Category: Education

This is a good discussion, I agree with most of it, for most people.  Here is one bit:

The hardest part is often just starting. I’ve found that it’s especially hard for me to start when a task is difficult or complex. The more importance and weight a certain activity has in my life or business, the more I seem to put off starting.

However, if I can just get moving on it, even for a few minutes, it tends to get easier.

Because I know this about myself, rather than setting the intention to finish something, I resolve myself to start. The more often I start, the easier things get finished. Overcoming that first bit of inertia is the biggest challenge (just like getting started on a run, or the first push of getting a car moving).

Once things are moving, momentum is on your side.

That is from Jonathan Mead, hat tip goes to Anya Kamenetz.  You also can enter “time management” into the MR search function, and then scroll down a bit.

I left the following comment on Bryan Caplan’s blog post:

You don’t need to overturn all convention.  The top schools could shift at the margin, as they have many times in the past, and suddenly the conformist thing to do is to have ?? percent of your classes be on-line, and so on.  In virtually any other context you would see the flexibility of the market here!  No major credentials need to collapse, if it turns out that cannot happen easily.

This is a phantom issue, raised by many people but not thought through deeply enough.  Markets convexify (sometimes).

It is fine to argue “on-line education is not in fact more efficient.”  It is much harder to argue “if it is efficient, conformity pressures will keep it out of the market.”  Don’t confuse the former case with the latter.

The very useful model is here, and there is further commentary from Bryan here.  My question is this: does the model imply that on-line education should succeed, or not?

Let’s say that education signals conscientiousness.  A purely on-line class, with no ogre standing over your shoulder to discipline you, should be blown off by those who are not conscientiousness.  The on-line class would seem to offer a better signal and a cleaner separation of types.

Alternatively, let’s say education signals IQ or some other notion of “smarts.”  On-line education would seem to offer less opportunity to get through by buttering up the teacher, spouting mumbo-jumbo in basket-weaving classes, and so on.  For better or worse, a lot of on-line education seems to be based on relatively objective tests.  Then on-line education would seem to offer a better signal of smarts.

One possible application of Bryan’s model might be this.  Income inequality is rising, so there is greater care to get the signal, selection, and screening right for top jobs.  Relatively high levels of education should be all the more discriminatory, and that may mean more on-line education.  In fact, in normative terms that might well be a problem with on-line education, namely its inegalitarian nature with regard to curiosity and effort and smarts.

Oddly, the signaling model could be true, but through an invisible hand mechanism — schools competing to separate quality in the most effective ways — you can end up with a state of affairs where upfront signaling costs are fairly low.  Imagine a chess school, needing to sort talent, and unable to teach its students very much, but setting up a quite cheap on-line tournament and declaring some winners.  Aren’t the Khan Academy users some really talented people?

Alternatively, through an invisible hand mechanism, if the learning model is correct, you could end up with an equilibrium in which upfront signaling costs appear to be relatively high, namely that you impose “taxes” to make sure people end up learning what they need to know.  Think Paris Island or KIPP schools.

It is important not to confuse “seeing high upfront signaling costs” with “the signaling model of education is essentially correct.”  They sound like they should go together, but quite possibly they don’t.

Fairfax County schools could become the first in the Washington region to create a virtual public high school that would allow students to take all their classes from a computer at home.

No sports teams. No pep rallies. No lockers, no hall passes. Instead, assignments delivered on-screen and after-school clubs that meet online.

It’s a reimagination of the American high school experience. And it’s a nod to the power of the school choice movement, which has given rise to the widespread expectation that parents should have a menu of options to customize their children’s education.

Several School Board members, who will hear a formal proposal for the online school at a meeting Monday, said they are excited by the prospect.

The full story is here.

Via a request from Ezra for topic coverage, here are some very good remarks from Ryan Avent.  Excerpt:

A sector dominated by the state—state-run in some cases, merely subsidised and regulated in others—is, I think most Americans would agree, both a major contributor to American prosperity and one of America’s most competitive industries on foreign markets, despite its glaring inefficiencies. What ought we to conclude based on this example?

Certainly, one could reasonably argue that the sector would be even better if state control were relaxed, monopolies broken up, subsidies curtailed, and market controls (like those on immigration) eliminated. But one also has to wrestle with how different the American economy would look if the state had never muscled public universities (including a broad network of technology-driven, extension-oriented schools) into existence.

This stuff is harder than we often pretend.

