Average IQ by College Major: Which Degrees Rank Highest?

Where do these numbers actually come from?

Short answer: not from IQ tests. They come from standardized admissions tests, then get run through a conversion.

The most-cited source is the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which publishes average GRE scores broken down by intended graduate major field. Millions of prospective graduate students take the GRE each year, and ETS reports the mean Verbal, Quantitative and Analytical Writing scores for roughly 50 broad major categories. Physical-sciences and math applicants consistently post the highest quantitative means; humanities applicants like philosophy post the highest verbal and analytical means.

The second common source is College Board SAT data by intended major, which works the same way one rung earlier, at the undergraduate-entry stage.

To turn those test scores into an "IQ," analysts apply a conversion. A frequently used SAT-era formula is IQ = 0.095 × SAT-math + 0.003 × SAT-verbal + 50.241, and a simpler back-of-envelope version is IQ ≈ 100 + (SAT − 1000) ÷ 15. Others map each test score to its percentile rank, then read off the IQ at the same percentile. All of these are stand-ins. Independent studies put the correlation between modern admissions tests and general cognitive ability around 0.7 — real, but far from perfect — and the tests lose precision at the high end, exactly where the "smartest majors" debate lives.

The top of the list, and why physics wins

Physics and astronomy top nearly every version of this chart for a specific, unglamorous reason: selection. The major demands heavy quantitative reasoning, so it filters for people who already score high on quantitative tests. The estimated IQ near 130 does not mean physics makes you smarter; it means the people who stay in physics were, on average, high scorers before they declared the major.

Mathematics sits right behind for the same reason. Philosophy is the interesting outlier — a humanities field that ranks with the hard sciences, driven by the highest verbal and analytical-writing scores in the GRE pool and famously strong performance on tests like the LSAT. Economics rounds out the top tier by scoring well on both halves of the test rather than dominating one.

The bottom of the list, read honestly

The majors near the bottom — education, business, communications, social work — deserve a fairer reading than the charts give them. Three things are going on:

• These fields enroll far more people. A big, broad major pulls in a wider slice of the population, which drags the average down even when the field contains plenty of very high scorers.
• Admissions tests measure a narrow slice of ability. The GRE and SAT reward abstract, timed, quantitative-and-verbal reasoning. They do not measure the interpersonal skill, judgment, patience or practical problem-solving that make someone excellent at teaching or social work.
• Averages hide the overlap. The distributions of different majors sit heavily on top of one another. A top-decile education major out-scores a bottom-decile physics major without much drama.

In other words, a low rank on this chart says something about the average admissions-test score of a field's applicants. It says very little about the ceiling of that field, and nothing about any one person in it.

The caveat that matters most: overlap

If you remember one thing, make it this. The gap between the top and bottom majors on these charts is roughly 25-30 IQ points. The gap within a single major — from its lowest scorers to its highest — is routinely larger than that. A physics major with an estimated IQ of 105 and an English major at 135 both exist, and neither is rare.

On top of the overlap, the whole exercise rests on converting admissions-test scores into IQ, an assumption-heavy step with a ceiling problem at exactly the scores being compared. So the ranking is best read as a statement about who tends to enroll where, driven by selection effects, not as a scoreboard of individual intelligence. Your major is a weak signal about your own cognitive ability, and a much stronger signal about the kind of reasoning a field happens to reward.

If you are curious where you actually land, the only way to find out is to measure it directly rather than infer it from your transcript.

Frequently asked questions

Q: What college major has the highest average IQ?

A: Physics and astronomy top most rankings, with an estimated IQ near 130-133 derived from GRE and SAT data, followed closely by mathematics and philosophy. The reason is selection: these fields attract and retain high quantitative and analytical scorers, so their averages sit at the top.

Q: Are these average IQ by major figures based on real IQ tests?

A: No. They are estimated from average admissions-test scores — mainly ETS GRE data and College Board SAT data by intended major — then run through a conversion formula. Real IQ tests are not administered by major, so every figure is an approximation with a wide margin of error.

Q: Does a lower-ranked major mean those students are less intelligent?

A: Not really. Lower-ranked fields like education, business and social work enroll far more people, which lowers the average, and admissions tests miss abilities those fields depend on. The overlap between majors is so large that many students in "lower" majors out-score many students in "higher" ones.

Q: How accurate is the SAT-to-IQ conversion behind these numbers?

A: Rough. Admissions tests correlate with general cognitive ability at roughly 0.7 and lose precision at the high end, which is exactly where the "smartest major" comparisons happen. The rankings capture a real pattern in group averages but should not be read as precise individual scores.

References

• Educational Testing Service — GRE General Test Interpretive Data by Graduate Major Field
• Educational Testing Service — A Snapshot of the Individuals Who Took the GRE General Test
• Randal S. Olson — Average IQ of students by college major and gender ratio

Last updated: July 13, 2026