Results for “direct instruction” 42 found
Differential Pricing in University Education
Traditionally universities have charged every student the same tuition/price regardless of major. Under budget pressure, however, differential pricing is becoming more common. Differential pricing is tending to reduce the peculiar cross-subsidies that currently exist as pointed out in a new working paper by Kevin Stange (earlier version):
Higher education in the United States is heavily subsidized, both through direct support for institutions by state governments and private donors, and through federal and state support
directly to students. There are also substantial differences in the extent of subsidization across
institutions and sectors, with students at selective private institutions more heavily subsidized
than those at less selective institutions(Winston 1999). Less commonly noticed, however, is that
there are also large cross-subsidies between students within the same institutions due to the
conventional practice of charging similar tuition fees to all undergraduate students regardless of
the cost of instructing them. The cost of instruction differs tremendously between upper and
lower division coursework and across programs even within institutions. For instance, recent
analysis of cost data from four large state post-secondary systems (Florida, Illinois, New York‐
SUNY, and Ohio) indicated that upper division instruction costs approximately 40% more per
credit hour than lower division instruction, and that upper-division engineering, physical science,
and visual/performing art was approximately 40% more costly than the least costly majors
(SHEEO, 2010). In fact, an earlier but more extensive cost study found that more than three-fourths of the variance in instructional cost across institutions is explained by the disciplinary
mix within an institution (U.S. Department of Education 2003). The consequence is that lower division students subsidize upper-division students and students in costly majors are subsidized
by those in less expensive ones.This pattern of cross-subsidization generally runs counter to differences in post-schooling
earnings and ability to pay. Lower division includes many students who eventually drop out,
while students that have advanced to upper division are more likely to graduate and earn more.
Engineering, science, and business majors tend to earn more and have higher returns than
education and humanities majors, even after controlling for differential selection of major by
ability (Arcidiacono 2004).
I have argued for targeting education subsidies to the majors that are most likely to have the greatest positive spillovers. Differential pricing moves prices closer to costs which opens up the possibility for more rational pricing but notice that it can in some cases move prices away from optimal subsidy levels.
Hat tip: Dubner at Freakonomics.
The Washington Post is on a roll
Here is one excerpt from their latest investigation:
It is possible that the conflict between the PRISM slides and the company spokesmen is the result of imprecision on the part of the NSA author. In another classified report obtained by The Post, the arrangement is described as allowing “collection managers [to send] content tasking instructions directly to equipment installed at company-controlled locations,” rather than directly to company servers.
Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw from the program if exposed. “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes.
An internal presentation of 41 briefing slides on PRISM, dated April 2013 and intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 items last year. According to the slides and other supporting materials obtained by The Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.
More on Online Education
At Cato Unbound I respond to some of the critics of my article Why Online Education Works. Here is one bit:
We do need more studies of offline, online, and blended education models, but the evidence that we do have is supportive of the online model. In 2009, The Department of Education conducted a meta-analysis and review of online learning studies and found:
- Students in online conditions performed modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.
- Instruction combining online and face-to-face elements had a larger advantage relative to purely face-to-face instruction than did purely online instruction.
- Effect sizes were larger for studies in which the online instruction was collaborative or instructor-directed than in those studies where online learners worked independently.
- The effectiveness of online learning approaches appears quite broad across different content and learner types. Online learning appeared to be an effective option for both undergraduates (mean effect of +0.30, p < .001) and for graduate students and professionals (+0.10, p < .05) in a wide range of academic and professional studies.
The benefits of learning a second language
Bryan has had a few recent posts criticizing the notion of multilingualism for (most) Americans. As a general advocate of learning foreign languages, I have a few points in response:
1. There is a sizable literature on the cognitive benefits of bilingualism. I get nervous when I see the topic discussed without reference to the main claimed benefits.
2. I believe that good fluency in a second or third language significantly expands one’s ability to see and understand and also articulate other points of view. And most of the very great thinkers of the past were fluent or semi-fluent in multiple languages. By teaching other languages at an early age, we can make our most productive thinkers deeper and more productive.
