Category: Education
How to make the rate of return on higher education negative
They’re signing up as we speak for a two-year degree course in heavy metal music (believed to be the first of its kind), which begins in September in a college in Nottingham.
…The degree organisers are loftily talking up the course by using terms such as “culture” and “context”. They point out that you can study music at Oxford, Cambridge or any other university, but that this “genre” degree is unique.
“Heavy metal is an extremely technical genre of music and its study is a rising academic theme,” they say. Metal is “seriously studied in conservatoires in Helsinki”, has classical music roots, and leading axe-men such as Joe Satriani incorporate the works of Paganini in their oeuvre.
Wow, Paganini. Get this:
“It’s a degree, so it will be academically rigorous,” said Mr Maloy [the sequence designer].
And why Nottingham?:
Not only was Earache Records, a heavy metal-focused record label, founded in the city, but additionally, the region’s Download Festival appeals to over 75,000 rock and metal fans on an annual basis.
The course fees are £5,750 a year. Here is a bit more information.
The Man of System
One sometimes hears arguments for busing or against private schools that say we need to prevent the best kids from leaving in order to benefit their less advantaged peers. I find such arguments distasteful. People should not be treated as means. I must confess, therefore, that I took some pleasure at the findings of a recent paper by Carrell, Sacerdote, and West:
We take cohorts of entering freshmen at the United States Air Force Academy and assign half
to peer groups designed to maximize the academic performance of the lowest ability students.
Our assignment algorithm uses nonlinear peer eff ects estimates from the historical pre-treatment
data, in which students were randomly assigned to peer groups. We find a negative and signi ficant treatment eff ect for the students we intended to help. We provide evidence that within our
“optimally” designed peer groups, students avoided the peers with whom we intended them to
interact and instead formed more homogeneous sub-groups. These results illustrate how policies
that manipulate peer groups for a desired social outcome can be confounded by changes in the
endogenous patterns of social interactions within the group.
I was reminded of Adam Smith’s discussion of exactly this issue in The Theory of Moral Sentiments:
The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.
Do note that this discussion is not a critique of the paper which is very well done.
Further results on hypergamy
This paper, by Marianne Bertrand, Jessica Pan, and Emir Kamenica, was pointed out by Matt Yglesias on Twitter, the abstract is this:
We examine causes and consequences of relative income within households. We establish that gender identity – in particular, an aversion to the wife earning more than the husband – impacts marriage formation, the wife’s labor force participation, the wife’s income conditional on working, marriage satisfaction, likelihood of divorce, and the division of home production. The distribution of the share of household income earned by the wife exhibits a sharp cliff at 0.5, which suggests that a couple is less willing to match if her income exceeds his. Within marriage markets, when a randomly chosen woman becomes more likely to earn more than a randomly chosen man, marriage rates decline. Within couples, if the wife’s potential income (based on her demographics) is likely to exceed the husband’s, the wife is less likely to be in the labor force and earns less than her potential if she does work. Couples where the wife earns more than the husband are less satisfied with their marriage and are more likely to divorce. Finally, based on time use surveys, the gender gap in non-market work is larger if the wife earns more than the husband.
Their title is “Gender Identity and Relative Income within Households.” There is a non-gated copy here.
Claims about pastries
Which raises a delicate question: Having already eclipsed Paris in Michelin stars, could Tokyo chefs one day eclipse the French at their own cuisine?
I put the question to pastry chef Sugino, who trained in France and is one of only four Japanese members of the prestigious Relais Desserts, an association of the world’s top pastry makers who meet regularly to exchange ideas.
Choosing his words carefully, he notes that pastry shops in France are having difficulty finding young people willing to put in the time and effort required to learn the craft. He also says that even top French patisseries are now taking shortcuts — by using stabilizers in their desserts, for instance.
“They are losing the basics,” Sugino says. “It is possible that, 10 or 20 years from now, the French will have lost the art of pastry but that it will live on in Tokyo, in Japan.”
Here is more.
The future is here
The Georgia Institute of Technology plans to offer a $7,000 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors.
Georgia Tech will work with AT&T and Udacity, the 15-month-old Silicon Valley-based company, to offer a new online master’s degree in computer science to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its current degree. The deal, announced Tuesday, is portrayed as a revolutionary attempt by a respected university, an education technology startup and a major corporate employer to drive down costs and expand higher education capacity.
Georgia Tech expects to hire only eight or so new instructors even as it takes its master’s program from 300 students to as many as 10,000 within three years, said Zvi Galil, the dean of computing at Georgia Tech.
…The deal started to come together eight months ago in a meeting between Galil and Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun.
“Sebastian suggested to do a master’s degree for $1,000 and I immediately told him it’s not possible,” Galil said.
Eventually, the program came together for about $6,600 per degree. In a blog post, Thrun compared the day of the announcement to the day he proposed to his wife.
