Jason Delisle says,

But if you get in the heads of people — and I did a focus group on this a year ago — you maybe went to school, it turns out it wasn’t for you or the school misled you, or you didn’t get a job in that field, and so you’re not really excited about paying back your $8,900 because you feel like you didn’t get anything for it.

Affluent people assume that student loan debt must be related to the high tuitions at top-tier schools with which they are familiar. DeLisle says that instead many of the defaults are occurring at lower-tier schools. The tuition and debt levels are low, but the students do not think they got anything out of the school, so they are reluctant to repay loans.

There is much more in this depressing interview. It is depressing how much of a discrepancy there is between a sensible policy on higher education and what we are actually likely to see.

Education realist writes,

High school is much harder. All that no excuses schools are doing, at best, is taking motivated kids, teaching them longer, and stuffing in enough information to get them test scores equivalent to the grade level of kids who don’t need all that extra help. And then off they go to high school and lose it again.

Neerav Kingsland writes,

It’s very easy to see how a totally dysfunctional environment could negatively impact students, whereas it’s a little more difficult to tease out the additional impact on students once the basics are in place.

There may be exceptions to the null hypothesis on the extreme down side. That is, the very worst parents, the very worst teachers, and the very worst schools might have an adverse effect on young people that is causal, significant, long-lasting, and replicable.

Will Dobbie and Roland G. Fryar write,

In this paper, we estimate the impact of charter schools on early-life labor market outcomes using administrative data from Texas. We find that, at the mean, charter schools have no impact on test scores and a negative impact on earnings. No Excuses charter schools increase test scores and four-year college enrollment, but have a small and statistically insignificant impact on earnings, while regular charter schools decrease test scores, four-year college enrollment, and earnings. Using school-level estimates, we find that charter schools that decrease test scores also tend to decrease earnings, while charter schools that increase test scores have no discernible impact on earnings.

The authors seem to think that their findings are precise and require some logical explanation. My guess is that their findings are random variations around the null hypothesis.

A commenter writes,

How much of the benefit of college is facilitating moving?

Suppose that two people from the same town attend colleges of equal quality, but one of them attends college locally and one relocates. I would bet that the relocator has more economic success down the road. It is a difficult hypothesis to test, but an interesting one.

Although I have scheduled posts through the weekend, blogging might be light after that. A relative is struggling from an encounter with Hansonian medicine.

A robust finding in health care economics is that when you compare two populations with similar characteristics, the population on which more is spent on medical care enjoys no better outcomes, where outcomes are usually measured in terms of mortality. Given that we know that some treatments do work, this represents a puzzle.

The most radical way of resolving the puzzle is due to Robin Hanson. He suggests that the treatments that work are offset in the aggregate by treatments that cause harm. It is the latter that I have dubbed “Hansonian medicine.” I have myself witnessed Hansonian medicine take the lives of elderly relatives, although their lives were not shortened by much and their lives almost certainly had been prolonged by previous treatments.

The current episode concerns a recent procedure on a not-so-elderly relative that resulted in a severe infection. Moreover, the condition for which the procedure was undertaken is something that I always suspected may have been brought on by taking statin drugs, so that for years I have said no to doctor recommendations for me to take statins. (Just now, I googled and found that some recent research might support my hypothesis. However, I believe that the consensus is that my personal views are wrong and that statins are a low-cost, high-benefit treatment, which is the opposite of Hansonian medicine.)

Lindsey Burke and Salim Furth write,

New studies of large-scale preschool programs in Quebec and Tennessee show that vastly expanding access to free or subsidized preschool may worsen behavioral and emotional outcomes.

You may have seen it claimed elsewhere that pre-K has been proven to work. Read the whole article. I am reminded of David Weinberger’s observation that nowadays for every fact there is an equal and opposite fact.

Meanwhile, long live the null hypothesis.

He asks,

If we are over-educating our workforce, then why don’t entrepreneurs find and train non-college workers at lower lifetime salaries?

Very good question. Equivalently, why don’t non-college workers try to convince entrepreneurs that they can do the same work at lower pay?

Some possible answers:

1. The Caplan answer is that the non-college worker is attempting to work around the system, and thereby signaling a non-conformist personality that will be difficult to train and integrate into the firm.

2. The Cowen answer is that the college-educated individual is better able to deal with authority–knowing when to question and when to keep silent–and will therefore be more productive. In other words, college makes someone more productive even in a job that does not “require” a college education.

3. I would suggest another possible answer. Perhaps college-educated workers do not get higher salaries than non-college workers in the same jobs.* Perhaps the goal of attending college is to maintain or raise one’s social status. Getting a “college-appropriate” job would be nice, but it is not absolutely necessary in order to feel that you have raised your status, or at least made the attempt.

*Note: I believe that studies that have looked at this *do* show college-educated workers earning higher salaries, even in the same jobs. But I think it is hard to do this quasi-experimentally, which you would have to do in order to control for cognitive ability and conscientiousness.