Results for “higher education”
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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.

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.

The temporary popularity of Caplanian views on higher education

Bryan Caplan as you know argues that even the private return to higher education isn’t what it usually is cracked up to be, especially since large numbers of individuals do not finish with a four-year degree.  Susan Dynarski (tenured at Harvard education, but an economist), writing in the NYT, seems to have started flirting with this view:

…a majority of people holding student debt have moderate incomes and low balances. Many have no degree, having dropped out of a public college or for-profit vocational school after a few semesters. They carry little debt, but they also do not get the benefit of a college degree to help them pay off that debt.

Defaults and financial distress are concentrated among the millions of students who drop out without a degree. The financial prospects for college dropouts are poor; they earn little more than do workers with no college education. Dropouts account for much of the increase in financial distress among student borrowers since the Great Recession.

And dropout is not at all rare. A bit less than half of college students don’t earn a bachelor’s degree. Some people earn a shorter, two-year associate degree. But more than a quarter of those who start college hoping to earn a degree drop out with no credential. A full 30 percent of first-generation freshmen drop out of four-year colleges within three years. That’s three times the dropout rate of students whose parents graduated from college.

I’ve seen modest variants on those numbers, but the general picture is broadly accepted.  Now here is Dynarski’s Congressional testimony from last summer:

College is a Great Investment

A college education is a great investment. Over a lifetime, a person with a bachelor’s degree will earn, on average, a million dollars more than a less-educated worker. Even with record-high tuition prices, a BA pays for itself several times over.

She is quite clear in the former NYT piece that she has changed her mind, so there is no “gotcha” here.  But clearly her views are evolving in Bryan’s direction.

In terms of policy, Dynarski notes that more than a quarter drop out of college with no credential.  Shouldn’t we restrict loan forgiveness to them?  Doesn’t that at least deserve discussion?  Or should we just go ahead and grant forgiveness to those with the “great” returns as well?  Her change of mind concerns the higher-than-expected problems of the non-finishers, not that she has seen new and inferior income numbers for the successes.  (In fact since the numbers for the average return haven’t changed, being more pessimistic about the losers has to mean being a bit more optimistic about the successes.  That should make us all the more interested in targeting the forgiveness.)

Why are we not allowed to know what percentage of the forgiveness beneficiaries fall into the “didn’t finish” category?  What should we infer from the reality that no one is reporting that statistic?  Is that good news or bad news for the policy?

What does Dynarski think is the marginal return from trying to finish college?  Are they really so positive for the marginal student?  What is the chance of the marginal student finishing?  The cited figures are averages, presumably for the marginal student the chance of finishing is much worse.  Presumably she is pessimistic about the nature of the college deal for the marginal student?

Now I know how these discussions run.  Suddenly there is plenty of talk about how we should make it easier for people to finish, perhaps by offering more aid.  As someone who teaches at a non-elite state university, I do understand what is going on with students who need to drop out to take care of family, and so on.  Still, in the meantime should we be encouraging more marginal students to try their hand at college? 

Yes or no?

That question runs against the prevailing mood affiliation and good luck trying to get a straight answer.  In the meantime, the world is taking an ever-so-temporary foray into the views of Bryan Caplan.  Let’s see how long it stays there.

What is the equilibrium in higher education policy?

That is the topic of my Bloomberg column, here goes:

Critics of the policy see it as rewarding Democratic supporters and interest groups, including university faculty and administrators but most of all students. This perception, regardless of whether it’s true, will influence political behavior…

Republicans, when they hold political power, are likely to strike back. They may be more interested in draining the sector of revenue. The simplest way of doing this would be to limit tuition hikes in state universities. De facto tuition caps are already common, but they may become tighter and more explicit, especially in red and purple states. Such policies might also prove popular with voters, especially during a time of high inflation.

A second set of reforms might limit the ability of public universities to spend money on hiring more administrators, including people who work on so-called DEI issues. Given the fungibility of funds, and the ability of administrators to retitle new positions, such restrictions may not be entirely enforceable. Still, they would mean less autonomy for public universities as policy in many states tried to counteract their current leftward swing.

