Category: Education
The wisdom of Alex Tabarrok
Alex did not reproduce this passage from his essay on on-line education, so I will did (and Reihan Salaam did):
Productivity in education has lagged productivity in other sectors of the economy because teaching is so labor intensive. Where exactly in the typical classroom is there room for investment, let alone productivity improvement? More chalk? Prior to online education, the bottleneck though which productivity improvements had to pass was the teacher, and we know that improving teacher productivity is very difficult, which is why teaching methods haven’t changed in millennia. Online education vastly increases the potential for productivity increases because it greatly increases the size of the potential market. Bigger markets increase the incentive to research and develop new products (coincidentally the very topic of my TED talk.) A tool used to improve online education–an interface, an algorithm, a new teaching method–can be applied very widely, potentially world-wide, thus greatly increasing the incentive to invest in the education sector, perhaps the most important sector of the 21st century economy.
Here are some budges forward on the accreditation of MOOCs.
Addendum: Here are interesting comments from Joshua Gans.
Why Online Education Works
My essay at Cato Unbound, Why Online Education Works, goes beyond much of the recent discussion to give specific examples of how online teaching increases the productivity and quality of education. Here is one bit:
Dale Carnegie’s advice to “tell the audience what you’re going to say, say it; then tell them what you’ve said” makes sense for a live audience. If 20% of your students aren’t following the lecture, it’s natural to repeat some of the material so that you keep the whole audience involved and following your flow. But if you repeat whenever 20% of the audience doesn’t understand something, that means that 80% of the audience hear something twice that they only needed to hear once. Highly inefficient.
Carnegie’s advice is dead wrong for an online audience. Different medium, different messaging. In an online lecture it pays to be concise. Online, the student is in control and can choose when and what to repeat. The result is a big time-savings as students proceed as fast as their capabilities can take them, repeating only what they need to further their individual understanding.
More at the link including a discussion of how most of my teaching career happened in 15 minutes.
Responses from Siva Vaidhyanatha (Robertson Professor in Media Studies at the University of Virginia), Alan Ryan (former Warden of New College, Oxford) and Kevin Carey (Director of the education policy program at the New America Foundation) follow later this week.
Trade and Property Rights at MRU
Lots more material available at MRUniversity this week in our sections on Trade and on Property Rights. We review comparative advantage in three videos that will be useful to principles students and also for professors looking for an additional resource to assign students. We cover Trade and Tariff History and look at Trade and Poverty in India among other topics. We then cover property rights beginning with basic issues of private vs. collective property and moving to property titling. Finally, we take a look at James Scott’s argument that fee-simple property rights developed because of government taxation in our video on Communal Property, Enclosure and the State.
Tyler and I were grateful for this tweet from @seanite8 “I’m from Kuwait, and I never would have the chance to learn about #MRUDevEcon. Thank u”
And Andres Marroquin writes:
I think everybody should see a recent Alex Tabarrok’s class on the effect of geography on institutions and long term economic growth. It is here, and it is superb!
See the link for further comments from Andres.
A simple model of lifetime happiness
Suppose that what makes a person happy is when their fortunes exceed expectations by a discrete amount (and that falling short of expectations is what makes you unhappy.) Then simply because of convergence of expectations:
- People will have few really happy phases in their lives.
- Indeed even if you lived forever you would have only finitely many spells of happiness.
- Most of the happy moments will come when you are young.
- Happiness will be short-lived.
- The biggest cross-sectional variance in happiness will be among the young.
- When expectations adjust to the rate at which your fortunes improve, chasing further happiness requires improving your fortunes at an accelerating rate.
- If life expectancy is increasing and we simply extrapolate expectations into later stages of life we are likely to be increasingly depressed when we are old.
- There could easily be an inverse relationship between intelligence and happiness.
Bill Gates on Education Reform
I’m also impressed by the results in places like Western Governors University. Its low-cost online programs rely on competency-based progression, not class-time or credit hours. It uses external assessments to evaluate student proficiency. And because its students are a little older and possibly more focused in their goals, its graduation rates are high and the salaries its graduates earn are good.
Because of institutions like Tennessee Tech and WGU, I’m optimistic about the potential of innovation to help solve many of the problems with our post-secondary system. But we need more and better information. I’m reminded of a point made by Andrew Rosen of Kaplan, the for-profit education company, that colleges today know more about how many kids attend basketball games and which alumni give money than how many students showed up for economics class during the week, or which alumni are having a hard time meeting their career goals because of shortcomings in their education.
That needs to change.
From here.
The culture that was Russian math departments, part II
There is a newly published paper by George Borjas and Kirk Doran, entitled “The Collapse of the Soviet Union and the Productivity of American Mathematicians”, here is the abstract:
It has been difficult to open up the black box of knowledge production. We use unique international data on the publications, citations, and affiliations of mathematicians to examine the impact of a large, post-1992 influx of Soviet mathematicians on the productivity of their U.S. counterparts. We find a negative productivity effect on those mathematicians whose research overlapped with that of the Soviets. We also document an increased mobility rate (to lower quality institutions and out of active publishing) and a reduced likelihood of producing “home run” papers. Although the total product of the preexisting American mathematicians shrank, the Soviet contribution to American mathematics filled in the gap. However, there is no evidence that the Soviets greatly increased the size of the “mathematics pie.” Finally, we find that there are significant international differences in the productivity effects of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and these international differences can be explained by both differences in the size of the émigré flow into the various countries and in how connected each country is to the global market for mathematical publications.
