Category: Education
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.
The culture that is Germany
Hard to believe, but ultimately not a surprise:
In the United States, many lament that it takes students too long to graduate. In Germany, the School of Economics and Management in Essen is suing Marcel Pohl, for $3,772 that the institution lost in tuition revenue when he finished a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in 3 semesters, not the 11 that would have been expected, UPI reported. The university declined to comment. Pohl said, “When I got the lawsuit, I thought it couldn’t be true. Performance is supposed to be worth something.”
The link is here. He went through the course material so quickly by divvying up the lectures with two friends of his, and sharing the resulting notes, thus attending only a fraction of the lectures the school was offering to him. Here is a German language account, consider this gem of a passage:
“Sie sagen, sie bestellen jetzt eine Cola, und haben nur ein halbes Glas und sagen: Dann möchte ich auch nur ein halbes Glas zahlen. Das ist ja auch völlig in Ordnung. So, sie haben aber die ganze Cola nur furchtbar schnell ausgetrunken und sagen: Jetzt möchte ich nur die Hälfte zahlen. Das geht einfach nicht.”
Just imagine if he had had on-line options.
David Gordon emails me on the workplace
Tyler,
I enjoyed reading your excellent post on the Crooked Timber workplace coercion piece. Many of their complaints also hold for the university classroom, e.g., limits to free speech, students have no say in what work is required, etc.; and often there are costs to refusing to enroll in classes the student finds onerous, such as failing to obtain the desired degree. But I doubt Bertram and his friends would regard this situation as coercive.
Best wishes,
David
Nor is it always easy to switch schools…
Sentences to ponder
When the head cook of Viet Taste in Falls Church gets an order for a plate of Bun Cha Hanoi, he knows exactly what to do.
He has cooked the pork dish — with vermicelli noodles, greens and pickled vegetables — countless times and knows exactly how much fish sauce and fresh herbs to add.
Outside his kitchen, the customers, most of them Vietnamese, are expecting authentic Vietnamese cuisine. German Sierra, born in Honduras, makes sure they get it.
Here is more, interesting throughout.
Steve Postrel on marginalism and the paradox of higher education
Via Reihan, this is an excellent blog post. Rather than excerpt, let me reproduce the whole thing:
By now, you may be getting sick of reading articles and blog posts about the crisis in higher education. This post is different. It proposes an explanation of why students have been willing to pay more and more for undergraduate and professional degrees at the same time that these degrees are becoming both less scarce and more dumbed down. And that explanation rests on a simple and plausible economic hypothesis.
First, let me dispose of the idea that “college (and business school) is all about signaling.” The explanation I present allows signaling to represent a major part of the value of higher education, but it says that the historical increase in willingness to pay for education is not caused by an increase in its signaling value. (And the evidence for signaling or screening education premia, as opposed to human capital accumulation, is pretty thin anyway.) I’m certain signaling plays a role in creating value for certain degrees from certain institutions for certain people in certain situations. That it dominates the value proposition for college seems like a stretch.
My hypothesis is that it is precisely the dumbing down of U.S. education over the last decades that explains the increase in willingness to pay for education. The mechanism is diminishing marginal returns to education.
Typical graduate business school education has indeed become less rigorous over time, as has typical college education. But typical high school education has declined in quality just as much. As a result, the human capital difference between a college and high-school graduate has increased, because the first increments of education are more valuable on the job market than the later ones. It used to be that everybody could read and understand something like Orwell’s Animal Farm, but the typical college graduates could also understand Milton or Spencer. Now, nobody grasps Milton but only the college grads can process Animal Farm, and for employers the See Spot Run–>Animal Farm jump is more valuable than the Animal Farm–>Milton jump.
So the value of a college education has increased even as its rigor has declined, because willingness to pay for quality is really willingness to pay for incremental quality. This principle holds true in many markets. For example, a roof with mean time to failure of 5 years is a lot more valuable than one with a MTF of 2 years, but a 25-year MTF isn’t that much better than a 22-year MTF for most owners. A fuel economy increase from 12 to 15 miles per gallon is a bigger deal than an increase from 27 to 30 MPG.
Empirical points in favor of this diminishing marginal returns/reduced overall rigor hypothesis:
1. Rigor appears to be declining over time at all levels of American education.
2. Rate of return evidence classically suggests that the big marginal gains to education come from lower levels of education.
3. The median wages of college graduates have been flat, but the median wages of high-school-only graduates have gone down even more.
4. The MBA market has continued to support higher tuitions and enrollment despite the secular trend in rigor.
5. Employers increasingly favor those with more education even as they complain more about the quality of the graduates they hire.
Additional implications:
1. The incremental human capital gained from attending a (truly) better school rather than a typical school is increasing, since the additional learning is more basic (and hence more valuable) than it used to be.
2. Five and six-year undergraduate-to-masters programs should grow to accommodate those who would benefit from additional human capital.
