Category: Education

Penelope Trunk says no:

Applications to the military increase in a bad economy
in a disturbingly similar way that applications to graduate school do.
For the most part, both alternatives are bad. They limit your future in
ways you can’t even imagine, and they are not likely to open the kind
of doors you really want. Military is the terrible escape hatch for
poor kids, and grad school is the terrible escape hatch for rich kids.

And:

7. Most jobs are better than they seem: You can learn from any job.
When I worked on a French chicken farm,
I thought I’d learn French, but I didn’t, because I was so foreign to
the French farm family that they couldn’t talk to me. However I did
learn a lot of other things, like how to bargain to get the best job in
the chicken coop, and how to get out of killing the bunnies. You don’t
need to be learning the perfect thing in your job. You just need to be learning. Don’t tell yourself you need a job that gives your life meaning. Jobs don’t do that; doesn’t that make you feel better? Suddenly being in the workplace doesn’t seem so bad.

8. Graduate school forces you to overinvest: It’s too high risk.
In a world where people did not change careers, grad school made sense. Today, grad school is antiquated.
You invest three to six extra years in school in order to get your
dream career. But the problem is that not only are the old dream
careers deteriorating, but even if you have a dream career, it won’t
last. You’ll want to change because you can. Because that’s normal for
today’s workplace. People who are in their twenties today will change
careers about four times in their life. Which means that grad school is
a steep investment for such a short period of time. The grad school
model needs to change to adapt to the new workplace. Until then. Stay away.

I don't completely agree, but this is a refreshing tonic.

"You're better than all those loser doers!"

That one I can verify the source.

Robin Hanson writes:

From now on…Markets in Everything!  All day, every day…

No, and Hossain and Morgan explain their tests:

In this paper, we offer new evidence regarding the economic importance of QWERTY type outcomes. We use laboratory experiments to study platform competition. Experiments have several advantages in studying platform competition: the identity of the inferior platform is clearly defined; the degree to which a platform has a “head start” is controlled; and the “life cycle” of platform competition is reproducible. So far as we are aware, we are the first to study QWERTY in the lab.

We can easily summarize our results: Somehow, the market always manages to solve the QWERTY problem. In sixty iterations of dynamic platform competition, our subjects never got stuck on the inferior platform–even when it enjoyed a substantial first-mover advantage. The remainder of the paper describes in detail the experiments and the results.

This is another theory which probably should be laid to rest.  I do think it can explain being stuck in an inefficient language (switching is then truly difficult), but traditional economic examples are hard to come by.

Bet on your own grades.  Here is how it began:

One
Sunday afternoon, Steven and I were sharing ideas, and I mentioned to
him that I had an exam the following day and that if I were to study I
was sure to get an A. But I was enjoying my Sunday afternoon, and I
made it clear to him that I had no intention of studying. That’s when,
in order to provide me with motivation, we made the following
agreement: If I got an A on the exam, he would give me $100, and if I
didn’t get an A, I would give him $20. We thought every student would
like this type of motivation, therefore, we established Ultrinsic
Motivator Inc.

I thank Max for the pointer.

Sometime in the next week – January 1st if you have that available,
or maybe January 3rd or 4th if the weekend is more convenient – I
suggest you hold a New Day, where you don’t do anything old.

Don’t
read any book you’ve read before.  Don’t read any author you’ve read
before.  Don’t visit any website you’ve visited before.  Don’t play any
game you’ve played before.  Don’t listen to familiar music that you
already know you’ll like.  If you go on a walk, walk along a new path
even if you have to drive to a different part of the city for your
walk.  Don’t go to any restaurant you’ve been to before, order a dish
that you haven’t had before.  Talk to new people (even if you have to
find them in an IRC channel) about something you don’t spend much time
discussing.

And most of all, if you become aware of yourself
musing on any thought you’ve thunk before, then muse on something
else.  Rehearse no old grievances, replay no old fantasies.

That is Eliezer.  He concludes:

If it works, you could make it a holiday tradition, and do it every New Year.

“I can describe the Russian economy as water in a sieve,” Yulia L.
Latynina, a commentator on Echo of Moscow radio, said of the chronic
waste in Russian industry.

“Everybody was thinking Russia had
succeeded, and they were wondering, how do you keep water in a sieve?”
Ms. Latynina said. “When the input of water is greater than the output,
the sieve is full. Everybody was thinking it was a miracle. The sieve
is full! But when there is a drop in the water supply, the sieve is
again empty very quickly.”

The article, which focuses on the financial comeuppance of Gazprom, is interesting throughout.