The link is here, possibly gated, there are earlier and ungated versions here.
For the pointer I thank Stuart Harty.
Conor Friedersdorf nails it
Before rank-and-file conservatives ask, “What went wrong?”, they should ask themselves a question every bit as important: “Why were we the last to realize that things were going wrong for us?”
Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike 4 years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday’s result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise.
Here is a key sentence:
They were operating at a self-imposed information disadvantage.
Read the whole thing. They should elevate him to something too. And as Matt Lewis said on Twitter:
Conservative media outlets promote too many voices who mislead the base AND turnoff independents. Good for ratings & clicks/bad for America.
Women, education, and earnings
From the job market paper of Miriam Gensowski, from University of Chicago:
Yet for education levels beyond the bachelor’s, higher education is associated with slightly lower earnings through marriage. The more highly educated women are less likely to be married, and thus lose the opportunity to bolster their own earnings with their husband’s. In the case of women with a Masters degree, the negative effect is clearly related to lower probability of being married – as Fig. 8 shows. A woman’s propensity to be married is much lower for women with a master’s as opposed to a bachelor’s degree or high school diploma. Most interestingly, the exceptional women who obtained a Doctorate degree did not suffer significantly in the marriage market, as one might have anticipated. Even though they were significantly less likely to be married, when they were married their husbands had higher-than-average earnings, so overall the impact of their high education on the returns to marriage are not statistically different from zero.
Of course there is a tricky causal issue. If you truly feel like getting a Masters degree, that may be enough to indicate your marriage prospects are lower and refraining from the Masters may not much help. We don’t know.
The paper is interesting throughout. For instance it finds a high return to education even after adjusting for IQ and personality traits. It ascertains which male personality types benefit the most from education. It also finds that the personality trait of neuroticism increases male earnings if correlated with a Masters or Ph.d but not otherwise.
The Chronicle of Higher Education covers MRU
Mr. Cowen hopes the site will become a library of explanatory videos about economics, not all of which will be organized into courses. He pictures a day when professors routinely make videos to explain their latest research findings to supplement their scholarly papers. “In less than five years most papers of every note will have a five-minute video,” Mr. Cowen predicts. “People can view it, rewind, rewatch, relisten. You can show it to classes.”
Here is more (listed as gated, but it wasn’t for me).
And here is good additional Washington Post coverage.
Project Blue Sky, from Pearson
Project Blue Sky allows instructors to search, select, and seamlessly integrate Open Educational Resources with Pearson learning materials. Using text, video, simulations, Power Point and more, instructors can create the digital course materials that are just right for their courses and their students. Pearson’s Project Blue Sky is powered by Gooru Learning, a search engine for learning materials.
A simple observation about education reform
The Prince George’s County school board has fewer college graduates serving current terms than any other school system in the Washington region, with only two of its eight members holding a bachelor’s degree.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank M.
MOOC cheating (model this)
From an email from Coursera:
Several students have contacted me about cases of cheating on the Final Exam. Frankly, why anyone who do this in a course that focuses on learning and offers no credentials, beats me. Students who cheat are really cheating themselves. If you are sure an answer is plagiarized from somewhere else (often easy to determine with a quick web search), you could simply award 1’s everywhere, which amounts to a score of 0. Whether you do that for one question or the whole exam is up to you. If there is any doubt that the student has broken the honor code, you have to give the student the benefit of that doubt. 0 on the whole exam is more significant than on one question. Though again, the stakes here are essentially zero; it’s mostly about self esteem, surely. For truly egregious cases, send me the details (your login id and the Student number (1, 2, or 3) and I can take it from there. Violation of the honor code is cause for expulsion from the class. Expulsion has occurred, in this class and others, I’m sad to say.
Meanwhile, if you want to know how evaluation training and peer grading looked from our side (the instruction team and the folks at Coursera who were making sure the ship stayed afloat), check out my latest post at MOOCtalk.org to see what was going on behind the scenes. Enjoy! 🙂
I thank AA for the pointer.
Measuring Baumol and Bowen Effects in Public Research Universities
That is a new paper by Robert E. Martin and R. Carter Hill:
We estimate three models of cost per student using data from Carnegie I and II public research universities. There are 841 usable observations covering the period from 1987 to 2008. We find that staffing ratios are individually and collectively significant in each model. Further, we find evidence that shared governance lowers cost and that the optimal staffing ratio is approximately three tenure track faculty members for every one full time administrator. Costs are higher if the ratio is higher or lower than three to one. As of 2008 the number of full time administrators is almost double the number of tenure track faculty. Using the differential method and the coefficients estimated in the three models, we deconstruct the real cost changes per student between 1987 and 2008 into Baumol and Bowen effects. This analysis reveals that for every $1 in Baumol cost effects there are over $2 in Bowen cost effects. Taken together, these results suggest two thirds of the real cost changes between 1987 and 2008 are due to weak shared governance and serious agency problems among administrators and boards.
For the pointer I thank Michael Tamada (who does not necessarily endorse the argument).
Markets in everything the culture that is Chicago
At Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s request, Walgreen Co. has agreed to provide $25 gift cards to parents who pick up their students’ report cards and participate in parent-teacher conferences during report card pickup days.
Here is more, courtesy of Peter Metrinko.