A few observations:

1. Postwar higher education has proven one of America’s most effective subsidies, and it has paid for itself many times over.  It is also one of the more significant successes of federalism.

2. We are fortunate that U.S. state universities are more or less autonomous, compared to the Continental model where professors and administrators are treated as part of the state civil service bureaucracy.  The latter system does not work well, and those countries have struggled to move closer to American models.

3. To refer back to a distinction from the David Brooks column, we should not be trying to squeeze the entire economy into the shoebox of the dynamic but risky “Economy I.”  For public choice reasons, as well understood by Karl Polanyi (an underrated public choice theorist if there ever was one), the polity requires some respite from Economy I, whether we like that or not.  Read also this analysis by Interfluidity, which is one of my favorite blog posts of all time.  Furthermore the more “sluggish” Economy II, by operating under different principles, often serves as a useful R&D lab for Economy I.  Think MIT and Stanford, or note that Adam Smith ended up as a customs commissioner, as his father had been.  Goethe and Bach worked for governments for much of their lives.  It’s about balance and synergy, though it is perfectly fair to see contemporary Western Europe, especially in the periphery, as a region which has far too much Economy II and too little Economy I.

4. Maintaining the truth of #1 will prove a significant challenge going forward.  It’s not about blaming the critics or defunders of state universities, or the critics of public subsidies to private universities.  The real problems are a few.  First, successful state programs tend to stultify and decline over time, and if nothing else the danger is that health care costs will eat up state budgets.  Second, the absolute returns to higher education (as opposed to the wage for not going) are not currently high enough to maintain the current fiscal structure of those institutions, furthermore those fiscal structures do not have so much “give,” due to tenure and various self-imposed cost inflexibilities.  Third, although most state universities have relatively little explicit debt, they are implicitly massively leveraged through reliance on ongoing tuition boosts, ongoing enrollment boosts, and timely retirements, none of which can be counted on in the future.

It will prove a daunting path forward.

Addendum: David Henderson comments.

The United States circa 2012 is one of the most productive economies of all time, arguably the most productive if you take into account size and diversification (rules out Norway, etc.).  Internationally speaking, in the richest and most productive global economy of all time, which is our most competitive sector?

Hollywood?  Maybe, but it could well be higher education.  Students from all over the world want to go to U.S. higher education.  If we had nicer immigration authorities, this advantage would be all the more pronounced.

In other words, I work in what is perhaps the most competitive and successful sector in the most competitive and successful economy of all time.

And yet what I see around me is a total, total mess.  And I believe my school to be considerably above average in terms of how well it is run.

…the connection between income and student performance “is no less true in the Age of Obama than it was in the Age of Pericles.” But, he points out, most of the connection is not causal, but due to other factors.  He cites a study by Julia Isaacs and Katherine Magnuson (Brookings Institution, 2011), that examines an array of family characteristics – such as race, mother’s and father’s education, single parent or two-parent family, smoking during pregnancy – on school readiness and achievement.  The Brookings study finds that the distinctive impact of family income is just 6.4 percent of a standard deviation, generally regarded as a small effect.  In addition, Peterson calls attention to earlier research by Susan Mayer, former dean of the Harris School at the University of Chicago, which also found that the direct relationship between family income and education success for children varied between negligible and small.

Responding to Ladd’s claim that the gap in reading achievement between students from families in the lowest and highest income deciles is larger for those born in 2001 than for those born in earlier decades, Peterson points out that the achievement gap between income groups was growing at exactly the same time the federal government was rapidly expanding services to the poor – Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, housing subsidies, and many other programs.

“A better case can be made that any increase in the achievement gap between high- and low-income groups is more the result of changing family structure than of inadequate medical services or preschool education,” Peterson says.  In 1969, 85 percent of children under the age of 18 were living with two married parents; by 2010, that percentage had declined to 65 percent.  The median income level of a single-parent family is just over $27,000 (using 1992 dollars), compared to more than $61,000 for a two-parent family; and the risk of dropping out of high school increases from 11 percent to 28 percent if a white student comes from a single-parent family instead of a two-parent family.  For blacks, the increment is from 17 percent to 30 percent, and for Hispanics, the risk rises from 25 percent to 49 percent.

That is from Harvard’s Kennedy School, from Paul Peterson.  Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Ilya Novak.

The Mercatus MA Fellowship is a two year fellowship designed for students and young professionals who want to enter into or advance a career in public policy.  Students have gone onto careers in government (both federal agencies and Capitol Hill) and think tanks, and three have been named presidential management fellows.