Results for “education” 2162 found
Why is the Biden Administration Against Fee Transparency in Education?
President Biden has made a big deal of simplifying fees:
The FTC is proposing a rule that…would ban businesses from charging hidden and misleading fees and require them to show the full price up front. The rule would also require companies disclose up front whether fees are refundable. This would mean no more surprise resort fees at check out or unexpected service fees to buy a live event ticket.
Like everyone, I dislike these kinds of fees, although I don’t think they are a good subject for legislation. But I would certainly not prevent firms from offering a simple, up-front fee. And yet that is exactly what the Biden administration is doing in higher education.
So called Inclusive Access programs let colleges package textbooks with tuition and other fees. Students get one bill and access to textbooks on the first day of college. It’s convenient, no more hunting for textbooks or sticker shock. In addition, inclusive access programs give colleges bargaining power when negotiating prices.
Strangely, the Biden administration’s Department of Education wants to ban colleges from offering inclusive access programs. Thus, the Dept. of Education is arguing that simplified pricing is bad for consumers at the same time as the FTC is arguing that simplified pricing is good for consumers. What makes this contradiction even more baffling is that Inclusive Access was a program promoted in 2015 by the Obama-Biden Administration!
Proponents of the ban argue that letting students negotiate their own purchases lets them better tailor the outcome. Maybe, but that’s the same argument for letting airlines unbundle seat choice and baggage allowances. Hard to have it both ways. Pricing is complex.
Tyler and I are textbook authors so you might wonder where our interests lie. I actually have no idea. It’s complicated. I suspect inclusive access leads to a more winner-take-all market on textbooks. Modern Principles is a winner, thus on those grounds I would favor. More generally, however, I would get the FTC and the Dept. of Education out of pricing decisions and let colleges and firms negotiate. Pricing decisions are more complicated and contextual than simplified bans or regulations.
How is AI education going to work?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is the first part of the argument:
Two kinds of AI-driven education are likely to take off, and they will have very different effects. Both approaches have real promise, but neither will make everyone happy.
The first category will resemble learning platforms such as Khan Academy, Duolingo, GPT-4, and many other services. Over time, these sources will become more multimedia, quicker in response, deeper in their answers, and better at in creating quizzes, exercises and other feedback. For those with a highly individualized learning style — preferring videos to text, say, or wanting lessons slower or faster — the AIs will oblige. The price will be relatively low; Khan Academy currently is free and GPT-4 costs $20 a month, and those markets will become more competitive.
For those who want it, they will be able to access a kind of universal tutor as envisioned by Neal Stephenson in his novel The Diamond Age. But how many people will really want to go this route? My guess is that it will be a clear minority of the population, well below 50%, whether at younger or older age groups…
Chatbots will probably make education more fun, but for most people there is a limit to just how fun instruction can be.
And the second part:
There is, however, another way AI education could go — and it may end up far more widespread, even if it makes some people uneasy. Imagine a chatbot programmed to be your child’s friend. It would be exactly the kind of friend your kid wants, even (you hope) the kind of friend your kid needs. Your child might talk with this chatbot for hours each day.
Over time, these chatbots would indeed teach children valuable things, including about math and science. But it would happen slowly, subtly. When I was in high school, I had two close (human) friends with whom I often talked economics. We learned a lot from each other, but we were friends first and foremost, and the conversations grew out of that. As it turns out, all three of us ended up becoming professional economists.
This could be the path the most popular and effective AI chatbots follow: the “friendship first” model. Under that scenario, an AI chatbot doesn’t have to be more fun than spending time with friends, because it is itself a kind of friend. Through a kind of osmosis, the child could grow interested in some topics raised by the AI chatbot, and the chatbot could feed the child more information and inspiration in those areas. But friendship would still come first.
Worth a ponder.
Finland education fact of the day
Finland: pic.twitter.com/i3PQKyhWWI
— Simon Sarris (@simonsarris) December 12, 2023
Returns to Education for Women in the Mid-20th Century: Evidence from Compulsory Schooling Laws
Abstract: Women had a similar level of schooling to men during the mid-twentieth century United States, but research on the returns to education for women is scarce. Using compulsory schooling laws as instrumental variables, this paper examines the causal effect of education on women’s labor market and marriage market outcomes. I examine both outcomes because women frequently traded off employment and marriage due to marriage bars and gender norms against married women working. I show that an additional year of schooling increases women’s probability of gainful employment by 7.9 pp. and women’s wage earnings by 15 percent, which can be explained by women’s entry into skilled occupations. Given the large returns on earnings, education surprisingly does not increase women’s probability of never marrying, but it does increase the probability of divorce and separation. In addition, women’s education positively affects the husband’s and the household’s labor supply and earnings, conditional on marriage formation and the husband’s education.
