The Center for College Affordability and Productivity

Reminder: We've Moved

2011-03-24T15:12:00.002-04:00

This site has moved to http://blog.centerforcollegeaffordability.org.

Reminder: CCAP Blog Has Moved

2011-03-18T12:34:00.001-04:00

Our new and revamped site is now live: http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/ (alternatively, if you want a much shorter url, use http://theccap.org/. We have migrated our blog, which you can access at http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/blog, over to our new site; we will cease posting our blogs on out blogger account. Please update your bookmarks as necessary.

If you use our RSS feed, please note that you must now use our Feedburner Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/theCCAP.

Thank you so much for your patience and we look forward to continuing to engage in discussions related to higher education policy.

The CCAP Blog Has Moved

2011-03-03T13:43:00.004-05:00

Links for 3/3/11

2011-03-03T08:00:00.001-05:00

Andrew Ferguson

Like most parents with kids about to apply to college, I’d heard how the process had descended into Absurdistan. But it wasn’t until I saw the feral squint of parental ambition in the faces of these well-to-do moms and dads that I realized how weirdly competitive and confused the whole thing had become…

the Principle of Constant Contradiction, a law of nature as ironclad as anything Newton came up with: for every piece of college admissions advice you receive, you will soon receive an equally plausible piece of advice that directly contradicts it…

Higher education is a highly competitive industry run by people who 1) won’t admit it’s an industry and 2) won’t admit they’re in competition with one another…

There’s no consensus about what American higher education is for. Some of us cling like Matthew Arnold or Cardinal Newman to the idea of the university as a place to nurture the young into the glories of civilization -- to furnish their minds with the best that’s been thought and said, as a preparation for a spiritually fulfilling life. Others of us in buck-hustling America see a college education in purely utilitarian terms, as a way to train for a high-paying job. Still others see it as a tool of social transformation, righting the inequities of society. And a very large number of people, particularly those under the age of 22, see it as a four-year booze cruise.
The result is a system of higher education that’s neither one thing nor the other -- a perfect recipe for frustration and disappointment…

Dean Dad

San Diego Community College district… colleges don’t set their own fees, and don’t get to keep the money. Therefore, the only way they can stay within their budgets when their allocations get cut is to turn students away…

I hadn’t realized just how badly the California system was designed until that moment. When revenue is completely decoupled from services, then growing your way out of the problem is off the table. My sympathies to the citizens of California, who are trapped in a system that makes absolutely no sense…

Bill Gates

We know that of all the variables under a school's control, the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. It is astonishing what great teachers can do for their students.

Yet compared with the countries that outperform us in education, we do very little to measure, develop and reward excellent teaching. We have been expecting teachers to be effective without giving them feedback and training…

Compared with other countries, America has spent more and achieved less. If there's any good news in that, it's that we've had a chance to see what works and what doesn't. That sets the stage for a big change that everyone knows we need: building exceptional teacher personnel systems that identify great teaching, reward it and help every teacher get better…

Jeffrey R. Young

Actually Going to Class, for a Specific Course? How 20th-Century.

Links for 3/2/11

2011-03-02T12:24:00.001-05:00

Michael Finnegan and Gale Holland

In one respect, trouble was inevitable: Voters had put $2.2 billion under the control of seven of the region's most obscure elected officials. They would be spending it with almost no public scrutiny — despite their promise of "strict oversight"

[P.S. You won’t believe what they did.]

Erin O’Connor and Maurice Black

This is not the profile of a profession that deserves the public trust. And yet academe has far fewer checks and balances than other peer review professions. Doctors can lose their licenses. Lawyers can be disbarred. But incompetent or dishonest professors are often forever...

