Category Archives: Economics of Education

Google certificates instead of college

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Inc Magazine writes,

The three new programs Google is offering, together with the median annual wage for each position (as quoted by Google), are:

Project manager ($93,000)
Data analyst ($66,000)
UX designer ($75,000)
Google claims the programs “equip participants with the essential skills they need to get a job,” with “no degree or prior experience required to take the courses.” Each course is designed and taught by Google employees who are working in the respective fields.

The courses take only 6 months and cost way, way, less than going to college. They are not a status symbol for parents (nobody is bragging that their kid got into Google), but still. . .

When to re-open schools? How about never?

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A commenter asked for my views on re-opening schools this fall.

If “re-open schools” means trying to go back to schooling as it existed before the virus with various rules added in an effort to reduce contagion, then I don’t think you can count me in the re-open camp.

With or without a virus, I want schooling to be reinvented. If it were up to me, I would try to use the virus crisis as an opportunity to be more aggressively experimental. Many of these experiments would enable education to take place with less risk of contagion, but that would not be the main purpose of the experiments.

I want children to learn to read. If the child is already a good reader, or if the parents are likely to teach the child to read, then school may be optional for a child aged 5 to 8. But otherwise, I think that failing to provide the child with school could be tragic.

For the child aged 5 to 8 whose parents are not as capable of teaching reading as the school, I want to see about 2-3 hours a day of school, focused on reading and arithmetic. The school could provide additional hours of day care, mostly in the form of music, art, and outdoor recess, to enable parents to work. Note Bryan Caplan’s rant about the day care issue.

If schools won’t provide daycare, why on Earth should taxpayers continue to pay over $10,000 per year per child? Every taxpayer in Fairfax County now has an ironclad reason to say, “I want my money back.”

The older the child, the less I want to see traditional schooling and the more I want to see a blend of online learning, project-based learning, computer gaming, and some ordinary classroom learning. I want to see much more physical exercise and much less sitting. The online learning would come from specialized companies, not from regular teachers.

Assuming that these ideas work for children near the center of the emotional and cognitive bell curve, you still have children who are far from that center. Those children will require programs suited to their particular traits.

Back to the present. Is it not odd that, because of the way they have lined up on Trump and the virus, that the Right is now pro-school and the Left is now anti-school? I find this amusing.

Also, my guess is that the surge in home schooling is particularly pronounced among progressive parents. I see interesting potential there.

An unflattering portrayal of social justice activists

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Tyler Cowen writes,

The actual problem is that we have a new bunch of “speech regulators” (not in the legal sense, not usually at least) who are especially humorless and obnoxious and I would say neurotic — in the personality psychology sense of that word. I say let’s complain about the real problem, namely the moral fiber, emotional temperaments, and factual worldviews of the individuals who have arrogated the new speech censorship functions to themselves.

I think that this is one of Tyler’s best posts of the year, and I have not excerpted my favorite part. The context is a letter to Harper’s signed by some prominent intellectuals, including many on the left, mildly rebuking cancel culture. I interpret Tyler as saying that the letter indicates how weak our side is relative to what one would hope. Imagine if the same group of signatories published a letter taking a stance with which you disagreed. Would you care? If not, then perhaps one should not be optimistic that this letter will turn the tide.

I wish we had a more scientific profile of social justice activists. My unscientific observations:

1. They tend to be young. Most of the people on my side of the free speech issue are also on my side of 50.

I’ve said before that I suspect that heavy usage of social media makes it more difficult to cope with beliefs you dislike. It makes controversy feel immediate and necessitating a response rather than remote and something one can allow to pass.

2. They tend to be not in the highest status brackets. How many leading scientists want to support #ShutDownSTEM?

If you’re successful in a prestige hierarchy, you don’t resort to dominance moves. Dominance behavior seems to me to be the essence of he social justice activist approach. It feels anti-liberal because it is.

3. They are not in the highest intellectual brackets. For a variety of reasons, institutions of higher education have had to accommodate students, professors, and especially administrators who are not top caliber in analytical ability. Part of the accommodation is to try to disguise the intellectual inferiority of those who are what George Will called lumpen intelligentsia.

They see liberal values and intellectual merit as elements of a dominance hierarchy, and they are wrong about that. They make their own dominance moves in the name of justice, and they are wrong about that, too.

Scientists against science

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Ten days ago, the head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science issued this:

AAAS acknowledges and supports #ShutDownSTEM, a grassroots movement that aims to “transition to a lifelong commitment of actions to eradicate anti-Black racism in academia and STEM.” We are committed to education, action, and healing at AAAS, and we hope to encourage other institutions and individuals to get involved. This is not a moment that our community can let pass. It is time to stop what we’re doing, take time to listen to our friends and colleagues, and commit ourselves to taking the actions needed to bring about real and lasting change.

