Category: Education

Yana, who is fourteen, was complaining last night about her math homework, and about calculus in particular. Without much thinking, I responded that if you could only learn five things from schooling, calculus should be one of them. First came an “Ugh.” Then came a question:

“What are the other four?”

Without much thinking, here was my list, in no particular order:

1. Calculus
2. Statistics
3. Programming
4. Shakespeare
5. The Bible

Another Ugh, directed mostly at the first three items. Writing would have been a natural sixth pick, and would not have drawn an ugh either.

Addendum: I’ve already received several emails asking why I chose the Bible rather than microeconomics. I didn’t mean anything sectarian in my choice of the Bible, rather it is a critical foundation of Western civilization and of Western literature. Plato would be next in line. As for microeconomics, knowing it brings huge social benefits but the private benefits are less clear. I love life as an economist, but it is not for everyone.

First-graders were asked to complete the first halves of proverbs and they came up with the following:

“Better to be safe than punch a fifth-grader.”

“Don’t bite the hand that looks dirty.”

“A penny saved is not much.”

“Don’t put off till tomorrow what you put on to go to bed.”

“You can lead a horse to water, but how?”

All, I might add, appear to show a familiarity with economic reasoning, with the possible exception of number four, which to my mind makes no sense whatsoever.

Here is the full story. My colleagues David Levy and Daniel Houser have recently started designing some economic experiments about the evolution of proverbs. Proverbs, like prices, aggregate information. One question is whether proverbs evolve to demonstrate the wisdom embodied in some weighted notion of “average opinion”, the opinion of the median member of the language community, or the most frequently expressed opinions at the mode.

After a few parents complained that their children might be ridiculed for not making the list [of honor-roll students], lawyers for the Nashville school system warned that state privacy laws forbid releasing any academic information, good or bad, without permission….As a result, all Nashville schools have stopped posting honor rolls, and some are also considering a ban on hanging good work in the hallways…”

Principal Steven Baum “thinks spelling bees and other publicly graded events are leftovers from the days of ranking and sorting students” and says “I discourage competitive games at school. They just don’t fit my worldview of what a school should be.” (From the Wash. Post)

The NY Times has a nice article on NFL coach Bill Belichik’s use of economics to recruit players for the Superbowl bound New England Patriots. He credits Wesleyan economics professor Richard Miller for teaching him the importance of thinking in marginal terms.

Students ask professors to write letters of recommendation for them. Today’s professors frequently respond by asking the student to write a first draft of the letter. Henry Farrell at CrookedTimber comments on this practice. Obviously the ethics of such a request are questionable. Furthermore it puts the student in a very difficult position. How great can you claim to be and keep a straight face, not to mention a reputation for probity?

That being said, I am not very worried about the practical repercussions. Most people, especially undergraduates, do not know how to write a very good recommendation letter. They fail to realize that such letters, to be effective, should offer very specific and pointed comparisons. Those few students who understand this fact are probably too shy to call themselves “comparable to Greg Mankiw as an undergraduate.” Nor will they write “comparable to your Professor Mediocre [fill in the name yourself!] as an undergraduate.” So if a professor asks the student to write the letter, the professor does not care about the letter or student very much. The resulting letter is likely to be very generic and thus not very effective. In addition, the professor probably has a hard time saying much about the student. This again suggests the letter will be less than overwhelming, no matter who writes it.

The really good candidates still will be able to produce credible signals of quality. They will find some professors able to make coherent and specific claims on their behalf. In fact, if professors ask the lesser students to write their own letters, the relative advantage of the very best students may rise.

A number of people wrote both in support and challenging my comments on obsolete professors. Fabio Rojas wrote:

My reading of university history is that academia has always been a superstar market, except for the three decades or so after WWII…Medieval universities were run by a small group of well paid elites, while much of the grunt work was done by low status lecturers. The German research universities of the 19th century were known for giving comfy chairs to a few stars, while privatdozents slaved away at abysmal wages. The only exception to this trend is post-WWII American higher ed. The simultaneous explosion of student enrollments and Cold War money meant that universities could afford lots of research scholars who could teach. Of course, that model is hard to sustain – already a lot of work is being shifted back to part time workers.

My hunch is that in 50 years, maybe less, the higher ed system will be very different. There will still be a core of elite research universities and liberal arts colleges, where people will pay to study with famous scholars, writers and artists. The rest of the educational system will move toward a University of Phoenix model – an elite core of administrators managing an army of part timers, distance learners, on-line learning, adult ed, etc. The traditional universities can probably maintain their monopoly on occupational certification, but the rest of the system will radically change.

Similarly, Roger Meiners wrote “I think you are correct about professors being nearly obsolete. My guess is that large state universities are the institutions due for the largest restructuring. The private schools, as inefficient as they are, still generally stick to their mission better.”

But my colleagues Robin Hanson and Bryan Caplan as well as Stephen Brown from the Dallas Fed all asked, If teaching by DVD is so great why haven’t we seen it already? After all, VCRs not to mention movie projectors have been around for a long time. Perhaps, they argue, there are efficiency reasons for the structure that exists today. Stephen writes:

Professors working collaboratively, but in decentralized manner may have substantial advantages in providing certifications (degrees) when compared against a system in which students watch pre-recorded lectures by the great teachers and then are tested for mastery by an administrator through exams–particularly if mastery cannot be well demonstrated by machine-graded, multiple-choice exams.

