Category: Education
The Coming Education Revolution
From Metafilter:
Stanford’s ‘Introduction to Artificial Intelligence’ course will be offered free to anyone online this fall. The course will be taught by SebastianThrun (Stanford) and PeterNorvig (Google, Director of Research), who expect to deal with the historically large course size using tools like Google Moderator.
There will two 75 min lectures per week, weekly graded homework assignments and quizzes, and the course is expected to require roughly 10 hours per week. Over 10,000 students have already signed up.
In 2003, I argued that professors were becoming obsolete, giving a 10 to 20 year time for a big move to online education. Later, I pointed out that the market was moving towards superstar teachers, who teach hundreds at a time or even thousands online. Today, we have the Khan Academy, a huge increase in online education, electronic textbooks and peer grading systems and highly successful superstar teachers with Michael Sandel and his popular course Justice, serving as example number one.
One of the last remaining items holding back online education is a credible system to credential and compare student achievement across universities. Arnold Kling has that covered with a new business model.
For superstars and strong researchers, life in the ivory tower remains good. But for most teachers the cushy life is gone; tenure is just a dream for a majority of university teachers, salaries are low and teaching requirements have risen.
As in other fields what we are seeing is an increase in teaching inequality, at the top are high-salary superstars surrounded by apprentices who work long hours at low pay for a lottery ticket that for most will not payoff and at the bottom are lots of mid-skill adjuncts who do the drudge work of teaching remedial English and math.
Addendum: Tim Worstall points to the UK’s University of London as a model for the future.
Keynes v. Hayek Debate
The Keynes v. Hayek BBC debate at the LSE which pits Lord Robert Skidelsky and Duncan Weldon arguing for Keynes against George Selgin and Jamie Whyte arguing for Hayek is now available in an online podcast.
Do exogenous increases in the # of children lower child quality?
Maybe not (in which I channel Bryan Caplan):
So what does it mean for an older brother when Mom and Dad come home for the hospital with twins? What’s it like to be the younger sister of twins?
First, you get less computer time. Frenette finds that, even after controlling for family income, education, and myriad other factors, having twin siblings reduces the number of computers per child by 14.1 percentage points.
Second, you are less likely to be enrolled in private school — youth are 4 percentage points less likely to in private school when there are twins in the family, all else being equal.
Third, parents are less likely to save money for their children’s post-secondary education in families with twins.
And the impact of fewer computers, less private school, and less saving for post-secondary education on children’s academic performance is…not much.
Fifteen year olds from families with twins do no worse than other children in international standardized assessments of reading achievement. If anything, they appear to do slightly better — but there are too few families with twins in Frenette’s sample to know whether the difference is statistically significant.
As a parent, I find these results encouraging. Even if your resources are stretched, and you can’t do everything you’ve planned for your kids, they might turn out just fine anyways.
The possibly gated paper is here and here. For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.
Facts about Leon Walras
1. He twice failed the entrance exam at the Polytechnique in Paris because of his weak math skills.
2. He enrolled in a mining engineering school, wrote novels, and was an art critic for a while.
3. He was self-taught in economics.
4. Walras thought he deserved a Nobel Peace Prize, though he failed to win one.
That biographical information is from Cocktail Party Economics: The Big Ideas and Scintillating Small Talk about Markets, by Eveline J. Adomait and Richard G. Maranta. I can imagine this book as a good supplement to an undergraduate economics class with a very good basic text; it is mostly basic analytics with scattered interesting features throughout the book. Here is a short interview with one of the authors.
Hire him
And the student who simplified a subject by writing about it “in Lehman’s terms” baffled Iain Woodhouse, senior lecturer in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, until he read the phrase aloud (“layman’s terms” was intended).
Will Norway get a do-over?
In large countries, single events are not usually taken as defining that country. So if the police in America botch a response to a mass murderer, soon enough another mass murderer will come along. There is almost always a do-over, usually many of them. If need be, we Americans can start a new war to create a do-over.
Norway doesn’t work this way. The country won’t soon have an event which generates comparable international or national publicity to the recent murders. That makes those murders, and the lack of an effective police response, sting all the more. There is no do-over on the horizon.
