Another point from my new FAQ on the Richwine whoop-tee-doo in Taki's Magazine.
Q. Who cares about test scores besides the Ivy League?
A. The military. A disproportionate number of Hispanics don’t qualify to enlist. A 2009 RAND Corporation report for the National Defense Research Institute to look into this sizable problem, Military Enlistment of Hispanic Youth: Obstacles and Opportunities, found that “Hispanics are underrepresented among military recruits.”
A major reason for this is that to get into the military these days, you have to score on the Pentagon’s entrance exam (the AFQT) at least at the 31st percentile (what the Pentagon calls Category IIIB). RAND reported:
Only 36 percent of young Hispanic high school graduates would score in AFQT Category IIIB [31st percentile] or above, compared with 68 percent of white high school graduates. A key implication of this result is that increasing the high school graduation rate among Hispanic youth may not lead to comparable increases in enlistment eligibility. [Bold mine.]
Note that this comparison excludes the large percentage of young Hispanic high school dropouts. So, 64% of Hispanic high school graduates (in the major 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth study funded by the federal government) score in the bottom 30% of the AFQT, versus 32% of white high school graduates. Now, problems with the English language are an issue that sap Hispanic performance on the AFQT to some extent, but we're still talking about Hispanic high school graduates here, not dropouts.
Also, the NLSY97's sample consisted of 9,000 kids from 12 to 16 on 12/31/96. So, it doesn't include immigrants who arrived after that age, and, I suspect, it would be light on illegal immigrants and even children of illegal immigrants, whose parents probably wouldn't be as quick to volunteer them for a study where the federal government tracks how they are doing each years for the rest of their lives.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics issues annual reports on how its NLSY97 sample is doing in life as they reach each additional year of age. The 2013 report looked at progress by age 25:
At age 25, there was a large difference in educational attainment among racial and ethnic groups. NonHispanic blacks and Hispanics were about twice as likely as whites to be high school dropouts in the October they were age 25. In comparison, whites were more than twice as likely as blacks or Hispanics to have received their bachelor's degree by this age. Thirty percent of whites had received their bachelor's degree, compared with 14 percent of blacks and 12 percent of Hispanics.
That's not horrible, but getting slightly less education than African-Americans isn't good, either. As I point out in my FAQ in Taki's, because Hispanics average higher overall on IQ tests than blacks, they ought to be getting more years of education than blacks get. Thus, IQ testing implies that Hispanic educational achievement is being depressed by the Hispanic culture of apathy toward education, which is something that could be fixed in the very long run -- an insight for which everybody ought to thank the IQ testing experts, not sneer at them.
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http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-bret-easton-ellis-out-gay-elite-20130514,0,5341223.story
Magic Homo.
LOSING OUR FUTURE:
How Minority Youth Are Being Left
Behind by the Graduation Rate Crisis
A Joint Release By:
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University
The Urban Institute
Advocates for Children of New York
The Civil Society Institute
National Graduation Rates By Race and Gender
Black Female: 56.2
Black Male: 42.8
All Blacks: 50.2
Hispanic Female: 58.5
Hispanic Male: 48
All Hispanics: 53.2
***************
***************
***************
Bottom line: At a bare minimum, the AFQT wants to see an IQ of 93 for a passing score.
More than 50% of all Hispanic males drop out of high school.
Fewer than 50% of all Hispanic males graduate from high school.
So less than 50% of 36% = LESS THAN 18% of all Hispanic males have IQs greater than or equal to 93.
Which, with a standard deviation of 15, puts the center of their bell curve down in the high 70s, as I have often argued here at iSteve.
BTW, an IQ of 93 corresponds roughly to what we math nerds would consider about second grade level [7-year-old] academics - the ability to have a rudimentary understanding of what subtraction amounts to, but struggling mightily with multiplication [3rd grade, 8-year-old] and being just about completely incapable of grasping what division [4th grade, 9-year-old] is all about.
In effect, these people are not zero marginal productivity workers but workers who can only be useful and employed when there is absolutely no one left to hire.
The US military may be the only institution with unbroken continuity to colonial times. I have a friend whose family has a military history extending back to the War of Jenkins' Ear. The AFQT is in place to preserve this continuity and to prevent Navy squids from firing torpedoes at cruise ships.
trust hurts, I guess.
Back in the mid-70s, some sailors on a guided missile cruiser not that far off of Los Angeles got drunk on torpedo juice and fired off one or more missiles for the hell of it.
Depressing with a capital D.
I have a pretty good feel for what is happening at that cutoff line. My fourth son, who we adopted from Romania when he was 14, joined the USMC with a qualifying score just above that (The Marines have a slightly higher cutoff). He got the worst jobs there.
