Category Archives: Economics of Education

Academia: Was it Always Thus?

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In response to me, Devin Helton writes,

what these complaints ignore is that intellectual narrowness in academia has been a major problem for many decades. The devastating real world consequences have already happened.

His long post includes many citations, although he leaves out Allan Bloom, regarded by many as the ur-complainer on these matters. One of his links goes to a post put up almost exactly four years ago by Timothy Burke, a Swarthmore history professor, who wrote

the conversation about diversity usually boils down to fixed identarian formulas, to improving the percentage of recognized groups, not to diversifying the kinds of experience (and passions) that professionals can bring to intellectual work. I feel intuitively that the generation of faculty just ahead of me, people from their late 50s to 70s, are more diverse in this sense if not racially so. I know considerably more first-generation scholars whose passionate connection to intellectual work got them into academia in that generation than in any younger cohort.

That fits with my diagnosis. I think that as the pre-1960s-era professors (meaning professors who got their Ph.D’s before 1970) have aged out of academia, there has been an acceleration in the trend toward doctrinaire belief and away from rational thought.

The story as I am suggesting it is that starting around 1970, graduate programs in the humanities and social sciences started to filter out independent thinkers. By 1990, your chances of having a thesis adviser who was a Thinker rather than a Doctrinairian were somewhat low. They dwindled rapidly thereafter. So the cohort that is now entering into teaching positions is almost devoid of Thinkers, and they are replacing the few Thinkers from before 1970.

Of course, there remains the possibility that what has changed over the past 15-25 years is that I have become a right-wing nut job. Or that the biases in academia have remained approximately constant, and the increase has been in the amount of complaining and anecdote-recitation among conservatives and in conservative media.

Fashions Change on Campus

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From an article in the Washington Post.

As colleges grapple with the widespread problem of sexual assault, there is a growing consensus that the nation’s schools need to do more to educate young people about sex and relationships before they ever set foot on campus.

The focus of the article is on attempts to use sex education in grades K-12 to explain the concept of consent to young people.

My point is not to say whether this is good or bad. What strikes me is how swiftly the fashions have changed on elite college campuses. As recently as five or six years ago, if you had asked me, I would have have said the colleges do too much to encourage casual sex–telling the resident assistant to keep a set of condoms in a candy dish so that anyone could come by and grab one as needed. Now, the colleges seem to be headed in the complete opposite direction. Not that they want to get rid of the condoms, but they seem to be trying to make sure that no one can have fun using them.

On a rather different note, Bart Hinkle gives an example of the campus fashion for “inclusion.”

Among other things, candidates should “include a list of activities that promote or contribute to inclusive teaching, research, outreach, and service”; they should report information about their “contributions to an inclusive campus”; they should write about their “active involvement in diversity and inclusion”; demonstrate that they have pursued “training in inclusive pedagogy”; incorporate “the Principles of Community into course development”; and so on. A spokesman for the university says providing such information is purely voluntary — but who applying for promotion or tenure is likely to see it that way?

He points out that if someone were to impose a similar requirement on professors to demonstrate their patriotism, people would be properly outraged.

I am becoming increasingly concerned that sending children to college is dangerous for their intellectual health. I am afraid that instead of being told how to think, students are being told not to think. They are being ideological role models, not intellectual role models.

Had someone expressed such sentiments to me fifteen years ago, I would have dismissed that person as a paranoid right-wing nutjob. I infer that in the meantime either I have turned into a paranoid right-wing nut job or there has been a significant erosion of intellectual integrity at American colleges, or both.

I am inclined to believe that it was rapid erosion of intellectual integrity. I think that the last 15 years have witnessed a change in the demographics of the professoriate. Professors with intellectual integrity have aged out or otherwise departed. An anti-intellectual conformity has appeared in their place. When you have intellectual integrity, you don’t see these sorts of abrupt fashion changes. I think of intellectual integrity as getting your beliefs from careful reflection. That means that you did not rely on fashions in the first place, and you do not change your beliefs to fit the latest fashion.

Educated to be Irresponsible

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The Washington Post writes,

Heavy drinking is one of the most significant predictors of sexual assault in college, according to the poll of 1,053 current and recent college students. Analysis of the results found that women who say they sometimes or often drink more than they should are twice as likely to be victims of completed, attempted or suspected sexual assaults as those who rarely or never drink. Several male victims also pointed to alcohol’s role in their assaults.

Long-time readers will know that I am angry about how colleges treat drinking. When my daughters were in college, I sent only two communications to school officials. Both of these were suggestions for taking a more pro-active approach to drinking. One suggestion was to tell admissions officers to try to admit more students with a lower propensity to drink, in order to change the culture at a small college. The other suggestion was to encourage arrest and prosecution of a repeat-offender drunken vandal.

The students are not treated as adults, in that they are not held accountable for the crimes that they commit when drunk, including vandalism and assault. On the other hand, they are not treated as children, in that the schools enforce no rules against drinking.

