Category: Education

Data available from the UC Office of the President shows that there were 2.5 faculty members for each senior manager in the UC system in 1993. Now there are as many senior managers as faculty.  Just think: Each professor could have his or her personal senior manager.

And there is this:

A report on administrative growth by the UCLA Faculty Association estimated that UC would have $800 million more each year if senior management had grown at the same rate as the rest of the university since 1997, instead of four times faster.

What could we do with $800 million? That is the total amount of the state funding cuts for 2008-09 and 2009-10, and four times the savings of the employee furloughs. Consider this: UC revenue from student fees has tripled in the last eight years. The ratio of state general fund revenue to student fee revenue in 1997 was 3.6:1. Last year it was 1.9:1. If we used that $800 million to reduce student fees, the ratio would go back to the 1997 value. To put another way, it could pay the educational fees for 100,000 resident undergraduates.

Here is more.  For the pointer I thank David Colquhoun.

What should I read?  There is no need to re-recommend Banerjee and Duflo, Lant Pritchett, or James Tooley on this topic, namely education in developing countries.  What else?  I thank you in advance for your counsel.

There are no professors in Virginia Tech’s largest classroom, only a sea of computers and red plastic cups.

In the Math Emporium, the computer is king, and instructors are reduced to roving guides. Lessons are self-paced, and help is delivered “on demand” in a vast, windowless lab that is open 24 hours a day because computers never tire. A student in need of human aid plants a red cup atop a monitor.

The Emporium is the Wal-Mart of higher education, a triumph in economy of scale and a glimpse at a possible future of computer-led learning. Eight thousand students a year take introductory math in a space that once housed a discount department store. Four math instructors, none of them professors, lead seven courses with enrollments of 200 to 2,000. Students walk to class through a shopping mall, past a health club and a tanning salon, as ambient Muzak plays.

I reserve judgment, but note this:

…Virginia Tech students pass introductory math courses at a higher rate now than 15 years ago, when the Emporium was built. And research has found the teaching model trims per-student expense by more than one-third, vital savings for public institutions with dwindling state support.

“When I first came here, I was like, ‘This is the dumbest thing ever,’” said Mike Bilynsky, a freshman from Epping, N.H., who is taking calculus. “But it works.”

No academic initiative has delivered more handsomely on the oft-stated promise of efficiency via technology in higher education, said Carol Twigg, president of the National Center for Academic Transformation, a nonprofit that studies technological innovations to improve learning and reduce cost. She calls the Emporium “a solution to the math problem” in colleges.

It may be an idea whose time has come. Since its creation in 1997, the Emporium model has spread to the universities of Alabama and Idaho (in 2000) and to Louisiana State University (in 2004). Interest has swelled as of late; Twigg says the Emporium has been adopted by about 100 schools.

You can read more here.

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.