Joanne Jacobs

Many districts turn merit pay into a small across-the-board pay boost, write Green and Buck. In Houston, 88 percent of teachers qualified for a small “merit” bonus. That’s nothing compared to Minnesota, where 22 school districts gave Q Comp bonuses to more than 99 percent of teachers…

Terry Ryan

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) reports that 14 states actually have laws on the books that force quality-blind layoffs…

Lloyd Armstrong

The rhetoric generally tells us that the crisis in American higher education is a financial one, not an educational one. However, it seems increasingly clear that the educational goals we have set for ourselves and our students are the goals appropriate to 20th century United States that had few real economic competitors. Much of our education has assumed that our graduates would go into a profession, and work in that profession for one, or at most a few, companies during their lifetime. That assumption is increasingly incorrect. Many of the professions for which we train students are in a decline as their functions move overseas. Graduates are increasingly required to change the focus of their work (not just jobs) several times in their working lifetime. As has been noted before, the offshoring phenomenon continues to move up the educational scale. Consequently, more traditional education - which was the answer to many problems in the 20th century - is not necessarily the correct answer in the 21st century…

Update on CCAP Website Redesign

2011-03-01T14:07:00.004-05:00

CCAP will be launching its revamped website within the next day or so. When it does go live, we will complete the process of transitioning our blog from blogger over to our new server. For those of you who use our blog's rss feed, we will provide you with the new rss information as soon as we go live. Thank you for your patience.

Links for 3/1/11

2011-03-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

Publius Audax

the total bill (at UT-Austin) runs to at least $95,000.

Can we really reduce that cost by nearly 90%, while maintaining or even improving quality? Yes, we can, if we do two things: intelligently exploit the huge economies of scale in higher education in Texas, with 950,000 students in college; and take full advantage of technology…

ROBERT M. COSTRELL

The showdown in Wisconsin over fringe benefits for public employees boils down to one number: 74.2. That's how many cents the public pays Milwaukee public-school teachers and other employees for retirement and health benefits for every dollar they receive in salary. The corresponding rate for employees of private firms is 24.3 cents…

Judith Scott-Clayton

Of all the potential merits of for-profit colleges, perhaps the most useful is simply the role they serve in upsetting the status quo…

Jamie Merisotis

Problem: College degrees are poorly understood in terms of the learning they represent.

Solution: Develop a degree qualifications profile (DQP) to define the specific learning outcomes of every degree issued by accredited colleges and universities.

Problem: Higher education programs and degrees are defined by seat time rather than learning outcomes.

Solution: Develop a new system of learning credits that are based on outcomes, not time…

Oliver Staley

With $10 million from hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin, List will track the results of more than 600 students-- including 150 at this school. His goal is to find out whether investing in teachers or, alternatively, in parents, leads to more gains in kids’ educational performance…

On New Jersey Taxes and Pensions

2011-02-28T12:55:00.003-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

Over at Quick and the Ed, Kevin Carey bashes on past and current New Jersey Governors. I’m all for bashing politicians, but the story Kevin tells is a bit… skewed.

Kevin’s version is that [evil] past Republicans cut taxes, and as a result did not fund teacher pensions. Fast forward to today, and [evil] current Republicans point to the underfunded pension and say we can’t afford to pay teachers their pensions.

There is just one little problem with this story. In 1997, when the tax cuts happened, the tax burden in New Jersey was 11% (total state and local taxes paid as a percent of total income). This was the fifth highest tax burden in the country. In 2009, their tax burden was 12.2%, the highest in the country.

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to blame tax cuts for the state of teachers’ pension funds when taxes went up. Moreover, if the state with the highest tax burden is unable/unwilling to fund pensions, then it doesn't seem like even higher taxes are going to remedy the situation.

More Information = Better Schools

2011-02-28T09:00:00.000-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

Our focus on the 3 I’s of higher ed reform (incentives, information, and innovation), just got another boost today. From the Economic Logician:

Publish school performance information!

Simon Burgess, Deborah Wilson and Jack Worth exploit a natural experiment in Britain: Wales suppressed the publication of school rankings in 2001, while England kept it. Using a difference-in-difference analysis, they show, oh surprise, that the performance of Welsh students regressed significantly, based on national exams… What is then a good argument for withholding school performance information?

There are a series of vigorous debates over how schools should be ranked, the role of government, etc. But as the evidence continues to trickle in, it is getting harder and harder to argue that there is little benefit in providing more information.