I have been re-reading The Secret of Our Success, by Joseph Henrich. Here is one passage:

Sometime in the 1820s an epidemic hit this population of hunters and selectively killed off many of its oldest and most knowledgeable members. With the sudden disappearance of the know-how carried by these individuals, the group collectively lost its ability to make some its most crucial and complex tools. . .these technological losses had a dramatic impact, leaving the group unable to hunt caribou (no bows) or harvest the plentiful Arctic char from local streams (no leisters).

The point of this passage is that it is possible for a culture to lose valuable knowledge and revert to a more primitive state. It strikes me that our academic leaders are attempting to do exactly that.

All hail the null hypothesis

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From a couple of years ago, by Jon Baron of the Arnold Foundation (no relation).

Business: Of 13,000 RCTs conducted by Google and Microsoft to evaluate new products or strategies in recent years, 80 to 90 percent have reportedly found no significant effects.[iv]

Medicine: Reviews in different fields of medicine have found that 50 to 80 percent of positive results in initial clinical studies are overturned in subsequent, more definitive RCTs.[v] Thus, even in cases where initial studies—such as comparison-group designs or small RCTs—show promise, the findings usually do not hold up in more rigorous testing.

Education: Of the 90 educational interventions evaluated in RCTs commissioned by the Institute of Education Sciences and reporting findings between 2002 and 2013, close to 90 percent were found to produce weak or no positive effects.[vi]

Employment/training: In Department of Labor-commissioned RCTs that reported findings between 1992 and 2013, about 75 percent of tested interventions were found to have found weak or no positive effects.[vii]

Pointer from Michael Goldstein.

Whose course will scale?

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Tyler Cowen writes,

My fall semester teaching was assigned to be online even before Covid-19 came along. The enrollment for that class – Principles of Economics – will be much larger, with hundreds more students, but with some assistance, I expect to handle it.

Suppose that none of the top tier colleges can have on-campus learning in the fall. If a lot of students are taking courses on line, then they should be able to choose courses from colleges other than the one in which they are enrolled. As an online student, your best approach might be to take econ with Tyler, engineering from someone at Carnegie-Mellon, journalism from someone at Northwestern, etc.

The online course market could end up looking like the textbook market. The per-student cost should fall to about the cost of a textbook. The market structure will tend toward winners-take most. If Tyler is one of the winners, he could have a few hundred thousand students.

In the online environment, having a good traditional brand, like “Mankiw,” will not matter much. Your competitors have been focused on the online product and persistently iterating and improving it.

With on-location college, the school can foist on you an inexperienced teaching assistant who can barely speak comprehensible English and charge your parents a fortune for the privilege. I don’t think that model will be viable if colleges go on line.

[UPDATE: Read Scott Galloway’s take, which is somewhat different from mine, but is still based on the view that online education scales differently from in-person education.

In ten years, it’s feasible to think that MIT doesn’t welcome 1,000 freshmen to campus; it welcomes 10,000. What that means is the top-20 universities globally are going to become even stronger. What it also means is that universities Nos. 20 to 50 are fine. But Nos. 50 to 1,000 go out of business or become a shadow of themselves.

}

The Heckman interview

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I assume you have seen the interview of James Heckman by Gonzalo Schwarz. You can tell that Heckman is not a fan of Piketty and Saez.

In truth, the evidence based on the IRS data is deeply flawed and has been incorrectly analyzed. Take “The Opportunity Atlas” promoted by the New York Times. It claims that “zip code is destiny.” Careful statistical analysis of the data shows otherwise. The same can be said of the academics who write about the growth of the Top 1%.

Heckman is known for his studies of education. A lot of support for the Null Hypothesis, with the exception of pre-school for impoverished children. But this may be his bottom line:

The main barriers to developing effective policies for income and social mobility is fear of honest engagement in the changes in the American family and the consequences it has wrought. . .Dysfunctional families produce dysfunctional children. Schools can only partially compensate for the damage done to the children by dysfunctional families.

John Ellis talks his book

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John Ellis writes,

We have here a classic vicious circle: the minority high school deficit leads to preferences in college admissions, preferences lead to political radicalism on campus, campus radicalism leads to a deterioration in the education of high school teachers, more poorly educated high school teachers increase the minority deficit, and that leads to even greater demands for preferences. Though the intent of college admissions preferences is to provide upward mobility for minorities, what they really do is reduce the quality of a college education by promoting a force that cripples it.

Note that this goes against the Null Hypothesis. In this case, the null hypothesis offers hope: if it is true, then education isn’t really causing this much harm.

His book is called The Breakdown of Higher Education.

Yuval Levin and TLP watch

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Yuval Levin writes,

The left wants to be sure we do not take injustices in our society for granted—that we see the ways in which the strong oppress the weak, that we take them seriously, that we never walk by them and pretend they don’t exist. . .

