Category Archives: Economics of Education

An Elite Higher-ed Peculiarity

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Steven Pinker writes,

The common denominator (belying any hope that an elite university education helps students develop a self) is that they [students] are not treated as competent grown-ups, starting with the first law of adulthood: first attend to your priorities, then you get to play.

Later,

Is this any way to run a meritocracy? Ivy admissions policies force teenagers and their mothers into a potlatch of conspicuous leisure and virtue. The winners go to an exorbitant summer camp, most of them indifferent to the outstanding facilities of scholarship and research that are bundled with it. They can afford this insouciance because the piece of paper they leave with serves as a quarter-million-dollar IQ and Marshmallow test. The self-fulfilling aura of prestige ensures that companies will overlook better qualified graduates of store-brand schools. And the size of the jackpot means that it’s rational for families to play this irrational game.

Pinker’s main suggestion is to de-emphasize factors other than aptitude test scores in admissions. However, I do not think that the worst problem with elite schools is the oddity of their admissions process. I think it gets back to not treating students as grown-ups. Part of that is rewarding students for reciting politically correct catechisms rather than for thinking.

What I’m Reading

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Building a Better Teacher, by Elizabeth Green. p. 281:

infrastructure had three elements: a common curriculum suggesting what students should study; common examinations to test how much of that curriculum they learned; and finally, teacher education to help teachers learn to teach exactly what students are supposed to learn.

She argues that

1. Good teachers make a difference.
2. Teaching itself is a skill that can be taught.

I remain skeptical on both points. On (1), why do researchers like Heckman consistently find support for what I call the null hypothesis, which is that no educational interventions make a large, reliable, long-term difference?

On (2), suppose that there are 50 habits that a great teacher has, and each of these habits can only be learned with intensive practice and immediate feedback. Suppose that it takes two months to learn each habit. If a natural teacher starts with 40 of these habits, it will be a lot less costly to train that teacher than to train a teacher that starts out with just 5 of these habits.

As the author pointed out in a live talk at a local bookstore, there are inevitable tensions in the teaching process. When some students get a concept and others do not, when do you move on?

Also, students respond to a teacher’s authenticity and love. How much rote technique can a teacher use before you lose that?

Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, smothers its teachers in the common curriculum and common examinations components of infrastructure. The result is that teachers feel stifled by the requirement to be on lesson x on day y. I would add that whenever I have looked at the data, Montgomery County test scores are mediocre. The county spends much more per pupil than other counties in the state, but its test scores are in the middle of the pack. One consequence of the infrastructure is that the student-teacher ratio is high even though the student-staff ratio is low. Actual classroom teachers work very long days and have very little time to receive and reflect on feedback.

I would note that higher education in America has even less of the infrastructure components than does K-12 education, yet higher education is said by some to work well here.

The strength of the book is that it gives us a picture of what better teaching looks like. The author’s descriptions of quality lessons and of schools that develop and guide their teachers are inspiring. If she is correct, and what works idiosyncratically can be made to work systematically, then reading the book would motivate educational leaders to try.

This Looks Interesting

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Andrew Moseman and Carl Davis write,

Frankly, learning to play a song the Rocksmith way is exhilarating. If I (Carl) had looked up the chords online, I could have played the song just as easily. But I might have stopped to scroll down on the computer screen or to relearn the first half of the song until I got it down pat. After a few progressively more difficult play-throughs on Rocksmith, I’d memorized the song without even thinking too hard about it.

First of all, I always wish I had been a teenager at a time when you could learn guitar from YouTube, or from something like this.

Second, isn’t this the way a lot of learning could be? Teaching equals feedback, and what this product attempts to do is greatly accelerate the feedback process. My guess is that the biggest advances in education will come from something like this rather than from a MOOC.

Of Interest to Libertarians

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1. From George Leef.

Since 2003, the [North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners] has been issuing cease and desist orders to beauty shops or any other business that offered teeth whitening services. The legal basis for such orders is that the “practice of dentistry” is restricted to licensed dentists and the Board decided that teeth whitening falls within that practice. Unless you’re a licensed dentist, you must stop.

2. From Graeme Wood.

Minerva is built to make money, but Nelson insists that its motives will align with student interests. As evidence, Nelson points to the fact that the school will eschew all federal funding, to which he attributes much of the runaway cost of universities. The compliance cost of taking federal financial aid is about $1,000 per student—a tenth of Minerva’s tuition—and the aid wouldn’t be of any use to the majority of Minerva’s students, who will likely come from overseas.

Health Care and Education in the U.S.

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In a post on his new blog, Neerav Kingsland writes,

Ultimately, charter school districts are simply single payer education systems.

The theme of the post is that using charter schools still leaves education less privatized than health care under Obamacare. So why is the left disturbed by charter schools? Some comments:

1. As Kingsland hints, one may ask conversely, why is the right so disturbed by Obamacare? In fact, many on the left have complained about this.

2. Many on the left are not happy with Obamacare. They prefer something like Britain’s NHS.

3. Starting points matter. We started from a health care system that was less centrally managed than Obamacare, so Obamacare represents a move to the left. We started from an education system that was more government-run than charter schools, so charter schools represent a move to the right.

4. There are many on the right who doubt the efficacy of charter schools for precisely the reason that Kingsland says that the left should like them. That is, they can be thought of as government outsourcing education, but still controlling it.