There is more here. Hi future.
Private Schools in Developing Countries
Tina Rosenberg has an excellent piece on private schooling in developing countries at the NYTimes blog:
In the United States, private school is generally a privilege of the rich. But in poorer nations, particularly in Africa and South Asia, families of all social classes send their children to private school….
BRAC used to be an acronym for Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee, but now the letters stand alone. It was founded in 1972 to provide relief after Bangladesh’s war of liberation. Although you’ve probably never heard of it, BRAC is the largest nongovernmental organization in the world, with some 100,000 employees, and it services reach 110 million people.
…And since 1985, it has run schools… BRAC has more than 1.25 million children in its schools in Bangladesh and six other countries, and it is expanding.
BRAC students, in fact, do better than their public-school counterparts….BRAC students are more likely to complete fifth grade — in 2004, 94 percent did, as opposed to 67 percent of public school students. (The BRAC number is now about 99 percent.) On government tests, BRAC students do about 10 percent better than public school students — impressive, given that their population is the most marginalized. (emphasis added).
In my own work on private schools in India I also found suggestive evidence that private schools–mostly very small, urban slum schools–produced better outcomes than their public counterparts (paper (pdf), video).
Jeffrey Selingo’s *College Unbound*
The subtitle is The Future of Higher Education and What It Means for Students, and I read it straight through in one sitting. It is the best book on its topic, and anyone interested in this area should buy and read it immediately.
Rising academic salaries for coaches
Even during the recession, salaries for athletic coaches at colleges and universities continued to increase. For instance in the SEC, between 2006 and 2011, “football coaching salaries increased 128.9 percent, from $3,147,149 to $6,928,989.” This is an extreme example but it reflects a more general pattern:
That big-time coaches earn more than professors may not be a surprise, but a new study documents the striking extent and longevity of the gap: Coaches’ salaries increase year after year at much higher rates — even as many colleges say they are engaged in belt-tightening across they board — and that pattern is driven by the institutions with the largest athletic programs.
…Athletics is tied much more closely to the commercial marketplace than all other parts of a university, Hirko said, which is why salaries and other expenses continue to rise at rates seemingly independent of the rest of the institution.
The full story is here. Here is a must-view map on the highest-paid public employee in each state; what have Montana, Alaska, and Delaware done wrong? (No wonder those states have so few people!) And New Hampshire is beyond the pale.
The Public Choice Outreach Conference 2013!
Students are invited to apply to the Public Choice Outreach Conference. The Conference is an intensive lecture series on public choice and constitutional economics that has “graduated” some of the leading lights in economics and political science over the past thirty years. The conference will be held at George Mason University from Friday August 16 to Sunday August 18.
Graduate students and advanced undergraduates majoring in economics, history, international studies, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, public administration, religious studies, and sociology have attended past conferences. Applicants unfamiliar with Public Choice and students from outside of George Mason University are especially encouraged. A small stipend is available and meals and rooms will be provided by the conference (for non-locals). Space, however, is very limited.
Applications are due June 21. You can find more information here. Contact Lisa Hill-Corley if you have further questions about applications.
How can you follow your passion if you don’t have a passion?
Remember Max, who wrote into MR asking for career advice? Max’s situation now has been turned into an NPR Planet Money segment, link here. There is audio at that link (very cleverly done) but here is part of their text:
The fact that Max and other young college graduates can even entertain this question — “What is my passion?” — is a new conundrum, and still a luxury not everybody enjoys. Yet, Tyler recently told me, it is “a central question of our time.”
So what’s the best, most rational answer for Max? It seems like economics could help; after all, it’s about costs and benefits and modeling complicated decisions.
But, Tyler says, “it was a truly difficult, tough question to make any progress on.”
Months passed. Tyler felt guilty. So he invited Max to lunch, and brought along two other economists — Bryan Caplan and Garett Jones — for backup. The economists posed questions to help Max frame the issue:
- How much are you willing to suffer in the short run to get a better future?
- Have you ever considered working in Asia?
- How important will it be to spend X number of hours with your kids? And what is that X?
- How well do you understand your own defects?
- What does 50-year-old Max want?
- Can your community be a cyber community, or do you need to have a face-to-face community?
In the end, the three economists did not advise Max to pursue some particular career path. They didn’t even give very specific advice. But they did all agree that Max’s lack of a passion could work to his advantage. Pursuing a passion — especially if it’s a popular passion — often doesn’t pay very well.
Advice for young researchers
From Andrew Oswald, via the excellent Angus:, here is the opening bit:
If everyone likes your work, you can be certain that you haven’t done anything important. Conflict and pain go with the territory —that of changing how a profession thinks and furthering what we know about our world. The pressures on young researchers are to conform, to accept fashionable ways of analyzing problems, and above all to please senior professors and their own peers. Unfortunately this is bad for scientific progress.