That is from Sophie Li, who is on the job market from Boston University. Her actual job market paper is: “The Effect of a Woman-Friendly Occupation on Employment: U.S. Postmasters Before WWII .” Some of you will wince to hear me say this, but many of the most interesting job market papers this year are on the economics of gender.
How will we know when higher education is reforming itself?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is the intro:
When the revolution in higher education finally arrives, how will we know? I have a simple metric: When universities change how they measure faculty work time. Using this yardstick, the US system remains very far from a fundamental transformation.
And:
This system [of numerically well-defined courseloads], which has been in place for decades, does not allow for much flexibility. If a professor is a great and prolific mentor, for instance, she receives no explicit credit for that activity. Nor would she if she innovates and discovers a new way to use AI to improve teaching for everyone.
This courseload system, which minimizes conflict and maximizes perceptions of fairness, is fine for static times with little innovation. If the university administration asks you for two classes, and you deliver two classes, everyone is happy.
But today’s education system is dynamic, and needs to become even more so. There is already the internet, YouTube, and a flurry of potential innovations coming from AI. If professors really are a society’s best minds, shouldn’t they be working to improve the entire educational process, not just punching the equivalent of a time clock at a university?
Such a change would require giving them credit for innovations, which in turn would require a broader conception of their responsibilities. Ideally, a department chair or dean or provost ought to be able to tell them to add a certain amount of value to the teaching and student development process — through mentoring, time in the classroom or other ways. The definition of a good job would not be just fulfilling the “2-2” teaching load called for in a contract, it would be more discretionary.
This would be hard to make work, of course, and many faculty would hate it. If the teaching requirement is discretionary, and in the hands of administrators, many professors will fear being bargained into a higher workload. Almost certainly, many (not all) professors would be bargained into a higher workload.
Definitely worth a ponder. The problem of course is that universities are in some regards low trust institutions, so renegotiating class load requirements simply isn’t going to go very well.
Texas fact of the day, educational polarization issue
This is absolutely insane. TAMU was probably one of the most conservative flagship state universities in the nation https://t.co/z3yVLvoe7I
— constans (@constans) September 25, 2023
The Productivity of Online Education Increases
Teaching is a labor-intensive service industry for which it is difficult to increase productivity. Thus, the price of education rises over time, the Baumol effect. One of the reasons Tyler and I have put a lot of effort into online education is that it ties education to high productivity growth industries such as software and technology. Thus in the Industrial Organization of Online Education we argued:
…as more of the value of a course comes from software and less from live teaching, productivity will improve, thus removing the cost disease.
Here’s a case in point:
This is just a test but all of the videos for our textbook, Modern Principles, and our free online platform Marginal Revolution University are already subtitled in many languages and soon we will see more translations like the one above. Amazing.
Patience and educational achievement
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
Economists have once again entered the fray, this time with a study that tries to determine how patience is correlated with better educational outcomes. The results are impressive, albeit unsettling. In Italy, differing degrees of patience account for two-thirds of the achievement variation across the country’s regions. In the US, differing degrees of patience account for one-third of the variation in educational outcomes across states, a smaller amount but still notable.
Before I go any further, you might be wondering which are the most patient states. They are (in alphabetical order) Maine, Montana, Vermont and Wyoming. The least patient state? California. In Italy, patience is highest in the northern region bordering Austria, which has a relatively Germanic culture and history. Patience is the lowest by far in Sicily. In both Italy and the US, patience is generally greater in the North than in the South.
These results do not necessarily mean that lower patience results in lower grades. It could be that doing well in school makes you more patient, because you learn that working hard has its own rewards, and that may lengthen your time horizon. Or there may be some underlying factor, say conscientiousness, that is key to both patience and academic achievement.
