Results for “education” 2162 found
Why does Minneapolis have such extreme educational disparities?
A correspondent writes me:
I live in Minneapolis and have worked in education policy here for a few years. With all of the unrest going on here, I feel increasing urgency to learn more about a question that’s been puzzling me for many years, and which I can’t seem to find a satisfactory answer to: why is Minnesota one of the worst states in the nation for disparities between black and white students, both in education and other outcomes such as employment and income?
Of course, most of my liberal colleagues and friends will say something like, “structural racism”, which isn’t really an explanation. That doesn’t explain why we to do so poorly in disparities, when other somewhat similar states such as Michigan and Illinois do better than us in their educational disparities.
All of this makes me think – there must be a study of disparities among minority or historically marginalized groups that looks across countries and cultural contexts, to try and understand what specifically causes students from those communities to perform poorly in school. And surely there must be cases where poor minority groups perform better in school than would be expected.
Do you have any suggestions for reading that could start me on the path to figuring this out?
The comments section is open, please leave your thoughtful suggestions there. And read this for general background on the economic side, and this.
A weird Lancastrian method for reopening higher education
I’m not sure this could work, but everyone else is doing weird ideas, so let’s consider another one.
Remember Lancastrian methods of education from 19th century England? Part of the idea was to keep small group size, and economize on labor, by having the students teach each other, typically with the older students instructing the younger.
Here is my suggestion: have students use an app to arrange in-person meetings, in groups of five, for periods of a few weeks running. Social distancing and masks can be applied as conditions at the time dictate. The app will match students on the basis of stated interests, and sometimes by other methods too, such as levels of mathematical sophistication or if you wish cultural diversity. The app also will tell them where to meet on campus, all classes being held outside.
Some classes would be led by professors, but there are not enough professors to go around so many others would be led by the more senior or otherwise better informed students. Professors and TAs could rotate across various groups if so needed.
All students are given free iPads, connected to campus wireless, and sometimes those iPads would serve as collective blackboards for the small groups.
Central admin. or departments could impose curricular structure in advance, or within a topic area particular assignments might be generated by “Unconference” methods, for instance the students might agree to read a particular book or essay, or to all learn a particular skill. To the extent overseeing faculty are scarce, you can try having the students themselves finding the relevant teaching materials. Very good groups would have the option of continuing for further weeks.
Start in August, keep on going until its gets too cold, they did it at Valley Forge and people learn in the desert and tropics too. Many of the meetings can be short — say 45 minutes — and you can privilege the more valuable majors with locations in the shade. Put up as many tents as you can.
Every class has a supply of back-up YouTube material, and associated testing, for when the weather is bad, or for when the semester has to end.
For the final semester grade each student writes a 20-25 pp. paper about what he or she learned through these units. Professors and sometimes TAs would grade those papers, and do note this is not an insuperable grading burden. It rewards the “did you learn anything useful at all?” approach, rather than “did you manage to sit and suffer through through all of your boring classes?”.
I suspect it feels too much like chaos to a university administrator, but perhaps that is an argument in its favor?
You will note that this method, for all of its learning uncertainties, has two big advantages. First, it really does prioritize the health of everyone involved. Second, students still have lots of contact with each other and get to enjoy some version of the campus experience. The interactive groups might even provide a more engaging campus experience than did the status quo ex ante, keeping in mind that some schools will combine this method with the abolition or radical paring down of dorms.
Addendum: Hand out free diapers, all other plans have that issue too.
Does coronavirus mean the end of traditional education?
I will debating/discussing the topic “Does coronavirus mean the end of traditional education?” @ the Cambridge Union. A bit disappointing not to be in the hallowed hall but should be interesting nonetheless. The debate will be live-streamed at 2pm ET on Wednesday.
Will a move towards digital, decentralised teaching transform a model that once seemed so entrenched? Will the loss of exams become permanent for many? In an online panel with the Cambridge Union, four world-renowned figures share their perspective on what the future holds for education in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Speakers:
Justine Greening served as Secretary of State for Education under Theresa May, following stints at International Development and Transport. Having left Parliament, Greening now chairs the Social Mobility Pledge.
