Mentor. Welcome Prodigy, I have been looking forward to your visit.

   Prodigy. Thank you Mentor. I brought my friend Jesse. Hope you don't mind.

   Mentor. Not at all. Have some cookies, Jesse.

   Jesse. Thank you. I'll put some in my pocket for my next prayer breakfast.

   Prodigy. Jesse has been advising me on selecting a college. You know I will be twelve soon and have to make a decision. I would appreciate your guidance, Mentor.

   Mentor. What do you think Jesse?

   Jesse. Prodigy must decide for learning not burning.

   Mentor. Hmm.

   Prodigy. I don't know about burning, but Uncle Jim has a different view of learning. He says "Who needs universities and their degrees?" Uncle Jim thinks that a university education limits earning potential. He says traditional careers impose a ceiling on earnings, maybe six figures. Software development, for example, has no such limits. Time spent in college might be put to better use. Graduate school uses up even more time. A scientist, for example, can count on ten or more years after entering the university before he is out on his own, four years for the bachelor's degree, four more for the Ph.D. and two or more as a post doc. Uncle Jim offered to help me start a software company, Purely Prodigy Systems. Not too bad for eleven, wouldn't you say?

   Mentor. And what do you say?

   Prodigy. I took Jesse's advice.

   Jesse. Amen. Learning begets earning.

   Prodigy. Jesse is persuasive, though without my inheritance I might have found Uncle Jim's offer more tempting.

   Mentor. Have you narrowed your search, Prodigy?

   Prodigy. Not yet. However I did run across a curiosity -- a college with a remarkable record of notable graduates. It is a mystery because the college is otherwise undistinguished.

   Mentor. Which college is it?

   Prodigy. The City College of New York -- CCNY. Eight of its alumni won Nobel Prizes, seven in the sciences and one in economics. That record is unmatched by any public college or university in the world. Even more extraordinary, all eight graduated in a 21 year period between 1933 and 1954.

   Mentor. That is remarkable. It must be very difficult to get into CCNY.

   Prodigy. Not exactly, breathing is the only requirement.

   Mentor. Then how do you account for eight Nobel laureates in 21 years?

   Prodigy. I've given it some thought. We have to look at what CCNY was when the laureates attended, not at what CCNY is today.

   Mentor. During the tenure of the laureates, was the faculty particularly distinguished?

   Prodigy. CCNY could boast few well-known scholars at that time. We will have to look elsewhere for answers.

   Mentor. Was there anything unusual about CCNY?

   Prodigy. Several things. Until 1976, CCNY charged no tuition. Every student had a full scholarship. Ten cents for a round-trip subway ride bought a college degree. At that price almost every brainy poor and middle-class kid in New York hoped to get in. Admission was fiercely competitive.

   Mentor. Anything else? Something about New York perhaps?

   Jesse. You mean Hymietown?

   Prodigy. You're getting warm, Jesse. By 1910 more than a million Jews, almost all Ashkenazic, lived in New York. They made up 25 percent of the city's population, and 80 percent of the CCNY students. Believe it or not, all eight of the City College Nobel laureates were Jewish.

   Mentor. So, it was not that CCNY was special. It was that most of its students were Jews from the right tail of the Jewish bell curve. Still, eight Nobel laureates in 21 years?

   Prodigy. Suppose that 21 is a typical age to graduate from college. Then, most of the CCNY laureates would have been born between 1912 and 1933. Recall Prodigy's Conjecture in Some Thoughts about Jews, IQ and Nobel Laureates. It asserts that American Jews constitute about 27 percent of any group whose distinguishing characteristic is intelligence. Ninety-three Nobel Prizes (excluding Peace and Literature) went to Americans born between 1912 and 1933. Prodigy's Conjecture theorizes that 25 or so were Jewish. At that time, half of all American Jews lived in New York City. Thus, we might expect that half of the Jewish laureates, say 12, were New Yorkers. If half of the best Jewish college students in NYC went to CCNY, then we might expect about 6 Jewish laureates to have graduated from CCNY between 1933 and 1954. Consequently, eight is not at all astounding. In fact, it is within the range of our expectations.

   Mentor. Fermi would be proud of you, but one puzzle remains. Where are the Prizes of Jews who graduated from CCNY before 1933 and after 1954?

   Prodigy. In the early part of the century, the center of mass of science was in Europe. The US had almost no scientific tradition. In fact, by 1920 Americans had won only 5 percent of the Nobel Prizes in science and medicine. Doing science is like doing carpentry. Both are learned through apprenticeship. Without a scientific tradition, there was little opportunity to learn how to do first-rate science.

   The fifties witnessed the breakdown of discrimination against Jews in academia. Jews had new opportunities, and CCNY was brain-drained by the Ivy League and other more prestigious schools. Jews continued to win Nobel Prizes in record numbers, but after graduating from other colleges. CCNY gradually declined. Finally in the late sixties a push for racial and ethnic diversity spawned a series of violent student protests. In response, CCNY dropped all admission requirements The college that once produced Nobel laureates now offered remedial courses in reading. CCNY laid in a supply of Ortho-Gro and prepared for the rest of the century.

   Jesse. They folded their tent and created a bigger tent. Red, Yellow, Brown, Black and White are all precious in God's sight.

   Prodigy. Hmm.

   Mentor. In a few square blocks of Harlem, a concentration of brain power materialized that was to contribute immensely to the intellectual strength of America. Out of this emerged the eight CCNY Nobel laureates. I wonder what the IQ of the CCNY students was like.

   Prodigy. We can estimate their IQ from demographic data.

   Mentor. You are welcome to use my library. What do you need?

   Prodigy. May I use your computer?

   Mentor. Please.

   Prodigy. Let's look at the supply-demand picture at CCNY circa 1930. The 1930 decennial census tells us that about 110,000 male eighteen-year-olds lived in New York. This is an upper bound to the CCNY applicant pool. (CCNY did not admit women.) At the time New York City was 25 percent Jewish. Thus, about 27,500 Jews and 82,500 non-Jews were in the age cohort of CCNY freshmen. On the supply side, CCNY graduated about 1000 students a year with bachelor's degrees.

   Recall La Griffe du Lion's Principle of Corresponding Order, proposed in The Color of Meritocracy. It reads:

If a large group takes a set of tests, such that each test contains at least one part dependent on cognitive ability, then the test takers will finish in the same rank order on every test.

   Mentor. It looks like the standard for admission to CCNY 70 years ago was higher than in the Ivy League today.

   Mentor. What do you think of that, Jesse?

   Mentor. Hmm.

   Prodigy. There is more. We can also calculate mean IQs for both Jewish and non-Jewish CCNY grads. The non-Jewish mean, < IQ _G >, is simply,

where the denominator in (5) renormalizes the distribution.

   Similarlly, the mean Jewish IQ, < IQ _J >, is given by,

where in (6) we have used the transformation,

   Using the bounds established for λ and Δ, I estimate that the mean  IQ at  for non-Jewish CCNY grads, circa 1930, was between 144 and 147. The overall mean IQ for CCNY grads was between 145 and 148.