Category Archives: Economics of Education

Online Self-Education: The Bigger, Closer Library

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When I was in college, I sometimes went to the library just to browse and learn. I might pick a book or journal off the shelf, read something, see a reference to something else, go read that, and so on.

From that sort of self-education perspective, the Internet is like that college library, only bigger and closer. I don’t have to go to the library–I just turn on my laptop or tablet. The contents are not confined by shelf space or budget. As an aside, there is multimedia (YouTube). Also, much more frequent updating.

One downside of the bigger, closer library is that it has many distractions. In college, the only competition for my attention was the sports section of the newspaper and the occasional girl I wanted to chat up. To play a game or get entertainment I had to go somewhere else. Now, the distractions are right in the library.

The bigger, closer library has to be an enormous boon to what Tyler Cowen calls infovores, particularly those for whom a traditional library was out of reach.

The question I have is how school as we know it relates to the bigger, closer library. Possibilities:

1. They are complements. You use the bigger, closer library more efficiently because of what takes place in school.

2. They are substitutes. Time you spend in school courses is wasted–you would be better off spending time in the bigger, closer library. But when you are distracted in the bigger, closer library, you would have been better off in school.

3. Schooling is not about learning. It is about socialization. Schools are in the process of shifting their focus to socialization, with the responsibility for learning shifting to the student and to the bigger, closer library.

On point (1), think of learning as requiring motivation, feedback, and content. The library has the content, but you have to be motivated to use it and you need feedback to know whether you are using it well. Perhaps right now the classroom provides better motivation and feedback.

However, I expect within a few years to see feedback systems on phones and tablets that are at least competitive with the feedback process that occurs in a classroom. At that point, the only contribution that classroom time can make is to help with motivation–teachers motivating students and students motivating one another.

Null Hypothesis Watch

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Melissa A. Clark and others report,

In 2010, Teach For America (TFA) launched a major expansion effort, funded in part by a five-year Investing in Innovation (i3) scale-up grant of $50 million from the U.S. Department of Education. This study examines the effectiveness of TFA elementary school teachers in the second year of the scaleup, relative to other teachers in the same grades and schools. The study found that, on average, TFA corps members hired in the first two years of the scale-up period were as effective as other teachers in the same high-poverty schools in both reading and math. Although TFA teachers in lower elementary grades (prekindergarten through grade 2) had a positive, statistically significant effect on students’ reading achievement relative to other teachers in the same schools, this was not true for TFA teachers in upper elementary grades (3 through 5) in reading, or for any grade level in math.

Pointer from Jason Richwine, who notes

On the bright side, TFA teachers appear to be at least as effective as regular teachers when it comes to teaching reading and math to elementary students. The fact that TFA requires only a five-week crash course in pedagogy — rather than traditional teacher certification — is another reason to question the value of an education degree.

Of course, this is consistent with the Null Hypothesis, as applied to teacher education. Actually, if you believe the Null Hypothesis only applies to teacher education, then you would expect the TFA teachers, who presumably have higher native ability, to perform better than typical teachers. However, then you run into the Null Hypothesis for education in general.

How Students Really Consume Online Education

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Sam Gerstenzang wrote,

What works about on demand knowledge is that it is pull based (the knowledge you need, when you need it) and comes in digestible chunks. Unlike MOOCs, which are consumed far in advance of the knowledge being applied, Wikipedia and StackOverflow are the knowledge you need, now. Humans are lazy and working ahead requires discipline and foresight, which makes on demand knowledge far more appealing to most.

You may need to read the whole post. I thank Ben Casnocha for the pointer.

It has struck me that the the traditional notion of a course and the medium of online learning may be misaligned. Try to imagine what would happen if you got rid of courses. What would you do instead in order to provide students with direction in their learning?

David Brooks on Redistribution vs. Education

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He writes,

No redistributionist measure will have the same long-term effect as good early-childhood education and better community colleges, or increasing the share of men capable of joining the labor force.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

A cynical believer in the Null Hypothesis would argue that putting money into education is an exercise in redistribution. It will redistribute income toward teachers’ unions members, college professors, and administrators.