Stephen Toope is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He previously held the same position at the University of British Columbia, and is perhaps best known for his regular emails to the Cambridge student body.
Alex Tabarrok is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University. Together with Tyler Cowen, he is best known as the co-founder of Marginal Revolution University, a free online platform for studying economics.
Shirley M. Tilghman was the nineteenth President of Princeton University, serving for twelve years until 2013. She is globally recognised for her scholarship in molecular biology.
Lord David Willetts, former Minister of State for Universities and Science under David Cameron in the UK.
The new economics of higher education
That is my new Bloomberg column, written for a special feature and thus 2x the normal length. Here is one excerpt:
The decisions of American families also will choke off out-of-state tuition revenue. Note that about three-quarters of America’s higher education sector, by enrollment, is state schools. The out-of-state tuition rate is the real cash cow of American higher education, and sometimes it can approach three times the in-state rate. Schools’ reliance on out-of-state revenue is going to take a big hit, as it was premised on a degree of individual geographic mobility that simply does not exist right now and may not be restored anytime soon.
I suspect many parents will, whether it is rational or not, prefer to keep their children closer to home.
The most vulnerable state schools will be those in underpopulated states and far from population centers. The University of Vermont, with about three-quarters out-of-state students, ought to worry…
Another problem will be the plummeting enrollment of foreign students, who typically are paying out-of-state tuition rates…
The University of Rochester, with about 27% foreign students, will find this adjustment especially difficult.
There is much more at the link, recommended. One theme is that upper tier schools will stay in business, but by relaxing admissions standards and by cannibalizing students from lower-tier schools (I am curious to see how those students do in their newly found “promotions”).
p.s. Average is Over
p.p.s. “free college” is a really bad idea, worse than before. State schools cannot at the moment survive the complete loss of tuition revenue.
Online Education is Better
The COVID-19 crisis is accelerating a long-term trend, the shift to online education. I’ve long argued that online education is superior to traditional models. In an excellent essay in the New York Times, Veronique Mintz, an eighth-grade NYC student agrees:
Talking out of turn. Destroying classroom materials. Disrespecting teachers. Blurting out answers during tests. Students pushing, kicking, hitting one another and even rolling on the ground. This is what happens in my school every single day.
You may think I’m joking, but I swear I’m not…during my three years of middle school, these sorts of disruptions occurred repeatedly in any given 42-minute class period.
That’s why I’m in favor of the distance learning the New York City school system instituted when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
…Distance learning gives me more control of my studies. I can focus more time on subjects that require greater effort and study. I don’t have to sit through a teacher fielding questions that have already been answered.
…This year I have struggled with math. The teacher rarely had the patience for questions as he spent at least a third of class time trying to maintain order. Often, when I scheduled time to meet with him before school, there would be a pileup at his door of students who also had questions. He couldn’t help us all in 20 minutes before first period. Other times he just wouldn’t show up….With distance learning, all of that wasted time is eliminated. I stop, start and even rewind the teacher’s recording when I need to and am able to understand the lesson on the day it’s taught.
Veronique’s online courses were put together in a rush. Imagine how much more she will learn when we invest millions in online classes and teach at scale. The online classes that Tyler and I teach, using Modern Principles and the Sapling/Achieve online course management system, took years to produce and feature high quality videos and sophisticated assessment tools including curve shifting (not just multiple-choice), empirical questions based on FRED, and adaptive practice–plus the videos are all subtitled in multiple languages, they can be sped up or slowed down, watched at different times of the day in different time zones and so forth. Moreover, technology is increasing the advantages of online education over time.
The importance of maternal education, up to a point
…we show that rank mobility increases as the percentage of mothers with a high school diploma increases. We find weaker evidence that mobility increases with the percentage of mothers with a university degree.
That is from a new paper by Marie Connolly, Catherine Haeck, and Jean-William P. Lalibert.
Education sentences to ponder
The unemployment rate for young college graduates exceeds that of the general population, and about 41 percent of recent college graduates — and 33.8 percent of all college graduates — are underemployed in that they are working in jobs that don’t require a college degree, according to new data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Here is more from Elizabeth Redden. The sad thing is, this is evidence of meritocracy, not a stinking economy.
