Yes but 130 is already at the near top most successful professionals are well below that.
Half the population is below 100 IQ with over a third being between 85 and 100.
Top higher education institutions only score slightly above 115 on average 130 which is a whole bracket over that is exceptional even for places that are selectively biased towards higher IQ scores.
I think that's the assumption people are making when they select the 130s range (which the original study apparently explained as "above average). More people aspire to socialise with their existing friends and family and be a bit smarter than them than aspire to trade their existing friends for what they perceive as a nerd clique (and the ability to solve really difficult mathematics problems isn't adequate compensation for that)
Getting into an Olympic team and even passing the qualifiers isn’t the same as winning gold or even any medal.
2% of top performers in their sports can qualify for an Olympic (summer games) team spot.
And no we’re not even talking about extreme cases like those that happen in the winter games from time to time.
Also remember your selection pool if you think the top 2% of professional competitive swimmers in say 100M can’t get into the olympics again check their scores vs the Olympic qualifiers.
We are already discussing a relatively very small pool of subjects here.
>For comparison being in the top 2% of any Olympic sport would land you a spot in most Olympic teams.
Being in the top 2% of performers in a given sport qualifies you national and even international achievements, if you chose to follow that or not it’s up to you.
But in any case top 2% of any group is by definition exceptional.
Last time I’ve chdcked in the US Ivy League was only slightly above the “normal” IQ upper limit which is currently set at 115.
85-115 is considered “normal” with 85 being the lower limit for what one would consider a functional adult and 115 is the upper limit around which most of the successful professionals will be hanging around.
Scoring in the top 2% of correctly normalized and clinically evaluated IQ tests is quite exceptional.
SAT scores do not actually correlate well to IQ scores directly and the higher you go the larger the actual distribution and variance is.
In fact if we take your study then the 120-130 IQ range correlates to an ACT score range of between ~20 and ~70.
If we take the ACT numbers they had for “study 2” which was conducted on 150 psychology students in a private university which is a highly selective group already you have an IQ range of 100-120 with the majority being between 105 and 115.
A normalized average IQ across the three main domains (verbal, spatial and math) of 130 or higher is unlikely even for Harvard, the only real good study we have for Harvard is the Carson study which used psychometric tests to measure IQ and it got an average of 122 amongst PHD graduates in exact sciences.
For all intents and purposes a clinical psychometric IQ score of 130 is exceptional even for elite school, STEM PHD graduates.
