Category: Education

Here's an NYT forum on the issue.  Here is a recent Megan McArdle blog post.  Traditionally I've been sympathetic to tenure (disclaimer: I have it), in part because the schools which have done away with it — the for-profits — have carved out a big niche but they have not displaced traditional non-profit, tenure-driven higher education in most fields.  Few parents dream of sending their kids there.  My point today is simply to note that tenure critics have yet to spell out what the alternative — and thus the debate — really looks like.

If you argue "abolish tenure" the real question is this: under what conditions will professors be fired?  For instance, if you abolish tenure but never fire a professor, the change is maybe not so large (though the threat to fire still can change equilibria).

Here's a thought experiment: take a 53-year-old professor, at a moderate quality university, who goes from publishing three articles a year to one article a year, and in somewhat lesser journals than before.  His teaching evaluations slip steadily, though he never becomes a disaster in the classroom.  In the no-tenure world, does that person get fired?  (And what's his chance of finding another job?)

If firing is in order, how much higher do initial wage offers have to be?  (Recall that you're asking the new hire to take a $$ wage lower than his human capital would otherwise indicate; btw Megan covers that query here.)  Is this deal worth it for universities?  If that guy doesn't get laid off, who does?  Only the convicted felons?

If you believe in abolishing tenure, and yet tenure won't go away, do you also think schools should cut entry-level wages for new professors, as a second-best means of lowering their total compensation?  How do you feel about the achievement paths of the schools that are already trying this strategy?  Will abolishing tenure involve any compensation scheme other than that already used by current for-profits in higher education?

With the pro-tenure arguments, you might wonder how higher education is supposed to differ from other sectors of the economy.  I believe it is this: given that higher education is in part about signaling and certification, socialization and networking of students, "warm glow" of the donors, and research superstars, the later-period shirking of the typical laggard doesn't hurt actual productivity nearly as much as the schools themselves might like to think. 

This also suggests that schools themselves will never make an intellectually convincing case for tenure, since they can't come out and admit that "in the longer run, most of us don't really matter, we only pretended our productivity was worth something in the first place."  Education as theatre, and all that; see my The Age of the Infovore.

When I hear answers to the above questions, namely what the alternative to tenure looks like, then the tenure debate will be getting somewhere.

To some extent the proposed gains from abolishing tenure can be reaped simply by increasing teaching load, relying more on on-line instruction and/or reintroducing mandatory retirement.

Nobody would argue that Torrance’s tasks, which have become the gold standard in creativity assessment, measure creativity perfectly. What’s shocking is how incredibly well Torrance’s creativity index predicted those kids’ creative accomplishments as adults. Those who came up with more good ideas on Torrance’s tasks grew up to be entrepreneurs, inventors, college presidents, authors, doctors, diplomats, and software developers. The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.

Like intelligence tests, Torrance’s test–a 90-minute series of discrete tasks, administered by a psychologist–has been taken by millions worldwide in 50 languages. Yet there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect–each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.

From Newsweek.  I am not at all convinced that creativity is on the decline.  The study cited seems to be unpublished and there isn't much on the author's website which is a little, well, too creative for my tastes.  Nevertheless, the Torrance test and its correlation with lifetime creative is interesting and a good reminder of what IQ tests do not reveal.  I also liked this bit:

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ “

This is a few years old, but I don't recall having covered it already.  From Patricia Flynn and Michael Quinn:

It is often suggested that Economics is a good major for individuals interested in becoming business leaders. Despite this widespread assertion, little research has been conducted on this topic. Using the Standard and Poor (S&P) 500 companies, this paper examines the validity of such a claim. We find evidence that Economics is a good choice of major for those aspiring to become a CEO. Economics ranked third with 9% of the CEOs of the S&P 500 companies in 2004 being undergraduate Economics majors, behind Business Administration and Engineering majors, each of which accounted for 20% of the CEOs. When adjusting for size of the pool of graduates, those with undergraduate degrees in Economics are shown to have had a greater likelihood of becoming an S&P 500 CEO than any other major. That is, the share of graduates who were Economics majors who were CEOs in 2004 was greater than that for any other major, including Business Administration and Engineering. The findings also show that a higher percentage of CEOs who were Economics majors subsequently completed a graduate degree – often an MBA – than did their counterparts with Business Administration and Engineering degrees. The paper demonstrates that while women now comprise over half of all bachelors and masters degrees awarded, they remain a minority in terms of undergraduate degrees awarded in Economics and in MBA degrees conferred. Economics programs may try to appeal to more women students as a stepping stone to becoming a CEO, especially as women continue to account for less than 2 percent of the S&P 500 CEOs.

For the pointer I thank Pablo Halkyard.

That's the name of a feature by Justin Evans in the new periodical The Point (issue two, Winter 2010).  It's a bit like Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary and I found it to be the funniest article I have read this year.  (It doesn't seem to be on-line.)  Here is one set of consecutive entries:

Economics: actually explains everything

Economy, the: completely incomprehensible

I also liked this one:

Debt: i) public — is inexcusable;

private — drives the economy.

ii) public — drives the economy;

private — is a failure of social safety nets.

They're not mostly about economics, by the way.  Most magazines bore me, especially those with an arty or intellectual feel to them.  Yet I have read half an issue of The Point (found browsing in a Berlin bookstore) and, based on that data, I think it is excellent and I will be starting a subscription.