When he arrived, he was unable to do much arithmetic, but with drill was able to make it through Algebra 1. His spatial abilities were decent. English was his third language, but he developed a fair vocabulary and decent feel for it. He's got some capabilities. He can fix stuff, he can learn stuff. But to those used to highly verbal collegiate types, he just isn't there. He could just barely learn the electronics for auto mechanic school (which is getting to be like rocket repair these days). 93 isn't high. (Math nerd Anon is wrong about the 2nd-grade stuff, however. You can do multiplication and division at IQ 93, just not easily).
"'Fast and Furious' May Actually Be The Best Film Of The Summer"
http://www.businessinsider.com/fast-and-furious-scored-100-on-rotten-tomatoes-2013-5
"What do "Citizen Kane" and "Fast and Furious 6" have in common?
They both have a 100% fresh rating on film review site Rotten Tomatoes."
I did one hitch, '92-'96. There were a number of guys who'd been in the service during the 1970s.
They described the US military in the 1970s as simply horrible. No discipline, no sense of mission, no concept of duty, rampant drug use, wearing short wigs to cover long hair, just a paycheck, three hots and a cot. It was all as alien to me as hearing my grandparents talk about the Great Depression.
Just another world.
Whatever the military is doing to screen applicants, it seems to be working. There are a ton of Hispanic NCOs, especially in the Army and Marines, and nearly all of them I've met are super-patriotic and competent guys. If employers were smart they'd look for military experience in their minority hires (a surprisingly large percentage of the black and Hispanic guys working in Hollywood are military veterans as well.)
So, I guess guys like Andrew Sullivan don't think the military administers a test that tells them anything worth knowing?
"They described the US military in the 1970s as simply horrible."
One big problem was that from 1976-1980, the Pentagon issued the wrong norms for converting AFQT scores into percentiles, so the military let in a lot of people of extremely low IQ. The Pentagon then paid the NLSY79 people to give the new AFQT to their sample in 1980, and used these new norms to keep out the nitwits, with a rapid increase in the professionalism of the forces in the 1980s. That NLSY79 AFQT data is what The Bell Curve is built around, by the way.
One big problem was that from 1976-1980, the Pentagon issued the wrong norms for converting AFQT scores into percentiles, so the military let in a lot of people of extremely low IQ
The big problem back then was the lingering anti-military sentiment left over from the Vietnam War. That hindered recruiting efforts for the newly volunteer military. Consequently the military had to take lesser individuals which lead to a poorer force and reinforced the negative image of the military in the public eye.
It took Reagan, his bigger budgets, a recession, and a revival of patriotism to make more highly qualified individuals choose to serve.
Hispanic culture of apathy toward education, which is something that could be fixed in the very long run -- an insight for which everybody ought to thank the IQ testing experts, not sneer at them.
Do we want Hispanics to follow Blacks down the road to educational and employment dreams that appear to be beyond their actual ability? The huge gap in college attendence between black women and men contributes (and is a consequence of) their unstable communities. Yale or Jail could do more harm to hispanics than blacks, because few Hispanics seem to have the extraverted, egotistic personality types that many blacks try to substitute for intelligence. Maybe we'll get lucky and they will be happy mowing lawns and scrubbing toilets forever. They've been happy enough as peons in Latin America. Their new Anglo and, with 10% or so of the illegals living in LA, Jewish upper class may be able to use them more effectively and humanely than the off-white elites in their homeland.
If they're too dumb to enlist, then they won't be on the track to become police. Very few will go to law school. They won't have many hands on the levers of power. Who will advocate against the privilege of the LA elite?
Maybe once their legal sociopathic employers will have less of an advantage over decent people, and the upper class won't become more like the Latin ones.
But the dumbest thing to do is send 20-something college-educated white women to try raise the ninos for college in lieu of having children. They're going to do it, just to try to prove Richwine wrong.
Should we pregame on the coming 'Hispanics get low SAT scores. What can be done?' Richwine must have checked out SAT scores. If Latino SAT scores improve to white levels, then no one should listen to paleos and evos ever. But if they don't go up, then the Winos were right. After the 7/7 bombings the BNP had flyers that showed blown up subways and said something like, 'This wouldn't have happened if you listened to the BNP.' That didn't go over well since it sounded like gloating. But could we get the elite to be more explicit that they might lose the country to the backlash if they're wrong.
Silver lining: that means 64% of the illegals amongst the Hispanic HS grads can't get a green card and then citizenship by serving in the military.
A recruit with a below cutoff intelligence score can get a waiver and still join. Samoan guys routinely get these kinds of waivers. Guys even in the 15th percentile will be waived on. Samoans are known for signing the contract and making it the whole way through and volunteering for infantry during a war to boot.
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