Another possible reform could tie funding for a school or major to the future earnings of graduates. That likely would penalize the humanities, which already tend to be one of the more politicized segments of the modern university…

Longer-term, a future Republican administration might decide to restructure the entire system of federal student loans. How about making student loans dischargeable through normal bankruptcy proceedings? That might sound like a pretty unremarkable idea to most voters, and many economists, including Larry Summers, favor it. It would also allow for some measure of debt relief without extending it to the solvent and the well-off.

Still, the long-term consequences of this reform would probably lead to a significant contraction of lending. Most enrolled students do not in fact finish college, and many of them end up with low net worth yet tens of thousands of dollars of debt. (By one estimate, the net worth of the median American below age 35 is $13,900.) So the incentives to declare bankruptcy could be relatively high. This would make federal student loans a more costly and less appealing proposition. Private lenders would be more wary as well. Higher education would likely contract.

The net effect of the president’s loan-forgiveness initiative — which is an executive order and thus does not have an enduring legislative majority behind it — could amount to a one-time benefit for students, no impact on rising educational costs, and the intensification of the culture wars over higher education.

Sad but true.

Higher education sentences to ponder

We find that the WTP [willingness to pay] for in-person instruction (relative to a remote format) represents around 4.2% of the average annual net cost of attending university, while the WTP for on-campus social activities is 8.1% of the average annual net costs. We also find large heterogeneity in WTP, which varies systematically across socioeconomic groups. Our analysis shows that economically-disadvantaged students derive substantially lower value from university social life, but this is primarily due to time and resource constraints.

That is from a new NBER working paper by Aucejo, French, and Zafar.

The future of higher education could be India

This is a fantasy, not a prediction, still we can hold out hope, here is my latest Bloomberg column:

In my fantasy, the [Western] schools that are open to expanding their India operations will rise considerably in reputation. India, and South Asia more generally, is in the midst of a phenomenal explosion of talent in diverse fields…

You might wonder whether India actually needs all of these foreign branches, when it has some superb schools of its own, for instance the various Indian Institutes of Technology. In my fantasy, some Indian institutions of higher education will improve and force some competitors — shall we say UC Berkeley? — to leave the country. Yet many talented Indians will find attending a branch of Harvard or Yale to be an appealing option. Furthermore, the top foreign schools may form alliances with Indian institutions (as Yale has done in Singapore), giving students the best of both worlds.

This future gets better yet. Over time, the population of Indian alumni of prestigious U.S. universities will increase, relative to those who studied and graduated in America. America’s top schools thus will become engines of opportunity. It might also become obvious that the students attending in the U.S. are underperforming their Indian counterparts. What better way to light a competitive fire under the current dominant institutions?

And maybe some of the keenest and most ambitious American students will prefer to study in India rather than in America. (Perhaps a “canceled” American student could be sent to Brown Uttar Pradesh?) Wouldn’t you want to study with the very best of your peers, knowing you might be sitting next to the next generation’s Einstein, von Neumann or, of course Ramanujan?

There is more at the link, noting that this is a Swiftian fantasy of sorts.

A weird Lancastrian method for reopening higher education

I’m not sure this could work, but everyone else is doing weird ideas, so let’s consider another one.

Remember Lancastrian methods of education from 19th century England?  Part of the idea was to keep small group size, and economize on labor, by having the students teach each other, typically with the older students instructing the younger.

Here is my suggestion: have students use an app to arrange in-person meetings, in groups of five, for periods of a few weeks running.  Social distancing and masks can be applied as conditions at the time dictate.  The app will match students on the basis of stated interests, and sometimes by other methods too, such as levels of mathematical sophistication or if you wish cultural diversity.  The app also will tell them where to meet on campus, all classes being held outside.

Some classes would be led by professors, but there are not enough professors to go around so many others would be led by the more senior or otherwise better informed students.  Professors and TAs could rotate across various groups if so needed.

All students are given free iPads, connected to campus wireless, and sometimes those iPads would serve as collective blackboards for the small groups.

Central admin. or departments could impose curricular structure in advance, or within a topic area particular assignments might be generated by “Unconference” methods, for instance the students might agree to read a particular book or essay, or to all learn a particular skill.  To the extent overseeing faculty are scarce, you can try having the students themselves finding the relevant teaching materials.  Very good groups would have the option of continuing for further weeks.

