Education & Intelligence: Causal perception
For a long time we have generally associated education with several life outcomes, including a person’s occupation. Many people have always perceived education as a proxy for intelligence – in fact, the terms education and intelligence are oftentimes being used interchangeably on the internet.
As a result of Stereotyping Bias (a fixed and oversimplified belief about a group of people), a candidate’s educational achievements have oftentimes resulted in the candidate being either rejected or hired for a job, as companies perceived this as an accurate indicator of intelligence (IQ).
Breaking the bias
Over the last ten years, many studies have been conducted to refute this causal perception. On top of that, many studies have already proven that education is a very poor indicator of job performance.*
The correlation between education and job performance is only 0.10, against a correlation between cognitive ability (GMA) and job performance of 0.65.
With Equalture, we want to break these biases, as looking beyond a candidate’s educational achievements will significantly improve fairness. For that reason, we have decided to conduct a studyourselves, making use of our own internal data set.
Download research paper here:
*Schmidt, F. L. (2016). The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 100 Years of Research Findings.