3. Ideally foreign languages can be taught to individuals when they are young, well before high school, thus very much lowering the opportunity cost of such instruction. Just toss out some of the other material, making sure to keep mathematics and English literacy. Most of Western Europe does this quite well, and I hardly think of those children as miserable. I don’t see why this has to cost anything at all.
4. I am reasonably sympathetic to the “we’re so uncommitted to this notion we’ll never see it through so let’s not bother trying” response to my attitude. (In particular it is harder for Americans to get within-culture reinforcement for language learning in the way that Europeans so often do, either from American popular culture or from crossing a nearby border.) Yet that’s a far cry from believing it would actually be a mistake to invest resources in that direction, if indeed we would see it through.
Here is one stimulating discussion of the topic, in English of course.
The economics of higher non-profit and for-profit education
Here is a 2009 paper of mine with Sam Papenfuss (pdf), a later version of which was published in this book edited by Joshua Hall. The paper deliberately sidesteps the recent scandals and focuses on fundamentalist explanations of why higher education might be provided on a non-profit or for-profit basis.
The key stylized facts are this:
Two primary features characterize the observed educational for-profits. First, for-profits tend to specialize in highly practical or vocational forms of training. For-profits are especially prominent in areas where student performance can be measured by a relatively objective, standardized test. Nonprofits, in contrast, have a stronger presence in the liberal arts, although they are by no means restricted to that arena..
This is a general pattern, and not unique to the United States today:
A comparison of for-profit and non-profit institutions in the Philippines [in the 1970s] bears out many of the differences noted above. Filipino for-profits tend to charge lower fees, specialize in education of lower academic reputation, spend less on capital equipment, and serve students who plan on pursuing vocational careers or taking a standardized vocational test upon graduation…Students at for-profits are approximately ten times more likely to take the tests. Adjusting for the lower pass rate from for-profits, the for-profits are putting about five times the number of students through the tests as the non-profits, even though for-profits educated no more than three-fifths of all Filipino students at the time.
Here is one possible (partial) resolution:
Faculty governance implies that for-profits and nonprofits place different relative weight on reputation and profits. The for-profit selects students and faculty on the basis of how easily their reputational benefits can be captured by shareholders, whereas the non-profit places greater weight on the reputational benefits that are kept by faculty. The for-profit pursues “reputation as valued by students in dollar terms” and the nonprofit pursues “reputation with the external world,” or “reputation as a public good.” In the resulting equilibrium, for-profits achieve lower status.
…The hypothesis therefore predicts a segmented market for higher education. Students who seek the highest levels of certification and reputation will attend non-profit institutions, which are run by faculty and use their prestige to raise donations. Students whose quality can be certified by an outside vocational exam do not need the non-profit reputational endorsement. They will pursue the more efficient instruction offered by for-profits.
There is a good recent paper by David Deming, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz on educational for-profits, available here. Here is a 2010 Dick Vedder piece on for-profits, more positive than most recent accounts.
My predictions about the iPad
Jason Kottke has some observations. My theory is that Apple wants to capture a chunk of the revenue in this nation's enormous textbook market — high school, college, whatever. Why lug all those books around? The superior Apple graphics, colors, and fonts will support all of the textbook features which Kindle botches and destroys. Apple takes a chunk of the market revenue, of course, plus they sell the iPads and some AT&T contracts. There are lots of schoolkids in the world.
As Kottke says, it is a device you use sitting down. And it fails to solve the "sunlight on your reading screen" problem/ Those both point to somewhat sedentary uses.. And it doesn't seem to have a camera.
In the longer run the iPad will compete with your university, or in some ways enhance your university. It will offer homework services and instructional videos and courses, none of which can work well on the current iPhone or Kindle. The device also seems to allow for collaborative use.
Can you imagine one attached to every hospital bed or in the hands of every doctor and nurse?