Start in August, keep on going until its gets too cold, they did it at Valley Forge and people learn in the desert and tropics too.  Many of the meetings can be short — say 45 minutes — and you can privilege the more valuable majors with locations in the shade.  Put up as many tents as you can.

Every class has a supply of back-up YouTube material, and associated testing, for when the weather is bad, or for when the semester has to end.

For the final semester grade each student writes a 20-25 pp. paper about what he or she learned through these units.  Professors and sometimes TAs would grade those papers, and do note this is not an insuperable grading burden.  It rewards the “did you learn anything useful at all?” approach, rather than “did you manage to sit and suffer through through all of your boring classes?”.

I suspect it feels too much like chaos to a university administrator, but perhaps that is an argument in its favor?

You will note that this method, for all of its learning uncertainties, has two big advantages.  First, it really does prioritize the health of everyone involved.  Second, students still have lots of contact with each other and get to enjoy some version of the campus experience.  The interactive groups might even provide a more engaging campus experience than did the status quo ex ante, keeping in mind that some schools will combine this method with the abolition or radical paring down of dorms.

Addendum: Hand out free diapers, all other plans have that issue too.

The new economics of higher education

That is my new Bloomberg column, written for a special feature and thus 2x the normal length.  Here is one excerpt:

The decisions of American families also will choke off out-of-state tuition revenue. Note that about three-quarters of America’s higher education sector, by enrollment, is state schools. The out-of-state tuition rate is the real cash cow of American higher education, and sometimes it can approach three times the in-state rate. Schools’ reliance on out-of-state revenue is going to take a big hit, as it was premised on a degree of individual geographic mobility that simply does not exist right now and may not be restored anytime soon.

I suspect many parents will, whether it is rational or not, prefer to keep their children closer to home.

The most vulnerable state schools will be those in underpopulated states and far from population centers. The University of Vermont, with about three-quarters out-of-state students, ought to worry…

Another problem will be the plummeting enrollment of foreign students, who typically are paying out-of-state tuition rates…

The University of Rochester, with about 27% foreign students, will find this adjustment especially difficult.

There is much more at the link, recommended.  One theme is that upper tier schools will stay in business, but by relaxing admissions standards and by cannibalizing students from lower-tier schools (I am curious to see how those students do in their newly found “promotions”).

p.s. Average is Over

p.p.s. “free college” is a really bad idea, worse than before.  State schools cannot at the moment survive the complete loss of tuition revenue.

Bryan Caplan’s stance on higher education policy

In my Warren post I wrote:

7. College free for all: Would wreck the relatively high quality of America’s state-run colleges and universities, which cover about 78 percent of all U.S. students and are the envy of other countries worldwide and furthermore a major source of American soft power.  Makes sense only if you are a Caplanian on higher ed., and furthermore like student debt forgiveness this plan isn’t that egalitarian, as many of the neediest don’t finish high school, do not wish to start college, cannot finish college, or already reject near-free local options for higher education, typically involving community colleges.

Bryan wishes me to point out that he does not favor “free tuition for all,” and indeed that is true, as I can verify from years of discussion with him.  Nonetheless I still believe such a policy would come closer to limiting educational signaling (by making so many schools worse and lowering the value of the signal) than would Bryan’s preferred policies toward higher ed.

The future of higher education?

Two public four-year institutions, Maine Maritime Academy and the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, rank in the top 10 colleges with the best long-term returns, while two four-year private colleges, St. Louis College of Pharmacy and Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, made the top 10 for short-term and long-term returns.

The report ranks 4,526 colleges and universities by return on investment.

Here is one article, with a graphic for the top ten, you will note that Harvard, Stanford, and MIT still do fine.  Babson is underrated, as it does much better over longer stretches of time.  Here is the Georgetown report.

