Category Archives: Economics of Education

Old Predictions

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A commenter reminded me of Red Sox Technologies, an essay that I wrote nine years ago about technologies that always seem promising but fail to deliver (at the time, the Red Sox were still without a World Series win). It is interesting to look at what I wrote as predictions and to evaluate them. In effect, I was predicting failure for micropayments, e-books, speech recognition, video conferencing, social networking software, and online education.

Micropayments, as they were envisioned back then, are still a non-factor.

e-books are ubiquitous, but my guess is that within a decade they will be in a phase of rapid decline. The book format just does not seem right to me for the digital world.

Speech recognition is still a disappointment, I think. Siri is looking like another iteration of “not quite there yet, but shows the potential….”

Video conferencing is still remarkably unused. In my essay, I was snarky about business meetings in general. I became very bullish on videoconferencing when I saw how it worked on Google+. But it still seems to be way under-used relative to in-person meetings. The best explanation I have heard is that there is some important signaling value in in-person meetings that overwhelms the efficiency gains from video conferencing.

Social networking software really took off. I was way off base on that one.

Online education is picking up, but the hype is still ahead of the reality. I still think that teaching=feedback, and too many educational technologies fail to put feedback front and center. I think at this point a lot of the interest in online education is driven by the fact that in regular education costs are going way up and quality is, if anything, going down.

College Sports

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Jordan Weissmann writes,

there are hundreds of colleges in this country where, in the face of ever shrinking state funding, administrators are choosing to spend millions on sports programs with only the faintest hope that they’ll one day see a return on their investment other than the dubious intangible benefits of having a few second-rate sports squads around to keep up school spirit. Moreover, they’re spending more on those programs every year. Even if athletics only make up a relatively small fraction of their overall budgets, this seems like a place where more of higher ed needs to think about cutting.

Why do alumni support donate money for sports teams?

I understand that sports loyalty can be an accidental phenomenon. The fact that I grew up in the St. Louis area made me a fan of the Cardinals baseball team. There are millions of Cardinal fans out there. I bet that you cannot find one who has donated money to the team.

There are many features of popular entertainment in America leave me personally unmoved. But probably the strangest one of all is college sports, particularly Division I football and basketball. Why they are so much more salient to people than minor league baseball is something that is very hard for me to understand.

College Admissions Officers

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Conor Friedersdorf writes,

To imagine that today’s college-admissions officers can step outside the failings of humanity, making subjective judgment calls in secret with racial enlightenment that is unprecedented in human history, is folly. It may have seemed possible and even done more good than harm when America was mostly grappling with black and white. Now that we’re asking people to calibrate the “diversity value” of American blacks, Africans, Hispanics, Thais, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Native Americans, and many more besides? The prudent course is acknowledging the limits of our wisdom. Alas, intellectual humility and restraint are not among the Ivy League’s virtues.

I strongly recommend taking judgment out of the college admissions process altogether. Humans over-emphasize their skill. Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow, describes a formative experience in which he and others thought that their judgments in placement decisions for the Israeli army were sounder than they actually were.

College Admissions, Merit, and Ethnicity

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The (long) article is by Ron Unz. One somewhat tangential excerpt:

Ultimately, he stamped her with a “Reject,” but later admitted to Steinberg that she might have been admitted if he had been aware of the enormous time and effort she had spent campaigning against the death penalty, a political cause near and dear to his own heart. Somehow I suspect that a student who boasted of leadership in pro-death penalty activism among his extracurriculars might have fared rather worse in this process.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who seems to have misgivings about recommending the article. I would actually nominate for the citations that David Brooks hands out every year for most important magazine essays.

Unz proposes a two-part admissions process for prestige institutions. One part would select the very best students, based on demonstrated academic ability. The other part would select a random sample of other qualified students.

I think he is on the right track. In fact, forgetting the first part and just taking a random sample of students who meet some qualification criteria would be an outstanding reform. However, you would also have to make scholarship offers unbiased. My proposal would be to have them be totally need-based. These policies would take politics, ethnicity, and other factors out of the equation. It would make sports teams genuinely amateur.

When I was an undergraduate, I assisted a Swarthmore economics professor with a study of the admissions process. We found that the student’s interview received a high weight and that scores on the interview went down as SAT scores rose above the high 600s. I speculated that admissions officers were not themselves super-smart and did not like super-smart applicants. (I was admitted because I talked about wrestling with the alumnus who interviewed me, having seen his son lose a match for the high school state championship. The day I arrived on campus, the Dean of Admissions said that the wrestling coach was looking forward to having me on the team. I never was any good in high school, and I never met that wrestling coach, but the interview did the trick.)

Back to the Unz article, it raises questions about the process by which America selects its elite. I share Unz’s concern that this process has been deteriorating. Moreover, think about what happens when people achieve elite status without merit. They become really attached to the existing system, because they are threatened by true meritocracy. I think that one of the signs of that is when questioning orthodoxy itself becomes a disqualifying factor. As I see it, the American academy has crossed that threshold.

MOOCs and Other Innovations in Education

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In September, I published an opinionated survey of education and technology. Among other things, I said that I thought that the hype around MOOCs (massive online open courses) was overdone.

Since writing that essay, one argument in favor of MOOCs has occurred to me. If you think about it, under the conventional model, most students hate many of the classes that they take. As Bryan Caplan pointed out a year ago, the fact that students are typically happy when class is canceled should give one pause. In the standard model, a sizable fraction of the students are only in the course as part of the process of getting a required certification.

With MOOCs, the student body is an all-volunteer army, as opposed to draftees. That might produce better class discussions, assuming that the technological hurdles to having class discussion over the Internet can be addressed.