Sometimes I think that the main point of college is not to teach critical thinking. It is to teach that there is no such thing as individual responsibility or accountability. “Alcohol” is responsible for bad behavior. The person drinking the alcohol is not responsible. The administrator condoning the drinking is not responsible.

In a larger sense, students are taught mindless sociology, in which group identity is everything, and individual responsibility is nothing. Individual effort plays no role in affluence–it is all a matter of “privilege.” Individual shortcomings play no role in poverty–it is all a matter of oppression.

In fact, there is a lot of truth to sociological views of power and group status. However, to treat this as the only truth about human relationships is to go to far.

What is odd is that I do not know anyone who deep-down believes in the pure sociological story. That is, I do not know any parent who tells their children, “Everything is determined by your group identity. You are not responsible or accountable for anything you do in life.”

If the higher education industry were more entrepreneur-friendly, I would start a college for students who want a low-cost, high-quality education and not a party school. Right now, most colleges act as if this is not a large target market. My hypothesis is that such colleges are missing an opportunity.

The WaPo Frames a Story

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Robert McCartney writes,

Gov. Larry Hogan’s imminent choice about the Purple Line will play a large role in defining whether his first year in office steers his Maryland Republican Party toward the middle or gives Democrats a cudgel to beat him as an anti-spending ideologue.

…Hogan’s continuing doubts about the project’s cost and benefits show he still shares some anti-transit views that he and his conservative supporters have long championed.

So, if you are not on board with the view that the benefits of this project exceed the costs, then you are “anti-transit” and an “ideologue.”

In general, I find the WaPo’s front page to be more loaded with left-wing rhetorical framing than is its editorial page. And I find that its Metro section is more loaded with left-wing rhetorical framing than its front page.

One of my pet peeves is the metro section’s constant reference to the “excellent reputation” of Montgomery County schools. What the schools have is a reputation for having an excellent reputation, but (and I have pointed this out in emails to Wapo reporters) the test scores for Montgomery County schools are close to the median for all counties in the state, even though Montgomery County spends way more than the median on a per-student basis.

In fact, if you plot the percent of students that perform well on tests against percent of students not on free and reduced meals, Montgomery County schools fall right in line. Statewide, the percentage of non-FARMs students is what drives school outcomes, and spending per student makes no difference. The null hypothesis wins again.

The Null Hypothesis Holds at the Macro Level

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Ricardo Hausmann writes,

In 1960, countries with an education level of 8.3 years of schooling were 5.5 times richer than those with 2.8 year of schooling. By contrast, countries that had increased their education from 2.8 years of schooling in 1960 to 8.3 years of schooling in 2010 were only 167% richer. Moreover, much of this increase cannot possibly be attributed to education, as workers in 2010 had the advantage of technologies that were 50 years more advanced than those in 1960. Clearly, something other than education is needed to generate prosperity.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Note that this is not necessarily support for the null hypothesis. It could be that the “something other” is quality of education rather than quantity.

Adult-supervised Motivation

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Kentaro Toyama says,

I think one of the issues is we tend to think of education as being the content. We overemphasize the importance of content, as opposed to emphasizing the part that’s really difficult in any good education, which is adult-supervised motivation—the motivation of the child to learn something.

The interview, on the limits of technology as a solution for problems in underdeveloped areas, is wise throughout.

Interpreting Roland Fryer

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He is the latest winner of the John Bates Clark Medal. The announcement reads, in part

Roland Fryer in a series of highly-influential studies has examined the age profile and sources of the U.S. racial achievement gap as measured by standardized test scores for children from 8 months to seventeen years old. Fryer (with Steven Levitt) has shown the black-white test score gap is quite small in the first year of life, but black children fall behind quickly thereafter (“Testing for Racial Differences in Mental Ability among Young Children,” American Economic Review 2013). The racial test score gap is largely explained by racial differences in socioeconomic status at the start of schooling (“Understanding the Black-White Test Gap in the First Two Years of School,” Review of Economics and Statistics 2004), but observable family background and school variables cannot explain most of the growth of the racial test score gap after kindergarten. Fryer’s comprehensive chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics (2011, “Racial Inequality in the 21st Century: The Declining Significance of Discrimination”) documents that racial differences in social and economic outcomes today are greatly reduced when one accounts for educational achievement gaps. He concludes that understanding the obstacles facing minority children in K12 schools is essential to addressing racial inequality. Fryer has taken up this challenge to study the efficacy of education policies to improve the academic achievement and economic outcomes of low-income and minority children.

His research has a lot of bearing on the Null Hypothesis. Some of his papers contradict the Null Hypothesis, and some do not.

It certainly is intriguing that the racial test score gap is low in the first year of life and rapidly rises early in the school years but that “observable family background and school variables cannot explain most of the growth of the racial test score gap after kindergarten.” Some possibilities:

1. The Null Hypothesis is incorrect, but the school variables that make a difference are subtler than what we now find to be “observable.” Some of Fryer’s other studies might lend some support to this, but other of his studies would not.