Still, it is hard to avoid the overall impression that there is a tight connection between certain “bourgeois virtues” and academic achievement. If you are a parent, you might want to be rooting for your child to be more patient rather than less, no matter how complex all the interrelationships among the various personal and cultural attributes may turn out to be.
The researchers estimated patience by an ingenious method. There is already a widely accepted global preference survey that measures patience across nations. They then used Facebook data on interests, clicks and likes to see which interests were most popular in the more patient nations. Then they examined that data to see how popular those interests were in the various regions of those countries.
Here is the underyling research by Eric A. Hanushek, Lavinia Kinne, Pietro Sancassani, and Ludger Woessmann. I do consider whether “patience” is exactly the right word for what is going on here. Hat tip also to The Wisdom of Garett Jones.
What Explains Educational Polarization Among White Voters?
Over the past 40 years of American politics, college-educated white voters have defected from the Republican Party, while the white working class has become a reliable source of Republican support. I study the issue basis of this realignment. To do so,
I generate over-time estimates of public opinion on four broad issue domains from 1984 to 2020 and develop a theoretical framework to understand how issue attitudes translate into electoral coalitions. Using this framework, I find that both economic and cultural issues have contributed to the observed realignment. College-educated white voters have become increasingly liberal on economic issues since the mid-2000s; college educated voters now express more liberal views than working class voters on every issue domain. Over the same time period, cultural issues have become more important for the voting decisions of the working class. The increasing weight placed on non-economic issues means that the conservative cultural attitudes of white working class voters translate to Republican support at a higher rate than in the past. Together, these findings suggest a nuanced role for economic and cultural issues in structuring political coalitions. Educational realignment has deep roots across issue domains, suggesting that the new coalitions are likely to be stable into the foreseeable future.
That is a new paper by William Marble, from someone on Twitter. That is in my view not really good news.
New Zealand’s great education decline
A growing proportion of children leave school unable to read an instruction manual or do basic maths. Over the last twenty years, our education system has slipped from being the envy of the world to barely mediocre.
Kiwi students once ranked near the top of international education league tables. In the latest results from the highly rated Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study, Year 5 students placed last among all English-speaking countries and 24th out of all 26 participating OECD countries. Students suffered similar slides in maths and science.
The New Zealand education system is also now one of the most unequal in the world. The gap between the educational “haves” and “have nots” eclipses all our English-speaking OECD peers. All this, despite Government spending per child increasing in real terms by more than 30% since 2001.
Here is more from Roger Partridge (2020). Here is a 2022 update:
Low attendance at school is another sign the country’s education system is slipping with children from lower socio-economic areas the worst affected, the executive director of the New Zealand Initiative says.
The New Zealand Initiative is a think tank which carries out research to help New Zealand plan for the future.
It has commented on new research by the Education Review Office that shows children are missing school more in New Zealand than other English-speaking countries.
The office found four in ten parents were comfortable with their child missing a week or more of school per term and a third of students did not see going to school every day as that important…
The education system had been declining for 25 years and data backed up his view, such as the Pisa study carried out by the OECD. As an example, in maths the knowledge of a 15-year-old New Zealand student equated to a student aged 13 and a half 20 years ago.
Also from 2022:
In the past 12-18 years, New Zealand’s scores had declined by 23 points for reading, 22 points for science and 29 points for maths. The OECD estimated that 30 points was equivalent to one-year of learning.
Here is the Kiwi establishment being vague about the causes of the literacy decline. What are the actual reasons for all this? There are plenty of regions of New Zealand without massive immigration, and they do not seem immune to these trends.
Here is some more circular blah blah blah, calling for a “holistic approach,” and so on. Does Kiwi culture work best when most of the citizens are more “tough-minded” than what is currently the case?
The incidence of loans for graduate education
In 2006, the federal government effectively uncapped student borrowing for graduate programs with the introduction of the Graduate PLUS loan program. Access to additional federal loans increased graduate students’ borrowing and shifted the composition of their loans from private to federal debt. However, the increase in borrowing limits did not improve access to existing programs overall or for underrepresented groups. Nor did access to additional loan aid result in significant increase in constrained students’ persistence or degree receipt. We document that among programs in which a larger share of graduate students had exhausted their annual federal loan eligibility before the policy change—and thus were more exposed to the expansion in access to credit—federal borrowing and prices increased.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Sandra E. Black, Lesley J. Turner, and Jeffrey T. Denning. Via Brett.
