lines of evidence from Roe, SMPY, and TIP? The mentioned standard is a high bar indeed. What percentage of the population can be truly said to ‘revolutionize a field’? It’s a lifetime’s work just to truly understand a field and reach the research frontier and make a meaningful contribution, and most of the population generally doesn’t even try but pursue other goals. Out of 600 students, is it reasonable to consider the Hunter Elementary experiment a failure because none has (yet—the Nobel Prize is increasingly delayed by decades)? As Gallagher then points out: …Yet, there are very few such individuals alive in any particular era. The statistical odds against any one of them having graduated from one elementary school in New York City is great. Whether the “creative rebel” would have survived the selection process at Hunter, or any similar school, is one of those remaining questions that should puzzle and intrigue us. If we consider the STEM Nobel Prizes, the USA has perhaps 1 per million people. So if even 1 HCES student had won a STEM Nobel out of 210, or 600, that would imply an enormous increase in odds ratio of >1666 (116001000000); or to put it another, if we genuinely expected 1 or more Nobels from our HCES alumni, then to achieve that >1666 increases in odds with only +57 early-childhood IQ points, we’d also have to believe something along the lines of each individual IQ point on average increasing the odds by 29x! And of course, if we did believe in such effect sizes, we would still frequently expect to observe a HCES-sized cohort to not win a Nobel (eg if we had expected 1 Nobel prize per 600, for a probability of 1⁄600 per student, then the probability of seeing 0 Nobels in n=600 is high: (1−1600)600=0.367; to drive the non-Nobel probability down to <5%, we would have to expect >=3 Nobels per 600). One is reminded of the oft-head criticism of the Terman study for failing to enroll William Shockley & Luis Alvarez, the former of whose known IQ test scores as an 8–9yo fell short by ~11 points of the nominal threshold (or 6 points for special-cases Terman might admit): a sample of hardly 1500 children, whose selection was inevitably imperfect , particularly when pioneering longitudinal studies, is supposed to contain all the Nobelists from a population at least 100 times the size (the screening population was nominally >168,000 Californian children), or else this debunks IQ somehow. What method of selection could accomplish this feat is never specified, nor do critics concede that it is impressive that IQ tests could come so close to picking out the children in elementary school who had a chance of many decades later becoming Nobelists despite all the limitations the Terman study labored under (like using a verbal-heavy IQ test). From a purely statistical perspective, given what is known about the instability of childhood test scores and regression to the mean and the relatively small Terman sample combined with the extreme rarity of Nobel prizes and randomness, the Terman study would be expected to miss at least one future Nobelist the majority of the time (Warne et al 2019). So it’s unclear how much weight we ought to put on the apparent ‘failure’ of the HCES alumni, because even the ludicrously optimistic model is consistent with often seeing ‘failure’.

Alumni How many people from Hunter Elementary and from Hunter High come anywhere close to being nationally famous? If we were to double-check in Wikipedia by looking for Notable people whose entries link to Hunter Elementary, perhaps because they were students there, we find painter Margaret Lefranc, linguist E. Adelaide Hahn, and minor actor Fred Melamed, and Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan (but while her mother taught at Hunter Elementary, she herself went to Hunter College High School—along with at least 95 other Notable people). I later learned that Hamilton star Lin-Manuel Miranda and scientist Adam Cohen also went to Hunter Elementary as well as High. Triple-checking in Google, this does seem to be a fair accounting—no billionaires or Nobelists suddenly pop out. If we were to judge by Wikipedia entries, it would seem that Hunter Elementary can claim around 5 Notable alumni while Hunter High can claim 96. (Checking the 96 WP entries by hand, most omit mention of the elementary school or whether they passed exams to get into Hunter High, but the ones who do always specify exams or a non-Hunter Elementary; only 1 entry, the group entry for the hip-hop band Dujeous, turns out to include a Hunter Elementary member: Loren Hammonds/“Mojo the Cinematic”. Overall, this comparison may be somewhat biased against Hunter Elementary but I don’t think hugely so.) This is not because Hunter High is 32x larger than Hunter Elementary: Hunter Elementary currently accepts ~50 students per year while Hunter High currently accepts ~175 + 50 grandfathered in from Hunter Elementary (total ~225), and is only 4.5x bigger—3.5x if we exclude the Hunter Elementary alums (who do not appear in the 95+ listed, apparently). Even more strikingly, while I do not recognize the names of Lefranc, Hahn, Melamed, or Adam Cohen, I do recognize several names on the Hunter High list (Kagan, of course, but also Bruce Schneier, Mark Jason Dominus, some rappers in passing). This would imply that Hunter High grads are much more likely to achieve Notability than Hunter Elementary grads: something like 8 times more likely. Why?

Implications for gifted education Given this, we would have to conclude that the idea of a gifted & talented elementary school is difficult to justify on the resource paradigm related to focusing resources on students’ with future adult intelligence >150 as only a small fraction of such students are findable with current IQ testing methods at that age, but that it makes far more sense to screen at a later age like 11yo and concentrate resources at high school or college levels. If we concluded that the gain from better education of those 5% in an elementary school is profitable and so a Hunter-like elementary school is a good idea, we should definitely not automatically enroll all such elementary school students in a even more expensive Hunter-like high school: each such grandfathered student is worth ~1/8th an outsider student in terms of potential. It would be much better to not grandfather the elementary school students—they have already been highly advantaged by the enriched education & peers, after all, so why should they be given an additional huge advantage over all the students outside the system who are equally deserving of the chance? The main reason would seem to be some sort of ‘family’ or loyalty sentimental reasoning; if this bias cannot be overcome, the idea of a single vertically integrated feeder system may be actively harmful to gifted education.