Every Generation's Got Its Own Disease

There's this guy named Neil Howe, and I guess he's famous for writing books about the cyclical nature of generations -- you know, those groups of people that media and popular sociologists love to name Baby Boomers, Generation Xers or Millennials. Howe wrote an op-ed that ran in the Washington Post last week, and was reprinted in the Star Tribune on December 12.

In it, he asks the question, Which generation is the biggest underachiever? And he supplies an instant answer: people born between 1958 and 1965.

Of course, being born in 1959, I have to take this personally, even though Howe is talking averages (which he readily admits).

Now, I don't want to get all bent out of shape by the fact that Howe refers to those of us in this lucky cohort as Generation X, when everyone knows that we're the tail end of the baby boom, and in fact the part of the Boom with highest annual number of births of all.


From looking at Howe's website, I gather this boundary shifting is part of his general schtick. And I sympathize with it -- I've never thought the people who came of age after the Vietnam War ended had a whole lot in common with people who were in college or fighting during it.

What I do want to quibble with is Howe's methodology for determining that we are such underachievers, which is primarily based on SAT scores. He writes:

The SAT reached its all-time high in 1963, when it tested the 1946 birth cohort... Then it fell steeply for 17 straight years, hitting its all-time low in 1980, when it tested the 1963 cohort... Ever since, the SAT has been gradually if haltingly on the rise.

Wow, I thought, what a bunch of dummies we must be. I wonder what a graph of that data looks like?

So I went in search of one, expecting to find something with an obvious drop around 1980. I didn't find any graphs at all, but I did find a Wikipedia page with the scores from 1972 to 2007, and made my own. (Despite extensive searching, I couldn't find any numbers online for the 1960s through 1971.)


And darned if I didn't find that Howe was exaggerating just a bit. No big drop around 1980 -- in fact, the scores look pretty darn flat for quite a while after the initial gradual decline.

Verbal scores did drop 5% between 1972 and 1980, but since then they have been basically flat -- they haven't increased at all, and in fact were exactly the same in 2007 as they were 1980. Math scores did hit their lowest point in 1980, and since then have gone up a bit, it's true, but they peaked in 2005 and for the next two years went down, as did the verbal scores. Too soon to tell if that's a trend or an aberration.

Some other thoughts I have that might account for this (other than the laziness of my cohort):

• It's really the math scores we're talking about here, since the verbal scores have been basically flat for 30 years. And my age peers were the biggest victims of New Math. How well I remember those Venn diagrams and null sets from 7th grade.
• My small-town public school had better SAT scores than most in the area, and I remember being told that this was partly because the school limited which students took the test more than peer schools. I have no facts to back this up, but I wonder if the late '70s and early '80s weren't perhaps a time when a broader (and more generally representative) set of students started taking the tests than in earlier years.
• The increased math scores of the past dozen years or so could be partly caused by the increasingly frequent use of test preparation tutors, such as Stanley Kaplan. Researchers have found (see Briggs and answers.com, which cites a number of academic sources) that such preparation increases math scores by 13 to as much as 25 points (verbal from 6 to 15). I don't think test prep was at all common for high schoolers until some time in the '80s; according to Kaplan's site, their company really grew in the '90s.
  

Obviously, I don't know what caused the slight dip in math scores in the late '70s and early '80s. But clearly, it's more complex than a general statement that my cohort had a "smartness deficit" (yes, Howe actually used those words).

And as for the other statistics he cites to defame the group (the percentage that graduated from college, got a graduate degree, or entered law or medicine) -- well, I bet if I could see those graphs, they would be pretty darn flat, too.