The main difference between world-class researchers and sound researchers is not intellect; it is energy, single-mindedness, more energy, and the ability to withstand what will sometimes feel like never-ending disappointment, tiredness and psychological pain. Tenacity is almost everything.
Is preschool declining in its overall effectiveness?
In a new survey paper (pdf), Greg Duncan and Katherine Magnuson report:
Programs beginning before 1980 produced significantly larger effect sizes (.33 standard deviations) than those that began later (.16 standard deviations). Declining effect sizes over time are disappointing, as we might hope that lessons from prior evaluations and advances in the science of child development would have led to an increase in program effects over time. However, the likely reason for the decline is that counterfactual conditions for children in the control groups in these studies have improved substantially. We have already seen in Figure 1 how much more likely low-income children are to be attending some form of center-based care now relative to 40 years ago. This matters because, though center-based care programs have varying degrees of educational focus, most research suggests that center-based care is associated with better cognitive and achievement outcomes for preschool age children (NICHD Early Childcare Research Network and Duncan 2003).
Even more impressive are gains in the likely quality of the home environment provided by low-income mothers, as indexed by their completed schooling. In 1970, some 71 percent of preschool age children in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution had mothers who lacked a high school degree, while only 5 percent of the mothers had attended at least some postsecondary schooling…
There is also this:
Analysis of the meta-analytic database shows that, taken as a whole, effect sizes were neither larger nor smaller for children who started programs at younger ages (Leak, Duncan, Li, Magnuson, Schindler, and Yoshikawa 2012). This suggests that other modes of early childhood investments—for example, home visitation for high-risk, first-time mothers (Olds, Sadler, and Kitzman 2007) or developmental screenings and interventions for children living in families with documented domestic violence—may be more-effective ways of building children’s capacities during the very early years of life.
It would be a mistake, however, to read the authors as simply trashing pre-school programs. Part of their close emphasizes this question:
This finding raises a puzzle: How do we reconcile the fade-out of preschool program impacts on test scores during elementary school with the evidence showing that such programs nonetheless have beneficial impacts on a broad set of later-life outcomes like high school graduation rates, teen parenthood, and criminality?
It is an interesting essay which raises good questions throughout.
More on Apprenticeships
A very good piece on apprenticeships from Stuart E. Eizenstat and Robert I. Lerman:
…firms interested in investing in the United States are finding too few workers with the skills needed to achieve the productivity and quality required in today’s globally competitive industries. The skills gap is real… U.S. unemployment remains at 7.5 percent, and only one out of two African American men in their early 20s has a job. A survey of employers published last year revealed that about 600,000 jobs go unfilled because of a lack of skilled labor….The central answer to the mismatch between jobs and employment is a 21st-century apprenticeship program.
…Although apprenticeships yield significant earnings gains for workers, this country has too few programs, partly because of the massive bias in public spending toward a college-only approach. Government spending on colleges and universities tops $300 billion per year; outlays to apprenticeship programs total less than $40 million annually. A public-private initiative could increase competitiveness and youth employment, upgrade skills and wages, achieve positive returns for employers and workers, and reduce government spending if companies played a larger role in skills development.
As I said in Tuning in to the Dropping Out:
Why should a major in English literature be subsidized with room and board on a beautiful campus with Olympic-size swimming pools and state-of-the-art athletic facilities when apprentices in nursing, electrical work, and new high-tech fields like mechatronics are typically unsubsidized (or less subsidized)? College students even get discounts at the movie theater; when was the last time you saw a discount for an electrical apprentice?
“Investigating America’s elite”
That is a new paper by Jonathan Wai, from the latest issue of Intelligence, with the subtitle “Cognitive ability, education, and sex differences,” and here is the abstract:
Are the American elite drawn from the cognitive elite? To address this, five groups of America’s elite (total N = 2254) were examined: Fortune 500 CEOs, federal judges, billionaires, Senators, and members of the House of Representatives. Within each of these groups, nearly all had attended college with the majority having attended either a highly selective undergraduate institution or graduate school of some kind. High average test scores required for admission to these institutions indicated those who rise to or are selected for these positions are highly filtered for ability. Ability and education level differences were found across various sectors in which the billionaires earned their wealth (e.g., technology vs. fashion and retail); even within billionaires and CEOs wealth was found to be connected to ability and education. Within the Senate and House, Democrats had a higher level of ability and education than Republicans. Females were underrepresented among all groups, but to a lesser degree among federal judges and Democrats and to a larger degree among Republicans and CEOs. America’s elite are largely drawn from the intellectually gifted, with many in the top 1% of ability.
I don’t yet see this paper on-line, but here is some summary coverage.
The MRUniversity course on Mexico
With President Obama visiting Mexico today, I thought I would remind you all that the excellent Robin Grier is teaching this course over at MRUniversity.com. It is called Mexico’s Economy: Current Prospects and History.