Category: Education

Once he [Weinstein] gets to college, he’ll be told to relax, go slow and enjoy learning for its own sake.

Colleges are offering a range of services for stressed students, says the New York Times.

There are now free massages and dogs to cuddle in exam seasons, biofeedback workshops and therapists available to help students work through their first C [TC: what about grade inflation? haven’t we gotten rid of C’s?].

At Harvard, the training given to graduate students who live in the undergraduate houses has in recent years expanded to include ways to help students fight perfectionism — a theme on many campuses — as well as negotiate matters involving race, class and sexual identity.

…Washington University in St. Louis has established stress-free zones during finals, where students can get chair massages and listen to New Age music.

Here is the full story, most of which concerns the difficulty of getting into a top school.

Consider the following facts:

1. Finnish children do not start school until they are seven years old. Most Finnish children do start day care from about the age of one, given that most mothers work.

2. Educational spending is a very modest $5,000 per student per year.

3. There are few if any programs for gifted children.

4. Class sizes often approach 30.

5. “Finland topped a respected international [educational] survey last year, coming in first in literacy and placing in the top five in math and science.”

6. Finnish teachers all have a Master’s degree or more.

7. Finnish teachers all enjoy a very high social status.

8. Reading to children, telling them folk tales, and going to the library are all high status activities.

9. TV programs are often in English, and subtitled, which further supports reading skills. (This should also serve as a jab to those who complain about the global spread of American TV shows.)

Here is the full story from The New York Times. Here is a general overview of the Finnish educational system, here is another. Here is a summary of the OECD study, with additional rankings and instructions on how to get a complete copy. Here is a story on Finnish economic competitiveness.

My take: The United States performs remarkably well when it harnesses status and approbational incentives in the right direction. We have done this for business entrepreneurship, but we are not close when it comes to education. When it comes to economics, we have to move away from our near-exclusive emphasis on monetary incentives.

Smart women who were shut out of the professions used to become teachers. That was bad for the women but good for their students.

The best female students – those whose test scores put them in the top 10 percent of their high school classes – are much less likely to become teachers today.

“Whereas close to 20 percent of females in the top decile in 1964 chose teaching as a profession,” making it their top choice, the economists write, “only 3.7 percent of top decile females were teaching in 1992,” making teachers about as common as lawyers in this group.

So the chances of getting a really smart teacher have gone down substantially. In 1964, more than one out of five young female teachers came from the top 10 percent of their high school classes. By 2000, that number had dropped to just over one in 10.

Women who do become teachers, however, are better educated today than in earlier years so rather than a total dumbing down there has been a trend towards mediocrity.

Merit pay would lead to better teachers but it is opposed by unions.

This is from the ever-wise Virginia Postrel, NYT password required. Here is a link to the original research. Caroline Hoxby argues that wage compression, often brought on by unionization, is responsible for three-quarters of the decline in the aptitude of female teachers.

MyRichUncle is not a lender. MyRichUncle is a network of investors, “Rich Uncles” if you will, interested in financing the next generation of undergraduate and graduate students.

MyRichUncle provides students with Education Investments–funds for school. Upon graduation, students pay a fixed percentage of their future income for a fixed period of time. At the end of the period, their obligation is over regardless of what they have paid.

Education Investments are not loans. That means there is no principal or interest, and there is no obligation to payback the amount initially received. At the end of the payment period, your obligation is over, regardless of what you’ve paid.

Education is the greatest investment one can make toward his or her future. It is the key to opportunity. MyRichUncle is here to make sure everyone can afford it.

In other words, investors give students money and hold equity in their future income performance. Payments range from one to three percent, over a ten to fifteen year period. This is an onerous burden over time but the marginal tax rate is not so large to make the person stop working. Plus there is a 2.5 percent service fee on what you borrow.

Here is their web site. Here is an article on the involvement of Michael Robertson, the MP3.com guy. Here is a Cato policy analysis on the idea.

My take: Why not try this? It will help some people go to a better school. True, the offer will take in some high time preference suckers, who don’t really need the money, but those people already have enough paths to ruin.

Keep in mind this is an insurance scheme, not just a loan market or a way to go through school. If it turns out that you are less smart or less hard-working than you thought you were, you pay less back. The self-confident may refuse to buy it, which leaves the fearful dominating the market. Think of this as stupidity insurance, or laziness insurance, packaged under a more marketable and flattering guise (“You too can go to school…”). Of course it is a central question in economics why markets provide so little insurance protection for long-term risks. Let’s hope this instrument is the start of a new trend.

Thanks to Paul Edwards for the pointer.

In Dry Holes in Economic Research (Kyklos subscription required) David Laband and Robert Tollison find that a large fraction of economics papers (26%) are never cited and despite large increases in resources devoted to publication this percentage has not changed in decades.

Between 1974 and 1996, there was a substantial increase in the emphasis on academic research in universities located in the United States and elsewhere throughout the world. This increased emphasis was, and continues to be, reflected in a variety of increased incentives for faculty to produce research, including higher salaries, reduced teaching loads, increased money for travel, on so on. Yet, as we report in this paper, during this time period the rate of uncitedness of economics papers remained constant (at 26 percent). Clearly, universities and taxpayers/supporters of universities are obtaining no enhancement of research output (in terms of citations) from the increased subsidy to faculty research. We discuss the implications of this result for the publication and organization of economic research. In particular, we discuss the fact that resources devoted to up-front screening of papers by authors and journals have risen substantially over this period, but to no avail with respect to reducing the incidence of dry holes.

Many Europeans seem to think so. Here is the original data, scroll to p.21 (pdf) to see the data, the rank ordering for “degree of scientific” is the following:

1. Physics
2. Medicine
3. Biology
4. Astronomy
5. Psychology
6. Astrology
7. Economics
8. History

Thanks to Randall Parker for the pointer.

Addendum: A Charlie writes: “Why not? At least, given the same date, time, and location, two astrologers will agree on all the major points.”

A school in China is allowing students who don’t do well in tests to borrow a few extra marks as long as they pay them back with interest.

The scheme was recently introduced by Penglai Road No 2 Primary School in the Huangpu District of Shanghai, reports Xinhua.

Students who do poorly on a test can ask their teachers to lend them a few points to improve their grade, but twice as many points must be paid back on the next test, assuming they achieve a better mark.

If they don’t, interest on the loan continues to run at 100% per test until it is paid off.

It is reported that about 40% of students at the school have taken out such loans.

Why the monopoly provision? If you are going to do this at all, allow students to trade and lend points among themselves, thereby establishing a competitive equilibrium price.

From Ananova, thanks to Mitch Berkson for the pointer.

The APA (American Philosophical Association) is looking for stories about how valuable philosophical training has been to people other than professional, full-time philosophers.

Here is the full story. And here is an excerpt from an accompanying letter:

We might also use some of these names later in a fund drive we are now planning.

Good luck is all I can say. If you can think of anyone since Alcibidiades and Alexander the Great, let them know. Queen Christina did study with Rene Descartes, and John Stuart Mill sat in Parliament, but no U.S. example comes to mind. Might philosophy be best suited to advising an autocrat?

Addendum: Astute reader Brock Sides offers the following link to famous philosophy majors. The list includes Woody Allen, Iris Murdoch, David Foster Wallace, Bill Clinton, the Pope, Harrison Ford, Bruce Lee, and Mike Schmidt.

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.