Also, what is the probability that Brooks is simply trolling Bryan Caplan?

Lifted from the Comments

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1. On medical innovation.

The third party payment system seriously distorts the incentives. I worked as both a consultant and then an investment banker in the healthcare sector for 12 years, and this element of the business drove me bonkers. In my experience, the companies that succeeded are the ones who successfully gamed Medicare, Medicaid and other third party payors. True innovation had little to do with their success. The exception were those sectors of the healthcare that were dominated by private payors (e.g., cosmetic surgery, dentistry, etc.).

There are four major stakeholders: patients, providers (clinicians), facilities (hospitals), and payers. They have different objectives, criteria, and decision processes. Getting material innovations imbedded requires concurrence from at least a couple and often three or four of the stakeholders. Coming up with innovations that (1) work, (2) have evidence of the type that the different stakeholders respond to, (3) have an economic model that keeps all stakeholders at least whole if not better off is really hard.

Complicating factors include:
* Key parts are highly local & fragmented (providers and facilities)
* Heavy regulatory overhang (FDA is one of many constraints)
* Low margins in some sectors means higher barriers to change (don’t rock the boat, esp given the high % of stable-ish gov’t payers)
* Little data to measure & compare real functional outcomes (vs. process outcomes like infection or readmission)
* The science is hard. Cancer is a hundred little diseases depending on what processes break, even within a disease site (e.g., breast). ‘Curing’ one doesn’t touch the other 99. (And it’s hard to prove that you ‘cured’ that one)

In a fully open market environment, we might make progress on some of these issues. In the current one? It’ll be slow.

2. On how to study

I think I’ve mentioned this book here before, but a few years ago, I stumbled across ‘How to Study and Teaching How to Study’ by F.M. McMurry (1909). I certainly wish I’d been taught or found this book when I was student. To me, his 8 factors of studying are very useful in having a formula to punch through material that doesn’t come easy…One thing is for sure, McMurry’s opening paragraphs on the various study techniques of his fellow students when he was a boy could have been written yesterday about high school or even college students today.

On the topic of motivation, McMurry says that people will study intensively when they really need to learn something. His example is an Eskimo who needs to learn how to build an igloo in order to have shelter.

Differences in College Completion Rates

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Timothy Taylor writes,

It turns out that if are someone from a family in the top-quarter of the income distribution who enters college, you are extremely likely to complete a bachelor’s degree by age 24; if you are in the bottom of the income distribution, you only have about a 22% chance of having a bachelor’s degree by age 24.

Read the whole thing. As he does so well, Taylor manages to locate an interesting report and extract fascinating material from it.

In terms of the Demographic Divide (one of the Four Forces), I think that the high-income college entrants are likely to have several advantages. First, they are more likely to have inherited high IQ and high conscientiousness. Second, their parents are more likely to have had their children after they were married and to have remained married after they had children. Third, the parents are likely to have better skills for identifying and dealing with their children’s needs. Finally, the parents have more financial resources to support the child. The report seems to emphasize only the last of these.

How to Become a Better Student

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As a teacher, I believe in triage. At the top, there are students who pick up the material with minimal effort. At the bottom, there are no-hopers who cannot seem to learn. In the middle are students where you think that some effort can make a difference.

In college, taking statistics or economics, I was one of the students who picked it up with minimal effort. On the other hand, as a folk dancer, I am a middle student. I am better than the no-hopers who never go beyond beginners’ sessions. But I am not as good as the dancers who can pick up a new dance right away.

Based on my experience with folk dancing, here is my advice to middle students.

1. YouTube is your friend! I encounter many dances that I wish I knew. Before YouTube, I had to muddle through and make mistakes, or give up altogether. Now I have been able to add some of these dances to my repertoire. Similarly, for statistics and economics, just about any concept you would want to learn has a YouTube video.

