Category: Education
The Hispanic high school graduation rate is increasing
The number of young Hispanics enrolled in college, which surpassed black enrollment for the first time in 2010, jumped to almost 2.1 million last year, from about 1.3 million in 2008. That is partly a product of a swelling Hispanic population, as well as the increased rate of college attendance.
But it also reflects a fast-rising high school graduation rate. In the 1990s, fewer than 60 percent of Hispanics 18 to 24 had a high school diploma, but that figure hit 70 percent for the first time in 2009, and 76 percent last year.
Here is a bit more.
Education as loss leader?
And then there is the Walt Disney Company. It is building a chain of language schools in China big enough to enroll more than 150,000 children annually. The schools, which weave Disney characters into the curriculum, are not going to move the profit needle at a company with $41 billion in annual revenue. But they could play a vital role in creating a consumer base as Disney builds a $4.4 billion theme park and resort in Shanghai.
Here is more, mostly on whether media companies enjoy any synergies in education markets, interesting throughout.
The benefits of learning a second language
Bryan has had a few recent posts criticizing the notion of multilingualism for (most) Americans. As a general advocate of learning foreign languages, I have a few points in response:
1. There is a sizable literature on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism. I get nervous when I see the topic discussed without reference to the main claimed benefits.
2. I believe that good fluency in a second or third language significantly expands one’s ability to see and understand and also articulate other points of view. And most of the very great thinkers of the past were fluent or semi-fluent in multiple languages. By teaching other languages at an early age, we can make our most productive thinkers deeper and more productive.
3. Ideally foreign languages can be taught to individuals when they are young, well before high school, thus very much lowering the opportunity cost of such instruction. Just toss out some of the other material, making sure to keep mathematics and English literacy. Most of Western Europe does this quite well, and I hardly think of those children as miserable. I don’t see why this has to cost anything at all.
4. I am reasonably sympathetic to the “we’re so uncommitted to this notion we’ll never see it through so let’s not bother trying” response to my attitude. (In particular it is harder for Americans to get within-culture reinforcement for language learning in the way that Europeans so often do, either from American popular culture or from crossing a nearby border.) Yet that’s a far cry from believing it would actually be a mistake to invest resources in that direction, if indeed we would see it through.
Here is one stimulating discussion of the topic, in English of course.
Company to offer its own degrees
A leading business publisher is to become the first FTSE 100 company to award its own degrees.
Pearson, which owns the Edexcel exam board as well as Penguin and the Financial Times, will recruit up to 100 undergraduates from September 2013 for a business and enterprise degree course.
David Willetts, the Universities minister, is trying to encourage private providers to set up their own degree courses.
Pearson will charge £6,500 a year for a basic three-year university course. Students are expected to be eligible for government loans to cover the fees and Pearson will also be offering “performance scholarships” to help its brightest recruits pay their fees.
That is probably not a big deal, just fyi, and here is a bit more.
For the pointer I thank Daniel Lippman.
Can you pass this Turing test?
What did they think about the weather that morning?
Three different responses came from a male human, a female human and a machine. Which is which? Keep in mind that the event was held in October 2008 and they all knew it was autumn/fall in England. The responses were:
A.”I do tend to like a nice foggy morning, as it adds a certain mystery.”
B. “Not the best, expecting pirates to come out of the fog.”
C. “The weather is not nice at the moment, unless you like fog.”
So which is which?
That is from a paper by Kevin Warwick, “Not Another Look at the Turing Test.” I will offer the answer when I get back home. For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
EconJobRumors.com
That site specializes in…economics job market rumors. It is also a more general bulletin board for discussing matters involving the economics profession.
What does a contract with Coursera look like?
The contract [with University of Michigan] reveals that even Coursera isn’t yet sure how it will bring in revenue. A section at the end of the agreement, titled “Possible Company Monetization Strategies,” lists eight potential business models, including having companies sponsor courses. That means students taking a free course from Stanford University may eventually be barraged by banner ads or promotional messages. But the universities have the opportunity to veto any revenue-generating idea on a course-by-course basis, so very little is set in stone.