A Sentence to Ponder

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From Reid Hoffmann, during a podcast with Russ Roberts.

The whole notion of separating the academy from the work life is insane.

That is a radical statement. It is even more radical than the view that I associate with the Montessori movement that separating students by age is insane.

The radical view goes something like this: in ordinary life, people learn naturally. The academy is an artificial environment, which tries to stimulate learning in an alternate reality, a sim if you will.

If so, what does that make educational software? A sim of a sim?

I think that there are some deep issues here.

Elite College Data Point

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William Deresiewicz writes,

In 1985, 46 percent of incoming freshmen at the 250 most selective colleges came from the top quarter of the income distribution. By 2000, it was 55 percent. As of 2006, only about 15 percent of students at the most competitive schools came from the bottom half. The more prestigious the school, the more unequal its student body is apt to be. And public institutions are not much better than private ones. As of 2004, 40 percent of first-year students at the most selective state campuses came from families with incomes of more than $100,000, up from 32 percent just five years earlier.

He goes on,

The major reason for the trend is clear. Not increasing tuition, though that is a factor, but the ever-growing cost of manufacturing children who are fit to compete in the college admissions game. The more hurdles there are, the more expensive it is to catapult your kid across them. Wealthy families start buying their children’s way into elite colleges almost from the moment they are born: music lessons, sports equipment, foreign travel (“enrichment” programs, to use the all-too-perfect term)—most important, of course, private-school tuition or the costs of living in a place with top-tier public schools.

He himself strikes me as a cloistered academic, with the typical prejudices of a professor. I do not endorse the article, apart from the quoted paragraphs.

Paul Ryan on Education Policy

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Federal education spending tends to be concentrated on programs, such as Head Start, that are political sacred cows but notoriously ineffective. Ryan would replace these with block grants, presumably hoping that at least some states will spend the money more wisely. For higher education, Expanding Opportunity, Ryan writes,

The federal government offers 14 tax benefits for higher education; they cost over $36 billion in forgone revenue in fiscal year 2014. By their very nature, most of these tax benefits are ineffective for low-income families. Families must pay tuition before they file their tax returns, so these credits and deductions don’t help cash-strapped students. And research finds that some of these benefits have little effect on enrollment—most recipients would have enrolled without them. Even more disconcerting is that states take advantage of these benefits by spending less on higher education or student aid.68 So not only is the federal government shortchanging other priorities, but these tax benefits are making college more expensive for everyone.

But you can be sure that any attempt to change these programs will run into a hornet’s nest of demagoguery.

Turning to accreditation, he writes,

Building on the reforms offered by Senator Mike Lee of Utah, new accreditors would submit to the Department certification standards as well as reporting requirements, credit transfer plans, and outcome-based
standards. They would also be empowered to accredit specific, high-quality courses rather than just schools or programs. As a result, students would be able to build an online program of their own, the sum of which could add up to a fully accredited degree. David Bergeron and Steven Klinsky describe such a system in which “students who complete the preapproved, tuition-free MOOC and also pass the confirmatory [new accreditor’s] assessment would earn accredited course hours from [the accreditor] itself. Enough such courses in the right scope and sequence (say physics from MITx, poetry from Harvard, theology from Notre Dame and so on) could lead to a fully accredited . . .degree.”

Boomerang Kids

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Adam Davidson writes,

Nearly 45 percent of 25-year-olds, for instance, have outstanding loans, with an average debt above $20,000…And more than half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, meaning they make substandard wages in jobs that don’t require a college degree.

…In 1968, for instance, a vast majority of 20-somethings were living independent lives; more than half were married. But over the past 30 years, the onset of sustainable economic independence has been steadily receding. By 2007, before the recession even began, fewer than one in four young adults were married, and 34 percent relied on their parents for rent.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Some comments:

1. Segments of our society are falling apart. The left’s treatments are exacerbating the problem. That is why I think that changing our system of means-tested benefits ought to be a high priority.

2. I chide my daughters for not working for a profit. But they are all out of the house. I am not a total failure.

3. Government-subsidized college loans contribute more to the problem than to the solution.

Student Loans and Risk

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Atif Mian and Amir Sufi write,

We believe they should recognize that the central problem with student loans is that they force graduates to bear a disproportionate amount of risk for circumstances completely outside their control.

The right way to think about student loans is that they are a gift from taxpayers to the higher education industry, both non-profit and for-profit. Most of the benefit goes to those who work in that industry, not to students. Most of the risk is borne by students and taxpayers, not by those who work in the industry.

The main risk for students is not, as Mian and Sufi imply, macroeconomic risk. Instead, the biggest risk is not graduating. Another risk is not getting a useful education.

The obvious reform is for the higher education industry to have more skin in the game. For example, the institution could be responsible for paying the first ten percent of any losses on a loan undertaken to attend that institution.

Actually, I do not believe that the public interest is served at all by government student loan programs. If the government got out of the business, then it would be up to the market to supply loans to students. Lenders (either the schools themselves or third parties) would have to try to identify students who are likely to profit from attending college, and there would be much more pressure on colleges to pay attention to graduation and to value added.

Some further points:

1. Keep in mind that if government student loan programs went away, tuition probably would fall.

2. Colleges retain the ability to engage in price discrimination, offering lower tuition to students who otherwise would not attend.