It will take some business away from Kindle but that will not be the major impact. The commercial book trade just isn't that big in terms of revenue and arguably that sector will shrink with digitalization, as recorded music has been doing.
The story here is one of new markets, not cannibalization or even competition.
Most of the commentary I've read hasn't been very imaginative about what the content might be.
Addendum: Chris F. Masse, who sometimes reads my mind, sent me this article (before this post was up):
“The book will never die. But the textbook probably will,” says Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis. Inkling is working directly with textbook publishers. First, they’ll port their existing tomes onto Apple’s iPad as interactive, socialized objects. Then, they’ll create all-new learning modules – interactive, social, and mobile – that leave ink-on-paper textbooks in the dust.
Read the whole thing, it's the best piece I've seen on the iPad so far.
What does a recipe maximize?
Brad DeLong’s daring but unsound cinnamon gambit led me to wonder what a recipe is intended to do. I see at least two possibilities:
1. A food recipe is designed to put you on the highest indifference curve possible, taking into account market prices and constraints.
2. A food recipe is designed to taste as good as possible, ignoring market prices and constraints. Bring on the caviar.
Cookbooks by famous chefs are more likely to fall into #2. The chef makes money not just from the cookbook but also from TV appearances, endorsements, and other ancillary products and activities. You might resent having spent so much on the saffron, but if it tasted good you will praise and value the chef. Few people will visit the restaurant of a man who shows you how to find cheaper potatoes.
Knowing this, how should you adjust recipes? It depends on the quality/price gradient. You could cut back on the most expensive ingredients, cut back on all ingredients, or perhaps add more spices and buy a quality of meat lower than suggested. At the very least you should cut back on your labor input and take shortcuts. This is in fact what most home cooks do, relative to the recipes they use. You don’t really peel all those boiled almonds, do you? Don’t feel guilty, just ponder the first-order conditions, smile, and gulp it down.
If you have a not-very-clearly-branded cookbook, you might be better off following the instructions to the letter. They are hoping to make money from happy book buying cooks, not ancillary food products. If the recipe is old enough, it is hard to predict the direction in which relative prices have changed, but at the very least wages have probably gone up. So you are back to making adjustments and taking some extra shortcuts to stay on your highest possible indifference curve.
If the recipe is from a supermarket, cut back on the high-margin items. Use more canned goods and less expensive cheese, relative to what is suggested. (Hey, what about blog recipes?)
Lunchtime Pho with Alex contributed to these ideas; I enjoyed the food but I believe the restaurant followed #1. I spent $6.45. Comments are open.
Intelligence predicts health and longevity
Large epidemiological studies of almost an entire population in Scotland have found that intelligence (as measured by an IQ-type test) in childhood predicts substantial differences in adult morbidity and mortality, including deaths from cancers and cardiovascular diseases. These differences remain significant after controlling for socioeconomic variables.
Here is the full article, courtesy of Randall Parker. It suggests another perspective on why health care appears not to contribute to health. Gross health care expenditures — an input — are not always the best way to measure real health care outputs. (Similarly, gross educational expenditures do not much predict learning, once we adjust for other factors.) High IQ is correlated with compliance with doctors’ instructions, good choice of doctor, adequate medical attention, and so on. High IQ thus appears to be doing some of the work that should be credited to health care, as properly defined and measured.
Policy implications: Targeting gross expenditures on health is not the best approach to making people healthy. But this does not mean that health is neutral with respect to health care policies. A smart policy can make people much better off, just as smart patients live longer.
My next question: Do veterinarians extend the lives of the animals they care for?