Extending the Race between Education and Technology
There is a new and updated take on this topic by Autor, Goldin, amd Katz:
The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does an excellent job of explaining U.S. wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from skill-biased technological change, combined with variations in the supply of skills from changes in educational access. We expand the analysis backwards and forwards. The framework helps explain rising skill differentials in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, but needs to be augmented to illuminate the recent convexification of education returns and implied slowdown in the growth of the relative demand for college workers. Increased educational wage differentials explain 75 percent of the rise of U.S. wage inequality from 1980 to 2000 as compared to 38 percent for 2000 to 2017.
Emphasis added, here is the full NBER working paper. For background, here is my old NYT column on their earlier work on this topic.
Note that for the most recent rise in inequality across 2000-2017, most of it has happened within educational groups. The less polite way of putting that — my words not those of the authors — is that the real marginal product of education is explaining less of the variation in earnings, or in other words the higher earners are drawing upon something they are not getting at school.
Students of the “education as signaling” debate also should note that, due to these results, now a) signaling is more relevant for your early wage offer, and b) signaling is less relevant for your eventual wage profile, which in fact is now more determined by your personal level of skill.
Bryan Caplan’s stance on higher education policy
In my Warren post I wrote:
7. College free for all: Would wreck the relatively high quality of America’s state-run colleges and universities, which cover about 78 percent of all U.S. students and are the envy of other countries worldwide and furthermore a major source of American soft power. Makes sense only if you are a Caplanian on higher ed., and furthermore like student debt forgiveness this plan isn’t that egalitarian, as many of the neediest don’t finish high school, do not wish to start college, cannot finish college, or already reject near-free local options for higher education, typically involving community colleges.
Bryan wishes me to point out that he does not favor “free tuition for all,” and indeed that is true, as I can verify from years of discussion with him. Nonetheless I still believe such a policy would come closer to limiting educational signaling (by making so many schools worse and lowering the value of the signal) than would Bryan’s preferred policies toward higher ed.
Artificial Intelligence Applied to Education
In Why Online Education Works I wrote:
The future of online education is adaptive assessment, not for testing, but for learning. Incorrect answers are not random but betray specific assumptions and patterns of thought. Analysis of answers, therefore, can be used to guide students to exactly that lecture that needs to be reviewed and understood to achieve mastery of the material. Computer-adaptive testing will thus become computer-adaptive learning.
Computer-adaptive learning will be as if every student has their own professor on demand—much more personalized than one professor teaching 500 students or even 50 students. In his novel Diamond Age, science fiction author Neal Stephenson describes a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive book that can answer a learner’s questions with specific information and also teach young children with allegories tuned to the child’s environment and experience. In short, something like an iPad combining Siri, Watson, and the gaming technology behind an online world like Skyrim. Surprisingly, the computer will make learning less standardized and robotic.
In other words, the adaptive textbook will read you as you read it. The NYTimes has a good piece discussing recent advances in this area including Bakpax which reads student handwriting and grades answers. Furthermore:
Today, learning algorithms uncover patterns in large pools of data about how students have performed on material in the past and optimize teaching strategies accordingly. They adapt to the student’s performance as the student interacts with the system.
…Studies show that these systems can raise student performance well beyond the level of conventional classes and even beyond the level achieved by students who receive instruction from human tutors. A.I. tutors perform better, in part, because a computer is more patient and often more insightful.
…Still more transformational applications are being developed that could revolutionize education altogether. Acuitus, a Silicon Valley start-up, has drawn on lessons learned over the past 50 years in education — cognitive psychology, social psychology, computer science, linguistics and artificial intelligence — to create a digital tutor that it claims can train experts in months rather than years.
Acuitus’s system was originally funded by the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for training Navy information technology specialists. John Newkirk, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said Acuitus focused on teaching concepts and understanding.
The company has taught nearly 1,000 students with its course on information technology and is in the prototype stage for a system that will teach algebra. Dr. Newkirk said the underlying A.I. technology was content-agnostic and could be used to teach the full range of STEM subjects.