It turns out for instance that the helicopter crew of the Oslo police force was on vacation. In expected value terms, maybe that wasn’t a mistake but it sure didn’t turn out well. Here is an article on Norway not very much arming its police force.
The Norwegian resistance movement from WWII has a heroic reputation, but now there’s been a do-over of Norwegian response capability, so to speak, or at least a perceived do-over.
Americans have a hard time understanding the concept of not getting many do-overs.
When it comes to our debt-ceiling crisis, we are acting as if we will get a do-over for sure; I wonder if that’s justified.
New and excellent manuscript on the economics of the family
By Martin Browning, Pierre-André Chiappori, and Yoram Weiss, you will find it here, on-line and free. Perhaps in this post-Freakonomics era you are jaded and feel you have seen too many “economics of the family” books. This is a scholarly rather than popular manuscript, and it is full of data and (simple) models. At some point it will come out from Cambridge University Press.
For the pointer I thank Scott Cunningham; “All of the models of household production, bargaining, sorting in marriage and dating, and the numerous other strands within this literature have been finally brought together into one place.”
IHS does Liberty Academy
Welcome to Liberty Academy! We’ve created learning paths to help you navigate the ideas of liberty through specific disciplines. Each path contains several lessons. The lessons are ordered to improve the learning process but you can skip around if you prefer.
Each lesson contains the following elements:
- A LearnLiberty short video explaining the concept
- Suggested resources for delving deeper into the topic
- Questions to enhance your understanding
- A discussion area to share your insights and ask questions
Model this
As we have written before, private colleges and universities are by far the biggest offenders on grade inflation, even when you compare private schools to equally selective public schools.
There are charts and further information at the link. By the way:
…about 43 percent of all letter grades given were A’s, an increase of 28 percentage points since 1960 and 12 percentage points since 1988. The distribution of B’s has stayed relatively constant; the growing share of A’s instead comes at the expense of a shrinking share of C’s, D’s and F’s. In fact, only about 10 percent of grades awarded are D’s and F’s.
It’s worth trying to model that too.
American vs. Russian notions of friendship
Not long ago I attended an evening-long discussion group on this topic, comprised mostly of Russian emigrants and their spouses. The Russians were generally keen to argue that they have deeper and closer friendships than do the Americans. They also dislike that Americans will call their acquaintances “friends.” In response I noted that:
1. Relative to Americans, Russians are far more concerned with defining who is truly a friend, or not. (Though Google+ may change this.)
2. Russians are far more likely to conduct purges of their friends. (“A future enemy” is one good Eastern European definition of a friend, or so the joke goes, thanks to BC.)
3. American geographic mobility has been falling for some time and so we might move back toward some closer and more durable notions of friendship; social networks play a role here too.
Since that evening, I’ve formulated a new version of the question in my mind. Putting aside the so-called “intelligentsia” (a Russian phrase, not one which comes quickly to my tongue), are Russian lower-middle class friendships so much more “life and death” than American lower-middle class friendships, especially among the immobile? What if seven guys grow up together in Somerville, MA, never go to college or leave town, work in auto parts stores, and end up reminding you of characters in a Clint Eastwood movie? Maybe they’re pretty tight, albeit with grudges and perhaps even purges along the way.
The new question is then this: why does the “treatment” of greater education have so much less affect on the nature of Russian friendships, relative to American friendships? Are there other dimensions along which the treatment of education influences Russians less? (Examples would be child-bearing age, taste in sports, taste in food, etc.) Influences Americans less? Other groups?
The Russian intelligentsia will be the first to insist how much education matters in their circles, but perhaps they doth protest too loud.
Signaling your ability to signal
Robin Hanson writes:
…people in business signal to each other all the time. In fact, most of the on-the-job business learning that employees do soon after college, such as how to dress well, how to give presentations, how to write memos, how to talk with clients, etc. might be skills that are mainly useful to signal innate features to bosses, co-workers, clients, etc. So employers might pay more for students with prestigious degrees because such degrees signal an ability to learn how to send later business signals. And this extra pay for top degrees could be entirely an investment in signaling, even if after hiring someone no one ever knew of or mentioned their degrees.
Bottom line: If much of human interaction is signaling, then much of human investment is in ways to better signal. Businesses that signal are also willing to invest in better signals. The fact that a boss is willing to pay more for an employee who went to a better school, even after that boss knows this employee’s “real” abilities, does not show that school isn’t all about signaling.