How to improve education
We present results from large-scale randomized trials evaluating the provision of education in emergency settings across five countries: India, Kenya, Nepal, Philippines, and Uganda. We test multiple scalable models of remote instruction for primary school children during COVID-19, which disrupted education for over 1 billion schoolchildren worldwide. Despite heterogeneous contexts, results show that the effectiveness of phone call tutorials can scale across contexts. We find consistently large and robust effect sizes on learning, with average effects of 0.30-0.35 standard deviations. These effects are highly cost-effective, delivering up to four years of high-quality instruction per $100 spent, ranking in the top percentile of education programs and policies.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Noam Angrist, et.al.
The Causal Effect of Economic Freedom on Female Employment & Education
While we have decades of evidence that economically free economies grow faster and are more productive than un-free ones, we have less knowledge about the effect of economic freedom on groups that have traditionally been disadvantaged. I study the causal effects of large and sustained jumps in economic freedom on women’s labor force participation and primary school enrollment. I find that these jumps have a positive and significant effect in both cases–economic freedom is good for women’s labor force opportunities and female education.
That is from Robin Grier at TTU.
The educational culture that is New Jersey
For four days, a 29-year-old woman pretended to be a student at a New Jersey public high school. She attended classes, spent time in the guidance office and collected phone numbers from teenagers who helped her find her way through the maze of hallways, according to students and a school official.
She continued to text former classmates days after the ruse was discovered last week, students said.
The woman, identified by the police as Hyejeong Shin, was arrested Tuesday and charged with providing documents that falsified her age to officials at New Brunswick Public Schools, a district with nearly 10,000 students in central New Jersey.
The incident, first reported by New Brunswick Today, has raised concerns about the safety protocols in place to verify student identities — and the woman’s reason for sneaking into a school that enrolls children as young as 15 in the first place.
Aubrey A. Johnson, the school superintendent, told board members Tuesday night that the district would be evaluating “how to better look for fake documentation and other things,” according to a video of the meeting shared on Twitter. Neither school nor police officials offered any information about a possible motive for her behavior.
Here is the full story, via tekl.
What is going wrong with American higher education?
Yes, yes all the Woke and PC stuff, but let us also look into the matter more deeply, as in my latest Bloomberg column. There is a serious talent drain due to excess bureaucratization, among other issues:
Another problem is the ongoing mental health crisis among America’s youth. This is not the fault of universities, to be clear, but a lot of unhappy students make for a less enjoyable college experience. The warm glow that so many baby boomers associate with their college years may not be reproduced by the current generation. They might instead look back on a quite troubled time, and in turn have less school loyalty.
I have also observed (as have many of my colleagues) that students seem to have more absences, excuses and missed assignments. No matter what the causes of those developments, they make it harder to run an effective university.
In fact, many of the smartest young people I know are deciding against a career in academia, even if that was their initial intent. They see too much bureaucracy and not enough time for the academic work itself. Students in the biosciences, at least the ones I talk to, seem to be an exception, perhaps because the opportunities to change the world are so obvious.
In my own field, economics, the prospect of having to do a “pre-doc” and then six years for a Ph.D. is driving away creative talent. On the research side, there is an obsession with finding the correct empirical techniques for causal inference. Initially a merited and beneficial development, this approach is becoming an intellectual straitjacket. There are too many papers focusing on a suitably narrow topic to make the causal inference defensible, rather than trying to answer broader, more useful but also more difficult questions.
…As committee obligations, paperwork and referee reports accumulate, the idea that academia allows you to be in charge of your own time seems ever more distant. Bureaucratization is eating away at the free time of professors. Much of the glamour of the job is gone, and my fear is that the system increasingly attracts conformists.
And don’t forget this disaggregation:
There are also big differences within universities. I have been a professor for more than three decades and speak often at other campuses. My impression is that presidents, provosts and deans are relatively sane, if only because they face real trade-offs as they draw up budgets, raise money and make payroll. University staff or student groups, on the other hand, often have no sense of the underlying constraints, and so advocate for ideas and practices that lead to some ridiculous stories. The actual decision makers are frequently not strong enough to push back, so they accept the demands as a way to survive or even advance.
Recommended.