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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (34042)	4/8/1999 3:22:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Mensa may be laughable because of its low qualification level, but consider the cachet that comes, these days, from being admitted to Harvard, MIT, or other ultra selective university. I knew a boy who won the prize as most outstanding freshman at Harvard. His future was pretty much assured, I guess. He became a professor like his parents and brother. He could have been a contender. A book worth looking up, as a forecast of the Bell Curve world is Michael Young, Rise of the Meritocracy.. If you look at the HR policies of my favorite companies (Intel, Dell, Cisco, Microsoft) you will see that they all have policies of hiring only people in the top 10 per cent (or so) of the IQ distribution. Major firms are going into highschools and recruiting kids with high IQ's for special treatment (part-time jobs and post graduation job guarantees. Microsoft, for instance, has programs where they train highschool kids (primarily in minority dominated schools) to become MCSE (Microsoft certified system engineer) and are guaranteed a job at, I believe, about $35,000 a year on graduation. (A survey showed that MSCE's averaged about $67,000/yr and had an average of 7 years experience in the industry.) Smart companies want smart, computer oriented employees and IQ is a marker for what they're looking for. High school chapters of Mensa may be the coming thing. I think Mensa is a two-sigma club. I think there will soon be a 3-sigma Mensa (maybe it will be called "Could have enrolled in the Ivy League Alumni Club" but it will serve the purpose of identifying a real elite. I suspect fewer people will sneer at this club than affect to sneer at Mensa.