One way of wording this (which Robin may or may not accept) is that the signaling and learning hypotheses are not always directly opposed.
When are signaling and human capital theories of education observationally equivalent?
Going as far back as Andrew Weiss’s survey paper, there are various attempts to argue that the two theories make the same predictions about earnings and education. A randomly elevated individual will earn more money but is this from having learned more or from being pooled with a more productive set of peers?
To explore this, let’s pursue the very good question asked by Bryan Caplan:
Our story begins with a 22-year-old high school graduate with a B average. He knows an unscrupulous nerd who can hack into Harvard’s central computer and give him a fake diploma, complete with transcript. In the U.S. labor market, what is the present discounted value of that fake diploma?
If he can fake a good interview (a big if, but let’s say), and if certification from recommenders is not important in the chosen sector (another big if), he may get a Harvard-quality job for his first placement. If you believe in the signaling theory, however, his marginal product is fairly low, much lower than the wage he will be paid. They will fire him. He’ll come out a bit ahead, if he is not too demoralized, but within a few years he will be paid his marginal product.
In most jobs they figure out your productivity within two or three months after training, if not sooner.
In a one-shot static setting, signaling and human capital theories might have the same empirical implications because the learning and pooling effects can produce similar links between education and wages (again assuming someone can fake an interview). But not over time and of course the wage dispersion for an educational cohort does very much increase with time. The workers don’t keep on receiving their “average marginal product” for very long.
Do not be tricked by those who serve up one-period examples to establish the empirical equivalence of signaling and human capital theories!
To tie this back to the academic literature, if IV-elevated workers enjoy an enduring wage effect comparable to that of the other degreed workers, you should conclude they learned something comparable at school unless you wish to spin an elaborate and enduring W > MP story.
Addendum: There is a less drastic scenario than the one outlined by Bryan. Let’s say there are fourteen classes of workers and a class nine worker is randomly elevated to class seven credentials. He might use that momentary good fortune to learn from smarter peers, work hard to establish a foothold, and so on. His lifetime earnings might end up as roughly those of other class seven workers, despite being of initial type nine. The higher earnings are still based on learning effects (not mainly pooling), though pooling gave that worker temporary access to some new learning and advancement opportunities. In most regards this works like the learning model, not the pooling model, although the period of learning extends beyond schooling narrowly construed.
Job interview questions
Jane Street Capital: What is the smallest number divisible by 225 that consists of all 1’s and 0’s?
I believe it must end with a zero. And the next to last digit must be a zero. Keep on going. Via Chris Blattman, here are some more, along with a few snarky answers.
Inconsistent Stories
Yglesias on the inconsistent stories told by the teachers unions.
[there] is a huge consistency problem in the messaging coming out of teachers unions. Sometimes I hear from union-affiliated folks that it’s unfair to attribute differences in student learning to differences in teacher skill, because everyone knows that socioeconomic and home environment factors drive a lot of this. Other times I see the American Federation of Teachers building a messaging program around the idea that its members are Making A Difference Every Day. To me this leads to the obvious conclusion that while socioeconomic and home environment factors do drive a lot of student learning, teachers are also making a difference every day. And it makes a lot of sense to ask which teachers are making the most difference. The teachers who are in the top 20 percent of difference-makers are playing a vital role to the future of America, and we ought to pay them more money and make sure they don’t leave the profession. But the teachers who are in the bottom percent of difference-makers are doing us little good, and we should try to replace them with other people.
Read the whole thing, he makes a number of good points.
Signaling vs. credentialism
The relationship between education and earnings is not entirely market driven. Within the government sector, pay grade is affected by education levels. Government also has educational credentials that affect many professions, including teaching, health care, and law. That is why I do not look to signaling as the explanation for the returns to schooling. For signals of ability, there are alternatives available. But strict credential requirements leave no alternative.
There is more at the link. While I trust the best individual researchers in the area, I share Arnold’s fear that the macro-organization of the education field is not structured to produce totally objective results. Still, a natural experiment showing a high signaling premium would yield accolades to its author and I still would like to see your nominations for the best work — and I do mean natural experiments — pointing in this direction.