Dr. Newkirk likens A.I.-powered education today to the Wright brothers’ early exhibition flights — proof that it can be done, but far from what it will be a decade or two from now.
See also my piece with Tyler, the Industrial Organization of Online Education and, of course, check out our textbook Modern Principles of Economics which isn’t using AI yet but the course management system combines excellent videos with flexible computerized assessment and grading.
The future of higher education?
Two public four-year institutions, Maine Maritime Academy and the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, rank in the top 10 colleges with the best long-term returns, while two four-year private colleges, St. Louis College of Pharmacy and Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, made the top 10 for short-term and long-term returns.
The report ranks 4,526 colleges and universities by return on investment.
Here is one article, with a graphic for the top ten, you will note that Harvard, Stanford, and MIT still do fine. Babson is underrated, as it does much better over longer stretches of time. Here is the Georgetown report.
Intelligence predicts educational achievement pretty well
This 5-year prospective longitudinal study of 70,000+ English children examined the association between psychometric intelligence at age 11 years and educational achievement in national examinations in 25 academic subjects at age 16. The correlation between a latent intelligence trait (Spearman’s g from CAT2E) and a latent trait of educational achievement (GCSE scores) was 0.81. General intelligence contributed to success on all 25 subjects. Variance accounted for ranged from 58.6% in Mathematics and 48% in English to 18.1% in Art and Design. Girls showed no advantage in g, but performed significantly better on all subjects except Physics. This was not due to their better verbal ability. At age 16, obtaining five or more GCSEs at grades A⁎–C is an important criterion. 61% of girls and 50% of boys achieved this. For those at the mean level of g at age 11, 58% achieved this; a standard deviation increase or decrease in g altered the values to 91% and 16%, respectively.
That is from a new paper by Deary, Strand, Smith, and Fernandez, via Noah Carl.
My education podcast with Can Olcer
#7 Tyler Cowen (GMU) on less homework, Swiss science culture, and low university completion rates
In this episode with Tyler Cowen we talk about a broad range of topics. For example, why it’s important that students have less homework, the Swiss science culture, and the low university completion rates.
Here is the link, here is Can on Twitter. Can currently runs Kosmos School, a K-12 science school realized through Virtual Reality.
Education fact of the day
Estimates suggest an average annual consumption value of college as high as $11,600, with considerable heterogeneity across students. Incorporating these benefits raises the average expected return to college by as much as 14%.
That is from a new NBER working paper by Yifan Gong, Lance Lochner, Ralph Stinebrickner, and Todd R. Stinebrickner.
Divorce and higher education
The social conservatives are turning out to be right about many things:
In this paper we evaluate the degree to which the adverse parental divorce effect on university education operates through deprivation of economic resources. Using one million siblings from Taiwan, we first find that parental divorce occurring at ages 13-18 led to a 10.6 percent decrease in the likelihood of university admission at age 18. We then use the same sample to estimate the effect of parental job loss occurring at the same ages, and use the job-loss effect as a benchmark to indicate the potential parental divorce effect due to family income loss. We find the job-loss effect very little. Combined, these results imply a minor role played by reduced income in driving the parental divorce effect on the child’s higher education outcome. Non-economic mechanisms, such as psychological and mental shocks, are more likely to dominate. Our further examinations show that boys and girls are equally susceptible, and younger teenagers are more vulnerable than the more mature ones, to parental divorce.
That is from a recent NBER Working Paper by Yen-Chien Chen, Elliott Fan, and Jin-Tan Liu.
Nonetheless, I suspect there is more to it than this. I can’t speak to the circumstances of Taiwan, but on average I think of women as suffering the most from non-divorce, not men. It is not sufficiently discussed how much the higher growth rates of earlier times might have been achieved at the expense of women, at least in the short run. It might in some ways boost economic growth to, through discrimination, allocate more very smart women to the teaching of grade school, and to keep them in unhappy marriages, “for the sake of the children.” And yet those outcomes are entirely unjust, and the contemporary world has decided it will not accept them.