Category: Education
MRU’s First Course: Development Economics
The first course from Marginal Revolution University is Development Economics and it will be taught by Tyler Cowen and myself. Development Economics will cover the sources of economic growth including geography, education, finance, and institutions. We will cover theories like the Solow and O-ring models and we will cover the empirical data on development and trade, foreign aid, industrial policy, and corruption. Development Economics will include not just theory but a wealth of historical and factual information on specific countries and topics, everything from watermelon scale economies and the clove monopoly to water privatization in Buenos Aires and cholera in Haiti. A special section in this round will examine India. There are no prerequisites for this course but neither is it dumbed down. We think there will be material in Development Economics that will be of interest to high school students in the United States and Bangladesh and also to PhDs in economics, even to those who specialize in this field.
Development Economics covers all the major topics of a sit-down class but because we have built it to be on online course from the ground up–no videos of us talking to a classroom–it will take less than half of the time of a sit-down class, plus no need to search for parking!
Our motto at MRU is “Learn, Teach, Share” so we will be inviting the world not just to learn but also to teach and share their knowledge. GMU is a very entrepreneurial university and we think we can be a world leader in online education.
Please do go to MRU and submit your email to be notified about our start date and registration which will allow you to contribute in our forums and online events. Development Economics is free to the world.
Stay tuned for more!
Not From the Onion: Harvard Cheaters
The NYTimes reports that Harvard is investigating “what could be its largest cheating scandal in memory.” Attention is focused on about 125 students in one course but Harvard would not say which course. The Harvard Crimson, however, has revealed that the course is “Introduction to Congress”!
I say give the cheaters an A and fail the rest.
The next transformational technology?
Noah Smith writes:
Addendum: I seem to be the only person talking about Desire Modification as a transformational technology. Greg Egan and Vernor Vinge have written books in which this technology plays a central role. In my “spare time” I’m writing a couple of sci-fi short stories based on the idea. It’s a really big deal, and I’ll write a post about it soon.
The coming disruption in education
From a new article about on-line educational start-ups:
To drive home the point of just how cheap it is to be Quizlet, one of its executives asks me how much money the United States spends per year to educate a single student in K-12 education. About $15,000, I say. That’s more than what it costs us per month to host the entire site, serving millions, the executive responds. Quizlet has no sales force, a very small marketing department, and more than seven million monthly unique visitors. (There are about fifty million public school students in the United States.) Quizlet, in its busiest months, during the school year, is among the top 500 most visited sites on the entire Internet. Now they’ve expanded beyond flash cards. You can create study groups, convert your content into multiplayer games, and search for cards and games that other people have created. We think we can get to 40 million users, then 100 million, says the executive. The question that drives the company, he says, is this: How can we create amazing learning tools for one billion people? This is the way most of the people in the valley talk.
Matt Yglesias adds useful comment.
A new RCT look at educational vouchers
From Matthew M. Chingos and Paul E. Peterson (pdf):
In the first study using a randomized experiment to measure the impact of school vouchers on college enrollment, we examine the college-going behavior through 2011 of students who participated in a voucher experiment as elementary school students in the late 1990s. We find no overall impacts on college enrollments but we do find large, statistically significant positive impacts on the college going of African American students who participated in the study. Our estimates indicate that using a voucher to attend private school increased the overall college enrollment rate among African Americans by 24 percent.
Hat tip goes to Michael Petrilli, via ModeledBehavior.
Boo hoo
Is Arnold Kling quitting blogging?
Sorry for being abrupt, but this is something I have been thinking about for months.
In the future, I plan to do my writing in essay format.
As far as blogging goes, I am opting for exit rather than voice, as it were.
Did he just get too fed up? Any chance he will pull a Michael Jordan?
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.”