C. Kirabo Jackson has a new study and his conclusion is a qualified yes:

…the incentives produce meaningful increases in participation in the AP program and improvements in other critical education outcomes. Establishment of APIP results in a 30 percent increase in the number of students scoring above 1100 on the SAT or above 24 on the ACT, and an 8 percent increase in the number of students at a high school who enroll in a college or university in Texas. My evidence suggests that these outcomes are likely the result of stronger encouragement from teachers and guidance counselors to enroll in AP courses, better information provided to students, and changes in teacher and peer norms. The program is not associated with improved high school graduation rates or increases in the number of students taking college entrance exams, suggesting that the APIP improves the outcomes of high-achieving students rather than those students who may not have graduated from high school or even applied to college. Nonetheless, APIP may be an exceptionally good investment. The average per-student cost of the program, between
$100 and $300, is very small relative to reasonable estimates of the lifetime benefits of attending and succeeding in college.

Here is a recent article on the topic.  My intuition is that this works best for unmotivated students, where there is no intrinsic motivation to undermine.

Harvard University’s admission that it lost $8 billion from its $36 billion
endowment fund, as staggering as it sounds, may grossly underestimate the true magnitude of the
loss between from July 1 through Oct. 31 2008.  According to a source close the Harvard
Management Corporation (HMC), which runs the fund for Harvard, the  loss is closer to $18
billion if the losses on the fund’s illiquid investment are realistically appraised.

That’s Edward Jay Epstein, via Megan McArdle.  As Megan points out, no one should be surprised by this and in fact I would be surprised if that were the full extent of the damage.

What is your favourite form of procrastination ?
 

I’m unable to procrastinate. I’m unable to think about tomorrow.

That answer is from Amelie Nothomb.

As you go shopping for Christmas presents this holiday, bear in mind
that buying the wrong gift for a man could put your relationship with
him in jeopardy, whereas buying a bad gift for a woman is far less
dangerous.

Neither I nor Robin Hanson agree.  Here is the discussion.  The authors do present a rationale for their hypothesis:

The researchers think their findings are consistent with the tendency
for women to act as guardians of relationships, and that their positive
reaction to the receipt of a bad gift was a form of psychological
defence against the disappointment of receiving a dud present.

"That
is, in response to the relational threat posed by receiving a bad gift
from a partner, women may be more motivated than men to protect their
sense of similarity to the gift-giver," the researchers said, adding
that this reflects "the broader tendency for women – more than men – to
guard relationships against potential threats."

What do you all think?

In my experience, use of the word "classy" means the opposite of what the speaker intends.

The link is here.

Applications to take the GRE are down and that means the number of graduate students is unlikely to rise, in contrast to the traditional pattern of greater graduate school attendance during recessions.  Here are a few hypotheses:

Stewart has several theories about why declines may be taking place
this year, despite historic trends. She said it was possible, as ETS
officials suggested, that the credit crunch was making it more
difficult for students to borrow – or that hearing about the crunch
discouraged some from trying. In that same vein, she said that with
many colleges and universities announcing budget cuts, many departments
may not have the same levels of funds to offer in fellowship support.

In addition, she said that while economic uncertainty in the past
has prompted some people to decide to improve their skills so they can
seek better jobs, the turmoil is so great this year that “no one will
leave a job if they have a job – they think the risk is too much to
take.”

Stewart also stressed that just because the surge in interest in
graduate school has not happened this year doesn’t mean it won’t start.
Many people these days are experiencing “freezing behavior” where they
are so uncertain about their next move and the state of the economy
that they aren’t making any changes, she noted. “It could be that this
has created a temporary pause where we would have normally seen a flow
to graduate school. That the flow hasn’t started doesn’t mean it won’t.”

I opt for paragraph #2.  How about all of you?  Are you in this position yourselves?

The ratio is about 2-1.  And it’s not just because women are concentrated in the "study abroad intensive" humanities:

The National Science Foundation reports that men earn 80 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering. But women’s participation in a study abroad consortium for engineers, the Global Engineering Education Exchange, typically ranges from 30 to nearly 40 percent (39.3 percent this academic year) – far outstripping their 20 percent representation in the field.

Here is what the experts think:

Among the many conventional wisdom-type explanations pervading in the study abroad field: differing maturity and risk-taking levels among 18- to 21-year-old men and women; a sense that females, concerned about safety, are more inclined to attend a college-sanctioned study abroad program than travel on their own; and, again, varying study abroad participation rates in male versus female-dominated fields.

I favor a more Hansonian explanation, such as this:

“The three main factors I found were motherhood, age and safety,” said McKinney, associate director of the Center for Global Education at Butler University. “Essentially, my informants shared with me that they really hope someday to be mothers and they can’t imagine being able to travel abroad and also be a mom. So if they’re going to have an overseas experience, they’re going to do it before they become mothers,” she said, adding that her informants “really felt plagued by the age of 30. They have a very long to-do list.”

If that hypothesis is true, what are the other testable implications?  What other forms of intertemporal substitution should we observe?