And this stunner:
When and if money does come in, the universities will get 6 to 15 percent of the revenue, depending on how long they offer the course (and thus how long Coursera has to profit from it). The institutions will also get 20 percent of the gross profits, after accounting for costs and previous revenue paid. That means the company gets the vast majority of the cash flow.
The full story is here, and for the pointer I thank my colleague Debra Lattanzi.
Mere exposure to money
The paper is by Eugene M. Caruso, Kathleen D. Vohs, Brittani Baxter and Adam Waytz. The title of the paper is “Mere Exposure to Money Increases Endorsement of Free-Market Systems and Social Inequality.” Abstract:
The present research tested whether incidental exposure to money affects people’s endorsement of social systems that legitimize social inequality. We found that subtle reminders of the concept of money, relative to nonmoney concepts, led participants to endorse more strongly the existing social system in the United States in general (Experiment 1) and free-market capitalism in particular (Experiment 4), to assert more strongly that victims deserve their fate (Experiment 2), and to believe more strongly that socially advantaged groups should dominate socially disadvantaged groups (Experiment 3). We further found that reminders of money increased preference for a free-market system of organ transplants that benefited the wealthy at the expense of the poor even though this was not the prevailing system (Experiment 5) and that this effect was moderated by participants’ nationality. These results demonstrate how merely thinking about money can influence beliefs about the social order and the extent to which people deserve their station in life.
For the pointer I thank Robin Hanson.
College fact of the day
What do families actually pay for college? On average, the answer was $20,902 in 2011-2012, which is down from $24,097 in 2009-2010.
That is from Timothy Taylor. That is not deflation due to higher productivity, but rather mostly the result of a series of substitutions, including living at home and switching to two-year colleges.
File under “Further reasons why the current revenue model is unsustainable.”
Elsewhere, Mark Edmundson, a U Va. English professor, writes:
Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely.
Boo hoo! Poor you! Poor me! Poor Alex, que triste!
File under “The Empire Strikes Back.”
Econ Memes
Art Carden has created a page of econ-related memes. Here is one of my favorites:
Report from the front lines
From U Va.:
[University President] Sullivan has an ambitious plan to retool introductory courses as “hybrids,” replacing much of the human labor with technology and freeing professors to focus on higher-level classes. Her initiative would go further than most elite universities have dared in replacing human instructors with software.
The story is here.
Street Corner Science
Nobel prize winner Leon Lederman answers science questions on the street. Excellent. We should have some economists do this….with a different economist on each street corner of course.
Hat tip: Metafilter.
I didn’t mean to leave anybody out
From my entering class at Harvard, that is. A few emails prompt me to produce a longer list:
Douglas Elmendorf, now head of the CBO in addition to his previous illustrious career in research and policy.
Rob Stavins, teaches at the Kennedy School and is one of the leading researchers in environmental economics including climate change.
Perry Mehrling, we’ve covered him a lot on MR, most of all I love his book on Fischer Black.
Asher Blass, living in Israel, working as a partner in a consulting firm, for a while he was chief economist at Bank of Israel. I recall Asher once telling me that an individual can have a larger impact in a country with a small population.
Kenneth Kuttner, he has spent time at the San Francisco Fed and co-authored several important papers on money and credit. Now at Williams College.
John Nachbar, a noted theorist at Washington University and for a while he was department chair.
David Corbett, he now works as a lawyer.
Allen Sanguines, he was brilliant in theory, he is now the President of Rasaland, a development fund in Mexico.
Mark Sundberg, a while ago he was at the World Bank.
Mary Hirschfeld, former Jeopardy champion, went on to get a Ph.D in theology at Notre Dame, now teaching humanities at Villanova.
Greg Duffie, macro and money, professor at Johns Hopkins.
Richard Grossman, at Wesleyan, he is well known in financial history.
Hamish Stewart, has done well recognized work in economics and philosophy.