2. The Null Hypothesis is correct because test scores performance is dominated by non-school environmental factors.

3. The Null Hypothesis is correct because test score performance is dominated by genetic factors. Then the problem is to explain why the gap appears at age seven (say) but not at age one. The lack of any gap at age one might be due to tests not being able to discriminate ability as well at that age as at later ages. This would give rise to a measurement error problem, one which biases differences toward zero.

Incidentally, someone pointed me to the blogger Isegoria’s link to a journal article entitled Individual Differences in Executive Functions Are Almost Entirely Genetic in Origin. The article comes from 2008, and the finding of 99 percent heritability strikes me as ridiculous. My guess is that if the same person is measured for executive function by two different investigators, the correlation will not be anywhere close to 99 percent. I hereby invoke Merle Kling’s third iron law.

‘Scott Alexander’ on the Growth Mindset

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He writes,

if you’re not familiar with it, growth mindset is the belief that people who believe ability doesn’t matter and only effort determines success are more resilient, skillful, hard-working, perseverant in the face of failure, and better-in-a-bunch-of-other-ways than people who emphasize the importance of ability. Therefore, we can make everyone better off by telling them ability doesn’t matter and only hard work does…

A rare point of agreement between hard biodeterminists and hard socialists is that telling kids that they’re failing because they just don’t have the right work ethic is a crappy thing to do. It’s usually false and it will make them feel terrible. Behavioral genetics studies show pretty clearly that at least 50% of success at academics and sports is genetic; various sociologists have put a lot of work into proving that your position in a biased society covers a pretty big portion of the remainder. If somebody who was born with the dice stacked against them works very hard, then they might find themselves at A2 above. To deny this in favor of a “everything is about how hard you work” is to offend the sensibilities of sensible people on the left and right alike.

Read the whole thing. I found it difficult to excerpt.

The view that I hold, which is not based on any studies and is just my opinion, is that effort matters a lot, but that the propensity to undertake effort is more genetic than environmental.

In a school setting, my sense is that you get good effort and results if you happen to have a cohort of students who compete to impress one another in terms of classroom accomplishments and who encourage one another to do their best. (Imagine having a Michael Jordan in the class, pushing everyone on his “team” to be better.) If there is a way for a teacher to influence that, to create such an atmosphere where otherwise it would not exist, I would like to know the secret. My guess is that setting up teams and having competitive games is a way to trick students for a day or two, but I don’t think it creates the overall mentality that I have in mind.

The Ideological Cesspool that is Academia

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1. Kimberly Strassel writes,

Apparently the only kind of thought not allowed is that which might “undermine,” according to UnKochMyCampus, “environmental protection, worker’s rights, health care expansion, and quality public education.” Stopping such research is the mission of this organization, which is spearheaded by Greenpeace, Forecast the Facts (a green outfit focused on climate change), and the American Federation of Teachers.

2. Read Tyler Cowen’s post on Elizabeth Anderson, a chaired professor of philosophy invited to give a prestigious lecture at Princeton.

I won’t summarize her views, but I will pull out one sentence to indicate her stance: “Here most of us are, toiling under the authority of communist dictators, and we don’t see the reality for what it is.” These communist dictators are, in her account, private business firms. That description may be deliberately hyperbolic, but nonetheless it reflects her attitude that capitalist companies exercise a kind of unaccountable, non-democratic power over the lives of their workers, in a manner which she thinks is deserving of moral outrage.

I cannot view this charitably. The way it looks to me, if you are on one side of the ideological divide, you are harassed and hounded. If you are on the other side, someone whose ideas are ignorant and ridiculous is considered an eminent scholar.

I am not saying that no one should listen to Elizabeth Anderson or that she should not have a forum in which to speak. Exposure to a broad range of viewpoints is a good thing. I just wish that there were a little boy who would stand up and say that the empress has not the slightest bit of clothing until she can explain the concepts of exit and voice, and explain the different ways in which they empower individuals.

But as far as I can tell, broad exposure to ideas is not what our leading colleges and universities are providing these days. Let me provide a perspective on this, and on “critical thinking.”

Critical thinking is not challenging views that are disliked. Anyone can find fault with those with whom you disagree. It is questioning the views of people with whom you agree that constitutes critical thinking. Above all, it means questioning your own views.

Many people are familiar with Rene Descartes’ phrase, “I think, therefore I am.” Few people know the context. Descartes’ is meditating about what he can know with certainty. He asks, what if all of my sensory perceptions are simply tricks played on me by an evil demon? Then maybe everything I believe that I know about the world around me could be wrong. But I cannot be wrong about my belief that I am thinking. At least one entity in the world certainly exists, namely, the person doing this thinking.

The ability to question large chunks of your own belief system is for me the essence of a well-trained mind. When we share things that other people say and write on the Internet, chances are they are things that we agree with. How often do you share things that raise reasonable doubts about your beliefs? If you do that as often as once a month, you are doing well.

If the future truly belongs to those who can think critically, then today’s college faculty may be left behind.