Robin and Bryan pointed to professors as a disciplinary device. The option of self-learning may in fact be self-defeating. (See also Amy Lamboley’s comment at Crescat Sententia). Moreover, if students attend universities to find mates then big lecture classes may not be such a cost after all.

Universities have been around a long time so caution is justified but it has to make a difference in the provision of education that I can today download to my hard drive 10,000 books from Project Gutenberg or search over 100,000 books at Amazon (another 60,000 are available from Google). Innovations often seem impossible or impractical until someone demonstrates the concept and then they take off. Yes, the last is a trendy reference to the Wright brothers – note that just days before they flew, Samuel P. Langley, Director of the Smithsonian Institution and head of a well-funded government project to invent the airplane, proclaimed the goal years if not decades away.

We economics professors like to point out – or at least I do – that downsizing is a good thing. Aren’t you glad that blacksmiths were downsized because of the automobile? But we don’t like it when this argument is turned on us. Steve Pearlstein writes:

Every year… there are thousands of college professors who twice or three times a week offer what is largely the same basic lecture course in a subject like molecular biology or Shakespeare comedies. A few of these professors offer the kind of brilliant lectures that fill auditoriums and provide the kind of educational experience that students remember all their lives. Many of the rest offer something that ranges from mediocre to awful….why don’t we identify these extraordinary lecturers, put their lectures on CDs, and sell them to universities that could supplement them with faculty-led tutorials or discussions?

Pearlstein points out that Mark Taylor, a Williams College philosophy professor, and Herb Allen, a Wall Street financier, tried to do just this at Williams College but not surprisingly the faculty resisted and vehemently voted the idea down.

The response from educators when presented with ideas like this is that students need face-to-face interaction with faculty, CDs can’t answer questions, material has to be kept updated etc. But none of this is really convincing. I teach Econ 101 well, but it’s not obvious, even to me, that students would not learn as much with a DVD of Kenneth Elzinga or Timothy Taylor or the late Paul Heyne, to name three great teachers of economics, supplemented with live tutorials and problem sessions. Needless to say, the latter scheme, would be cheaper.

I think that we faculty will manage to beat back these ideas for another ten to twenty years but eventually the benefits of the technological approach will become overwhelming. When this happens teaching will become more of a winner-take-all superstar market and wages for the rest of us will fall.

Lisa G. from Pittsburgh writes to Marilyn vos Savant (Parade, Dec. 7, 2003):

Many of my friends and I are intelligent, liberal-arts graduate who, due to an economic system that glorifies science, medicine, business, and law, are toiling as secretaries and retail clerks. Is there any hope for the philosopher, writer, dancer, poet or sculptor to find paying work in Western society? Or are we doomed to relegate our talents to hobbies while working in drudgery until we die, just to pay the bills?

Marilyn gives a namby-pamby work hard, follow your dreams sort of answer. Here is what she should have said.

First, stop whining. You had a choice of poetry or business and you chose poetry. If your love for the subject is not enough to make up for the loss in income then go back to school. Two, stop blaming “an economic system” that glorifies science etc. and notice that these jobs pay highly because the skills they require are rare and people are willing to pay for the product of these jobs. If you produce something that people want you will be paid highly also but don’t expect other people to pay so that you can fulfill your dreams of writing poetry that no one wants to read. Third, what do you mean by it’s difficult to find work for the philosopher, writer, dancer, poet or sculptor in “Western society.” Do you know of any society at any time or place that has offered more for the arts? A retail clerk who does sculpture on the side has a far higher income than does your typical sculptor working in India. Try visiting most of the rest of the world – where science and business are not glorified – if you want to truly understand “drudgery.”

I see from the above that I have been harsh so here also is some positive advice. Stop focusing on money and instead look around for opportunities to practice your art. Enter poetry slams, make a movie, high-end camcorders are now capable of making decent quality films (yes, you will have to save to buy one), use the internet to promote your works. Do not denigrate your art as a “hobby” even if you don’t do it full-time for pay. Look for work that draws upon your artistic skills. A writer can be an editor, a poet can write great ad-copy, a photographer can photograph weddings (do not sneer it’s a privilege to be trusted with recording one of the most important events of a person’s life.) And don’t look down upon the world of work. The great poet Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive who wrote “It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job.”

The Centre for British Teachers has an interesting report by James Tooley and Pauline Dixon on private schools in India. See also my earlier post on this subject and Tooley’s chapter in The Voluntary City.

Yes, the beautiful do get better student evaluations, the research of Daniel Hamermesh confirms this, the link is through Instapundit.

And get this bit, taken from the link within the link:

According to their data, the effect of beauty (or lack thereof) on teaching evaluations for men was three times as great as it was for women.

How about this?:

A glance at Web sites such as ProfessorPerformance.com and RateMyProfessors.com — where students rate their instructors on criteria such as coolness, clarity, easiness, helpfulness, and hotness (on RateMyProfessors.com, hot professors get chili peppers beside their names) — leaves little doubt about the viciousness of some students. Petty comments abound: “Someone fire this fat bastard” and “Looks like a hobbit, is not a nice person!”

Harold Glasser has been a victim of such comments. One of his students posted the following remarks on ProfessorPerformance.com: “Glasser where’s (sic) the same blue fleece sweatercoat thing, and this awful matching blue fleece hat that looks like the one Elmer Fudd wore. If this wasn’t enough, he has some of the same mannerisms as Dr. Evil,” from the Austin Powers movies.

There is no chili pepper next to my name, but given all this, my opinion of my looks has gone up.

Addendum: Here is link to the paper, thanks to John Charles for the pointer.