Divorce and higher education

The social conservatives are turning out to be right about many things:

In this paper we evaluate the degree to which the adverse parental divorce effect on university education operates through deprivation of economic resources. Using one million siblings from Taiwan, we first find that parental divorce occurring at ages 13-18 led to a 10.6 percent decrease in the likelihood of university admission at age 18. We then use the same sample to estimate the effect of parental job loss occurring at the same ages, and use the job-loss effect as a benchmark to indicate the potential parental divorce effect due to family income loss. We find the job-loss effect very little. Combined, these results imply a minor role played by reduced income in driving the parental divorce effect on the child’s higher education outcome. Non-economic mechanisms, such as psychological and mental shocks, are more likely to dominate. Our further examinations show that boys and girls are equally susceptible, and younger teenagers are more vulnerable than the more mature ones, to parental divorce.

That is from a recent NBER Working Paper by Yen-Chien Chen, Elliott Fan, and Jin-Tan Liu.

Nonetheless, I suspect there is more to it than this.  I can’t speak to the circumstances of Taiwan, but on average I think of women as suffering the most from non-divorce, not men.  It is not sufficiently discussed how much the higher growth rates of earlier times might have been achieved at the expense of women, at least in the short run.  It might in some ways boost economic growth to, through discrimination, allocate more very smart women to the teaching of grade school, and to keep them in unhappy marriages, “for the sake of the children.”  And yet those outcomes are entirely unjust, and the contemporary world has decided it will not accept them.

Higher education update occasionally we innovate

Income-share agreements:

To pay for his professional flight degree at Purdue University in Indiana, Andrew Hoyler had two choices. He could rely on loans and scholarships. Or he could cover some of the cost with an “income-share agreement” (ISA), a contract with Purdue to pay it a percentage of his earnings for a fixed period after graduation.

And:

Around a third of graduate education in America is now online, according to Richard Garrett of Eduventures, a consultancy. Many universities take a do-it-yourself approach, but the better-known ones tend to go into partnership with the OPMs. 2U, a ten-year-old startup, led the way, and has been followed into the business by, among others, Pearson, an educational publisher, and Coursera (which started off as a provider of MOOCs). Coursera joined up with UoI to create its online MBA programme.

Both are from The Economist.

Does higher education change non-cognitive skills?

There is a new study on this very important question:

We examine the effect of university education on students’ non-cognitive skills (NCS) using high-quality Australian longitudinal data. To isolate the skill-building effects of tertiary education, we follow the education decisions and NCS—proxied by the Big Five personality traits—of 575 adolescents over eight years. Estimating a standard skill production function, we demonstrate a robust positive relationship between university education and extraversion, and agreeableness for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The effects are likely to operate through exposure to university life rather than through degree-specific curricula or university-specific teaching quality. As extraversion and agreeableness are associated with socially beneficial behaviours, we propose that university education may have important non-market returns.

That is from Sonja C. Kassenboehmer, Felix Leung, and Stefanie Schurer in the new Oxford Economic Papers.  Here is a much older, non-gated version.

These results seem broadly consistent with the 1960s “schooling of society,” conformist, Marxian critiques of education.  It is striking that higher education does not have more of a notable, measurable impact on either openness or conscientiousness.

In passing, I would like to note that I am not crazy about the term “non-cognitive” in this context.

What if you combined Robin Hanson and German higher education?

Students in Germany rated their curriculum, teaching and job prospects more highly when their universities were labeled “excellent” by the government — even though the award was unrelated to teaching, according to new research.

But this next sentence does not follow:

The results cast further doubt on the reliability of student satisfaction scores, a co-author of the study said.

Here is the full story by David Matthews.

Where is higher education economically vulnerable?

Disruptive threats nearly always start with an attack on the large sources of profit. In the newspaper industry, the first real blow was not the replacement of the traditional newsroom as we initially feared: it was the erosion of classified revenue that paid for the newsroom by companies with weird names like eBay and Monster.

In higher education, the real threat won’t be a frontal assault on core degree programs, but the erosion of the most profitable continuing education courses and graduate programs. Coding bootcamps aren’t likely to expand their focus to challenge the preeminence of the degree any time soon. But the explosion of non-accredited programs is beginning to threaten the MBA. They have proven that they can iterate quickly and deliver a more modern learning product at a fraction of the price. Higher education will never be replaced, but the most profitable courses will be attacked, creating revenue implications that have a ripple effect across institutions.

That is from Frederick Singer, via Jeff Selingo.  Do note that Jeff’s new book There is Life After College is coming out April 12.