3. More-rigorous high schools will attract larger premia (in either tuition, ability to be selective, or, for public schools, their impact on local property values), because at lower overall levels of rigor the increment of human capital is worth more.
Extensions of the logic to signaling considerations:
1. If you accept that the marginal ability and effort necessary to acquire education increases in the level of education (the flip side of the assumption about diminishing marginal payoff), then the signaling value of the typical degree is actually declining. The innate ability difference between the college and high-school-only graduate shrinks as both curricula are made less rigorous.
2. Signaling by the quality of the institution attended and the difficulty of the major subject studied is becoming more important; a very selective (or hard to complete) school or major adds back some of the lost signaling power of the typical degree.
3. We should see college degrees becoming more important in occupations that wouldn’t seem to “require” them under the old model of college, such as service staff in food service and hospitality jobs.
“Scene of the Verge of the Hay-Mead”
That is a chapter from Far From the Madding Crowd, which remains a much underrated Thomas Hardy novel. This chapter is a masterpiece of behavioral economics, most of all on matters of courtship and romance. It is difficult to excerpt, because it relies so much on the sequence of events and dialog. You can read it free here. There are other sources, including MP3s, here.
Zingales on Education Equity
Luigi Zingales has a good op-ed on education in today’s NYTimes:
… scholars like me…work in the least competitive and most subsidized industry of all: higher education.
We criticize predatory loans by mortgage brokers, when student loans can be just as abusive. To avoid the next credit bubble and debt crisis, we need to eliminate government subsidies and link tuition financing to the incomes of college graduates…Just as subsidies for homeownership have increased the price of houses, so have education subsidies contributed to the soaring price of college.
…These subsidies also distort the credit market. Since the government guarantees student loans, lenders have no incentive to lend wisely. All the burden of making the right decision falls on the borrowers. Unfortunately, 18-year-olds aren’t particularly good at judging the profitability of an investment…
Last but not least, these subsidized loans keep afloat colleges that do not add much value for their students, preventing people from accumulating useful skills.
Instead of subsidies Zingales, drawing a page from Milton Friedman, proposes income-contingent loans.
Investors could finance students’ education with equity rather than debt. In exchange for their capital, the investors would receive a fraction of a student’s future income — or, even better, a fraction of the increase in her income that derives from college attendance. (This increase can be easily calculated as the difference between the actual income and the average income of high school graduates in the same area.)
As I wrote about earlier, Bill Clinton received a loan like this from Yale’s law school and later created a national program but it didn’t get very far (although Obama wants to expand the program). Australia, however, implemented an income contingent loan program in 1989. Australian students don’t pay anything for university when they attend but once their income reaches a certain threshold they are charged through the income tax system. Many other countries are experimenting with income contingent loans.
Lumni is a private organization, started by economist Miguel Palacios (here is his book and Cato paper on human capital contracts), that is funding loans like this right now.
One point that Zingales doesn’t examine is adverse selection – an income-contingent loan will appeal most to people who want careers with low-income prospects, say in the non-profit sector. (Redistribution of this type was one of the reasons for the Yale law school program.) Thus, the program works best when incomes differ due to luck. My guess is that the adverse-selection problem can be handled if education venture capitalists are left free to price.
Who will be next to ask for a raise?
Angus reports:
Kudos to Thomas Sargent for landing a two year position at Seoul National University for an estimated $1,250,000 per year.
Economists can pull down 7 figures in total compensation when you figure in consulting and speech-giving on top of the academic salary, but this is the biggest salary+”research funds” number that I’m aware of in economics.
Portugal fact of the day
In 2009, only 30 percent of Portuguese adults had completed high school or its equivalent, according to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Here is more, mostly on the Portuguese response to fiscal consolidation.
What is college for?
Here is an excellent post by Noah Smith, excerpt:
There are three extremely important forms of human capital that you can’t acquire on the job:
1) Motivation,
2) Perspective, and
3) Human networks.
These, I believe, are the types of capital that college is designed to build, both in Japan and in the United States.
Read the whole thing.
What is the correct Bayesian inference from this British message?
I found a little card in my bathroom, perched above the toilet and near the shower:
This bath has a non slip surface in part. If you would like a rubber bath mat in addition please contact housekeeping.
And so what does that mean? Here are some options:
1. The part without the non slip surface is really, really slippery. Watch out!
2. We are boasting about having a non slip surface “in part,” yet without appearing to be boasting too explicitly.
3. We are not sure which is your best course of action (there is human heterogeneity), but we want to get you thinking about the non slip surface and also the slip surface. We are sure you will put the information to good use and also we are showing our respect for your decision-making and autonomy.
4. We have attempted to word this message as emotionally neutrally as possible. We are therefore signaling that we are a quality hotel, without intending to offer any particular advice about the non slip surface or for that matter the slip surface. We also did not fall into the trap of hyphenating “non slip” (though we did elsewhere in the bathroom hyphenate “co-operation”), nor did we place a comma after “addition” as you barbarians might have done.
I am not intelligent enough to discern which of these might be true.