Experimental economics, African style
This settlement in western Kenya, where Ms. Odera lives, has become
a giant test tube, and Ms. Okoth’s instruction is one part of that
experiment. Eventually there will be 10 such test villages, scattered
across the world’s poorest continent.Led by Jeffrey Sachs,
director of the Earth Institute of Columbia University, the project
aims to fight poverty in all its aspects – from health and education to
agriculture and energy in one focused area – to prove that conditions
for millions of people like Ms. Odera and her neighbors can be improved
in just five years.It is an important and uncertain gambit. If
it fails, initiatives like that pushed recently by Prime Minister Tony
Blair of Britain to greatly increase foreign aid to Africa may seem
foolhardy. If a single village cannot be turned around with focused
attention, how can whole communities and even countries be revitalized?…The researchers behind the program are keeping track of every penny
they spend, trying to demonstrate that for a modest amount, somewhere
around $110 per person, a village can be tugged out of poverty.They
have tried to measure exactly how bad Sauri was at the start of the
project last fall. Every home was surveyed to get an accurate portrait
of the population. Blood tests were taken among a smaller group for a
nutritional analysis, because many villagers eat only once a day, and
show it.Blood will also be tested to determine how widespread
the malaria parasite is, and then again later, to see whether the
mosquito bed nets given to every villager help keep more people,
especially children, alive.
Here is the New York Times story. Here is my earlier post on Sachs’s plan. Here is an on-line World Bank discussion about when foreign aid works and doesn’t; they invite MR readers to join in.
My favorite Polish things
My favorite Polish novel: Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem. Don’t worry if you hate science fiction, this is possibly the best novel ever penned about erotic guilt and the nature of personal identity.
My favorite Polish music: My traditional favorites have been the Chopin Etudes and the Polonaise Op.40. But arguably the Mazurkas hold up best over time. Here is a recent Chopin CD that will blow you away.
My favorite Polish movie: Kanal, directed by Andrzej Wajda. A European movie of great depth with a plot as gripping as Hollywood.
My favorite Polish TV show: The Decalogue, episode four. This audiovisual classic is now available in its entirety on DVD. In the fourth episode, a daughter receives an envelope from her father, with the written instructions: “Don’t Open This Until I Die.” I leave the rest up to your imagination.
I’m enjoying my time here very much, soon I will be in Kracow.
Addendum: Let’s not forget the goose in cranberry sauce, the pork knuckle pate, the wild boar with dumplings, the sour soup with sausage, the duck with cherry sauce, or the wonderful Brazilian restaurant they have here. Polish food in Brazil is fantastic, so now they are returning the favor, all to the benefit of me.
Education in Finland, recipe for success?
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.
Short art
The higher the wage rate, the more valuable is time. Some people will use their greater wealth to consume more leisure, others will run around and look harried.
Surely the arts should adapt to serve this second category of customer. We are all familiar with channel-surfing, or the two-minute pop song, but how about “high culture” in bite-sized portions?
“There’s no hard and fast reason why an opera has to be colossal or epic in scale,” says director David Pountney. “An opera is simply a narrative idea expressed through music. Length is immaterial – I have seen several successful operas that are barely 10 minutes long.”
In fact, 10 minutes sounds Wagnerian in comparison with Peter Reynolds’s Sands of Time. At three minutes and 34 seconds, it is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s shortest opera. “The librettist, Simon Rees, came up with the idea of an opera whose duration should match the boiling of an egg,” says Reynolds. “So we created a domestic scenario of a couple having an argument over breakfast. It starts with the sand-timer being turned, and ends with the egg coming out of the saucepan.” [I’ve added the link to this quotation]
Then there is always Samuel Beckett:
…the shortest of all Beckett works, the notoriously ephemeral Breath, consists of a set of printed instructions that take longer to read than to perform. Richard Gregory, of the company Quarantine, recently produced the work at Newcastle Playhouse, and came up with an ingenious solution for extending its 30-second duration. They did it twice. “I think we spent about a fortnight, all told, preparing a piece that was over in under a minute,” says Gregory.
And here is a nice short (truly short) story:
Augusto Monterroso’s El Dinosaurio reads in its entirety: “Upon waking the dinosaur was still there.”
Addendum: If your tastes run in the other direction, here is a version of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, slowed to down to last twenty-four hours. And go to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, where you can see Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho”, the classic Hitchcock movie but at much slower speed.