The right, on the other hand, wants to be sure we do not take social order for granted—that we see the ways in which our civilization protects us, enriches us, and elevates us, that we never imagine that this is all easy or natural, and never forget that, if we fail to sustain this achievement, we will all suffer for it.

He does explicitly cite The Three Languages of Politics.

The topic of the essay is education policy, and I recommend the entire essay–it is probably the best essay I have read this year. I could have selected many passages to quote.

My inadequate attempt at a summary:

1. For the past 30 years, conservatives have focused on ways to strenthen incentives for K-12 schools to improve test scores.

2. Meanwhile, the left has taken over the culture of education. Conservatives need to fight to reverse this trend.

I think that these are valid points. But the song that runs through my head comes from Carole King. “It’s too late baby, now it’s too late.”

The left takes the social justice mission of education as given. The cultural values that Levin views as important are treated as relics of a racist patriarchy that must be purged from schools.

I would say that conservatives face an uphill battle, with an emphasis on the word battle. Even the ordinarily mild-mannered and moderate Levin concludes,

this adds up to a controversial understanding of the purpose of primary and secondary education, and one that will tend to fan the flames of our culture wars. Whether we like it or not, the next phase of conservative education-policy thinking will need to be willing to do that

Sizing up the current scene

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Start with a bunch of excerpts.

1. Spencer Klavan writes,

The rise of woke politics, and the urgent need to defeat it, has made strange bedfellows of all of us in the new conservative coalition.

2. James Hankins writes,

A strategy of seeking total victory over cultural Marxism, in any case, gives it too much credit. It overlooks how intellectually feeble it already is. Cultural Marxism is able to flourish today precisely because of hyperpartisanship. It appears strong only because it is a weapon clasped in the fist of ideological tyranny. In a more pluralist culture, it would have to defend itself against critics who do not share its premises, and it would soon find itself at a serious disadvantage. Cultural Marxists are good at policing their own ranks for unorthodoxy and exposing the hidden power-relations that sustain (as they wrongly think) all non-Marxist structures of thought. They are not good at finding common premises with non-Marxists, and therefore at constructing arguments with universal validity. But in politics, constructing arguments with universal validity is what we call seeking the common good.

3. William A. Galston writes,

it isn’t hard to understand why only 15% of those under 30 think the U.S. is the greatest nation on earth, why nearly half believe hard work is no guarantor of success, or why so many of them support a single national health-care program—and Bernie Sanders for president.

4. Reacting to the recent European National Conservatism Conference, Titus Techera writes,

From this political point of view, intellectuals are supposed to fulfill a negative, defensive role: To protect reasonable politics from the attacks of elite institutions, especially in Brussels, but it’s not obvious whether intellectuals who want to discredit the EU as such and transform Europe could retain the necessary enthusiasm and urgency playing for what might seem like low stakes. They certainly don’t seem to have a future in government, where, Orbán stressed, the economy comes first.

(Jim Hoft gives a more complete, matter-of-fact report on the conference.)

My comments on these:

1. I agree with Klavan that those of us who oppose the religious/cult version of contemporary leftism should focus on that issue. For now, we ought to sweep under the rug our differences about free-market economics, Donald Trump, and the social issues that Klavan discusses.

2. Although Hankins’ essay overall is the best of the bunch, the quoted excerpt is the one with which I am least in agreement. The religious/cult version of contemporary leftism may look feeble intellectually, but its political power on college campuses is formidable. The administrative apparatus set up to enforce it is going to be around for a long time. Not so the professors who would stand for reason rather than religion, most of whom will retire over the next 15 years. I think that intellectual detente is possible between those of us on the right and those who are on the non-religious left. But we do have to inflict a long-lasting defeat on the religion/cult.

3. Galston is an interesting figure to watch. Earlier this year, he fretted over Sanders’ potential to drive away voters in November. I see this more recent column as the mirror image of a conservative writing “Donald Trump would not be my choice, but I understand where his supporters are coming from.” In any case, his analysis of polling data showing Sanders’ strong support among young people is quite sobering. Can we speculate on how a Sanders victory in November might affect the religious cult? It would give the cult a more sympathetic figure in the White House, and that seems dangerous. But it might dissipate some of the cult’s energy. In particular, in the absence of the Trump bogeyman, the non-religious left might be tempted to assert itself.

4. Techera speculates on the proper role for conservative intellectuals. He suggests that it is “negative, defensive,” and this may not be very motivating. Progressive ideology offers the intellectual a higher-status part to play, that of helping rulers enact and implement activist policies. And the religious cult offers intellectuals a role that is even higher status yet, that of stamping out heresy and punishing sinners.

I would suggest that conservative intellectuals worry a bit less about politics and a bit more about the hold of the religious cult on campus. To me, the situation at the major institutions of higher education looks hopeless. We need some alternative prestige hierarchy in which reason is given a higher value than religion.