Deborah Weiss, for a while she was my colleague at GMU Law, now she is living in Texas and raising a family.
My earlier coverage of the class was here. Our TAs included Michael Mandel and Nobu Kiyotaki. There are more, perhaps Miles can help me out in the comments.
Reminiscences of Miles Kimball, and others
Miles and I were in the same entering class in Harvard. Miles and Abhijit Banerjee were for economic theory the sharpest students in the group and it must have been an absolute terror to teach them. Both were gentlemanly in the extreme, but if a mistake or ambiguity were on the board, or in a paper, you could be sure they would find it and point it out. I recall Abhijit answering a question on the macro final exam and showing that what he thought would be the supposed Harvard faculty member answer was in fact wrong, in addition to solving for the right answer, finding a few other possible equilibria, and acing the rest of the exam in but a few hours’ time. Steve Kaplan, from the same class, later became known as an empirical economist but his theoretical acumen was remarkably good. Those three dominated a lot of the discussions. Mathias Dewatripont was also no slouch in theory though temperamentally quieter. Alan Krueger, in his third year, obtained the reputation of having the best eye for an important empirical paper and how to execute it; he learned the most from Larry Summers. Nouriel Roubini was generally quiet, though he looked all-knowing and at times slightly jaded.
Brad DeLong was a few years older. He was thought of as the slightly right-wing guy (compared to his peers he was) who read a lot of unusual history of economic thought, including Adam Ferguson. He and his girlfriend (now wife) were inseparable and always affectionate.
Miles struck me as a mind in perpetual motion, in the best sense of that phrase. I was not surprised, in 1984, when I heard about his linguistics Master’s thesis, which includes a learned and original discussion of Charles Peirce. Miles is also a cousin of Mitt Romney, and he will soon blog “Will Mitt’s Mormonism Make Him a Supply-Side Liberal?”. I wonder what he makes of us all.
Here are his early tweets.
One feature about his blog which is refreshing is that he is neither a libertarian nor a progressive, though he incorporates ideas from both approaches. My RSS feed is mostly libertarians and progressives, but that is part of the strange selection mechanism of the blogosphere, not a reflection of the economics profession.
Again, Miles’s blog is here and Miles on Twitter is here. Most of all, he seems to be a great dad, or at least his daughter thinks so. She too is studying at Harvard, for an MBA. Here is her project Expert Novice, “Every month or so, I write a letter about what I’ve learned lately.”
A fourth and hybrid perspective on the future of on-line education
In a very good blog post, Bryan Caplan lays out three competing perspectives. But he leaves out a fourth:
Select groups, such as adult continuing education, military officers on ships, precocious 12-year-olds, or perhaps middle class students in Kenya who can’t get the real product, will follow an exclusively on-line model. But most students will not, at least not in the United States. College still has considerable consumption value, fraternities improve your job prospects, instructors help motivate, and face-to-face contact imprints a lot of learning on our minds. Still, there is far too much duplication of lectures and universities are being squeezed by personnel costs. State governments face rising Medicaid costs and 78 percent or so of students are in state systems. Lecture duplication will be significantly reduced, and instructional time will be spent…instructing…rather than repeating canned lectures ad nauseum. Imagine that ten years from now one-third of all lectures are delivered on-line in one manner or another, perhaps with some later in person commentary. Students may watch those lectures with an instructional aide present to address questions or to show them how to press the “Play” button. There will be no need for employers to fundamentally change which sources they respect for personnel certification, although possibly some upstarts will arise in corners of the market where quality can be measured by tests.
You will find two critiques of my views on on-line education here, and here, but neither represents my views correctly. They all take on-line education to be an all-or-nothing prospect.
At the end of his post Bryan writes:
* When I talk about “online education,” I don’t just mean students at existing brick-and-mortar colleges taking some classes from their dorm rooms. I mean students enrolling in virtual colleges instead of physical colleges.
I would say he is defining away the most likely model, namely a hybrid model which has a significant on-line component.