My grandfather used to watch a show called “College Bowl”, which was hosted by the late Allen Ludden. It was an on-air competition betweens teams of undergraduates of various colleges. The host would ask questions, and the students would answer-the team with the most right answers won. I remember the vast range of questions: these people were bright! They answered questions as varied as classical mythologies, english/frech literature, chemistry, mathematics, American history, etc. I remember marvelling at how much these kids knew!
Now,compare the situation with today-you can actually graduate from college without taking ANY courses in higher math…and the levelof ignorance is appalling-recently, some harvard undergrads weregiven a blank map of the world-and asked to place various cities/countries-most of them failed miserably.
So, was the average undergrad of 40 years ago much better educated than one of today? 
You might not know this, but College Bowl lives on - albeit untelevised in the US. University Challenge, a British spin-off, lives on in prime-time. In the US, it’s competed between universities without publicity. For some sample questions answered by today’s undergraduates, try www.naqt.com or www.acf-qb.org. I play for Oxford University in the British version.
As far as your question goes, I suspect that the answer is both yes and no. Did your average quiz bowl participant know more about this stuff than today’s average undergrad? Yes, but they also knew a lot more about this stuff than an average 1950s undergrad! There are simply people who enjoy and have a gift for retaining information and read widely, leading to the sort of performances you saw in College Bowl.
I am sure you could still find enough contestants on a campus today to put together a great team for the dweeb olympics.
Don’t compare the outstanding geeks of then to the average today.
I think another thing going on here is that in 1950 students didn’t live in such a condition of information overload. The information they had came from their school and their library. Today kids are bombarded with information from a much wider range of sources. Not a lot of this information is what you might call usefull, details of every Simpsons ep. for example, but they still must process and internalize all this. A student of today might have done just as much memorizing as those in the 50s but still not know anything about French litereature or classical mythology.
The fallacy is in thinking College Bowl contestants in the 50s were “average” undergraduates. There weren’t (and aren’t.) It’s like looking at footage of the Olympics from the 50s and saying, “Back then the average person could run a marathon. Not like the lard-asses of today!”
I played on the Penn State College Bowl team for three years. If anything, I think the questions we answered were even broader in range than the questions from the '50s. Yes, we had questions in physics, math, French literature, classical mythology, etc., but also questions in current technology, pop culture, sports, and a few other subjects which were often absent from the old version of GE College Bowl, as I think it was called.
QuizCustodet: Which college? I am a Jesus College Old Member myself…
There’s been a shift in what students are required to study, so today’s students may not be learning the same things a 50’s student would (I’m thinking specifically about English Lit courses here). But given a subject like math, I’m quite sure today’s students could go toe to toe with their 50’s counterparts.
Another factor might be that educational philosophy was somewhat different back then. I talked about this a lot with my mom when I was in high school–We both went to “top” public high schools, she in the late '50s, me in the late '80s, and we both went on to top colleges. Her education tended to put a lot more emphasis on memorizing–names and dates and bits of poetry, etc. My American History course probably put more emphasis on understanding the causes and effects of the Civil War than hers did, while she was probably expected to know more names and dates than I was. The Clearly, the names and dates type questions would be more likely to be asked on a quiz show.
As several above posters suggest, certain students of today would probably be competitive with the College Bowl contestants of yesteryear on the same questions. But I agree with the OP that the average high school graduate of today would be less likely to be able to tell you that the Civil War ran from 1861-1865.
And to lend a little evidence to Degrance’s assertion that the brains of today are more cluttered up with things like “details of every Simpson’s ep.,” as soon as I thought “causes of the Civil War,” I thought of this:
from the episode where Apu takes the test to become a U.S. citizen:
Proctor: All right, here’s your last question. What was the cause of the Civil War?
Apu: Actually, there were numerous causes. Aside from the obvious schism between the abolitionists and the anti-abolitionists, there were economic factors, both domestic and inter–
Proctor: Wait, wait… just say slavery.
Apu: Slavery it is, sir.
I was a member of the regional champion “quiz bowl” team in high school, and I played on my university’s College Bowl team. Had a great time doing both.
One thing that you need to remember about these competitions: it really is a team effort. While it’s important that each competitor have a good grasp of knowledge from a variety of fields, it’s just as important to team up people with individual specialties in different fields. A team comprised of four math prodigies may clean up on all the math questions, but might not do very well in the cultural or history questions.
I myself specialized in general liberal arts / fine arts, as well as “off-the-wall”, obscure facts. This, oddly enough, brought me some of the only moments of true glory in my high school career. Our quiz bowl games were televised live, and there were several occasions when I scored the winning points by answering some bizarre question that came out of left field. Which means that even insufferable know-it-alls had a chance to win some respect from the jocks.
As an interesting addition to this discussion, you might want to look at this - British TV recently aired ‘University Challenge Reunited’, a series of games between teams that had won the contest in previous years. The results do suggest better teams earlier on, but I think that this is more than adequately explained by the increased time that older teams have had to accumulate more trivia. Note particularly that Somerville 2002 (an excellent team, on which I had 3 friends) got through to the semi-finals, so the brain rot can’t have been that severe!
Duke - you’ll be pleased to know that Oxford retains the British Student Quiz Championship trophy, as well as the Varsity match. I’m a 4th year undergrad physicist at St. John’s.
Why, thank you!