2. Give yourself more practice than you get from the teacher. Sometimes, a dance session leader will teach a dance for a couple of weeks, then forget about it for a couple months, then put it on again and expect students to remember it. This will leave me totally frustrated if I have been passive. But I can do something about it by practicing the dance on my own, in order to make up for the inadequate practice at the session. As a teacher, after I finish a unit, I often stop giving practice questions on that topic. When I do this, if students want to remember the concepts, they will have to practice on their own.

3. Identify your weak spots and work on them. You can keep doing a dance wrong week after week. Instead, make a mental note of the parts that give you trouble, then later go to YouTube until you have them ironed out. Similarly, if you got a problem wrong, come back to it and do it correctly several times.

4. When you watch someone doing something, articulate what they are doing. If you trying to learn a dance by following, try to say to yourself the steps that the person is doing. Saying “right, left, cha-cha-cha” helps you learn more thoroughly than if you simply follow along. Similarly, if a teacher is doing an exercise in statistics or economics, try to articulate the steps that the teacher is doing. (“Deciding whether this is a shift in demand or a shift in supply” or “using the binomial distribution” or somesuch.)

5. Make the subject seem really important to you. Think of someone you have had a crush on, and pretend that the way to get them to notice you is to become good at the subject.

Null Hypothesis Watch

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“Scott Alexander” writes,

When they caught up with these kids at age 25, the intervention group was found to have an odds ratio of around 0.6 to 0.7 of having developed various psychiatric disorders the study was testing for, including antisocial personality disorder, ADHD, depression, or anxiety. They had odds ratios around 0.7 of developing drug and alcohol abuse problems by various measures. They reported less risky sexual behavior, less domestic abuse, and fewer violent crimes. All of this was significant at the p < 0.05 level, and some of it was significant at much higher levels like p = 0.001 or below. Subgroup analysis found the data were very similar when you restricted the analysis to various subgroups like boys, girls, whites, blacks, highest-risk, lowest-risk, and by study site (it was a multi-site study)

This was a randomized, controlled study of a group of many interventions. “Scott” goes on to point out a number of caveats. The group of interventions was expensive. A lot of other indicators, including employment rates, did not improve. We do not know whether the results came from one or two of the interventions, or from the combination of all of them.

Still, it looks as though something managed to defeat the null hypothesis. As a controlled trial, it gets over the hurdle of confusing correlation with causality. As a study of long-term outcomes, it gets over the hurdle of fade-out. The results are numerically significant, not just statistically significant. The only remaining hurdle is replicability. My guess is, given the complexity of all those interventions, that the replicability hurdle will be a challenge.

Roland Fryer, School Reformer

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Timothy Taylor writes,

These methods involved a lot of change at the schools involved, including changing a number of principals and teachers. But the same student body that had been dramatically underperforming was no longer doing so. Fryer draws the hard lesson explicitly. We know many of the changes that can be made to improve low-performing schools dramatically within a few years. The financial costs of these changes are manageable. But the school systems that need to be changed, and many of the people currently working in those systems, are not ready to make the needed changes.

I remain skeptical. I continue to believe in the ultimate triumph of the null hypothesis. But Fryer is a careful, credible researcher.

Education Voucher Implementation Issues

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Neerav Kingsland has thoughts here. For example,

Enrollment targets would be required to be uniform across grades; i.e., you couldn’t offer hundred kindergarten slots but only fifty fourth grades slots. This would prevent schools from using selective attrition to weed out tough to serve kids. Moreover, it would force each school to equally share the burden of midyear enrollees.

I thought about some of these issues fifteen years ago. For example,

Determining the size of supplements for learning disabilities would be a challenge. As best as I can figure it, some government bureaucracy would have to identify the most desirable level of supplementary funding for a given disability. For example, the government might decide that a certain disability requires 40 hours a year of tutoring, at $25 an hour, or $1000 in additional spending. Then parents of children with that disability would receive an additional $1000 in voucher money.

In general, I think that it is better to use pricing mechanisms rather than rules to address fairness issues.