Links for 2/28/11

2011-02-28T08:00:00.001-05:00

DAVID LEONHARDT

If policy makers began to tie funding to performance — both graduation rates and measures of actual learning — we might not drive down the cost of the good colleges. But I bet we’d stop wasting so much money on colleges that are doing their students a disservice. And I bet there are more of these colleges than we care to admit. With better data on learning, we could also figure out how to evaluate new kinds of schools that may indeed be cheaper than traditional colleges are…

Mark Smithers

there are a few dirty little secrets about online learning at traditional universities. Here are two: 1) Not many courses have any form of content online whatsoever (even when the university promotes a policy of minimum online presence). 2) When a course does have online content it is invariably rubbish…

Andrew J. Rotherham

In any organization that is serious about effectiveness quality-blind layoffs are nothing short of insane…

Marc Parry

WikiLeaks, scourge of governments worldwide, now has a copycat for academe. And the new group is itching to publish your university’s deepest secrets…

Theodore C. Wagenaar

most academics resist assessment in general and on principle. Some professors dislike the scrutiny. Others feel that assessment reflects corporate encroachment and a threat to academic freedom. Still others fear a homogenization of the educational experience…

Executed well, assessment encourages faculty members to articulate their course and assignment goals more clearly and to develop sound rubrics. That helps them think more broadly about overarching program goals, and how to measure students' success in reaching those goals. That, in turn, typically leads to greater faculty interest in how classroom activities connect with academic performance. Asking what is important leads us to ask about what works, and both contribute to good-quality assessment, better teaching, and greater learning…

Links for 2/25/11

2011-02-25T11:00:00.001-05:00

Dean Dad

“measure student learning.” Historiann dismisses this one out of hand, with a quick reference to No Child Left Behind and the following: “Let’s just strangle this one in its crib unless and until we get some evidence that more testing = more education.”

It’s a fascinating response, because it encapsulates so cleanly the unthought impulse that many of us have. Testing equals Republicans equals bullshit; now shut the hell up and write us large checks. Trust us, we’re experts.

It’s written a little more carefully than that, of course, but written specifically to defeat verification. It rejects any sort of “measurement,” but does so by calling for “evidence” that measurement works.

What would that evidence look like? Might it involve, say, measurement?...

The knee-jerk response to any sort of accountability rests on a tautology. We know better than anyone else because we’re experts; we’re experts because we know better than anyone else. Screw measurement, accountability, or assessment; we already know we’re the best. Just ask us!...

Aristocratic pretensions aren’t gonna cut it; the “appeal to authority” isn’t terribly appealing. We need to show, rather than tell, the public that we’re worth supporting…

Daniel de Vise

Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., today announced a Four-Year Degree Guarantee: Students who follow a few institutional policies are promised a degree in four years, or else the college will waive tuition until the student has finished…

James E. Côté and Anton L. Allahar

Younger professors have fallen into place. Indeed, they are also products of the corporate university; many have been narrowly “trained” rather than broadly educated…

The corporate model treats students like customers, and as customers they expect services and products for their tuition fees. The services include high grades in return for little effort…

Joanne Jacobs

“Creative destruction” is a bitch, but it beats destruction.

Unions and Feds had better watch out. You don’t want to be fighting against this guy.

Back to the Future: The Need for Apprenticeships and Post-Secondary Certificates

2011-02-25T08:30:00.001-05:00

by: Onnalee Kelley

There are broadly three ways to approach post-secondary learning. Some colleges—mainly Liberal Arts institutions—teach their students by providing them with the ability to adapt to many different skill sets. Other universities teach students by focusing intensely upon one particular field that corresponds with a student’s major. Lastly, training from certificates and apprentices immerse the student in a particular skill set and teach him or her kinesthetically as well as didactically.

At the American Enterprise Institute’s Conference on Higher Education last week, Diane Auer Jones argued for advancement of these post-secondary alternatives by providing information about the benefits of certificates and apprenticeship programs. The three different approaches to learning are all imperative for our society and are individually needed, given the various demands of the labor market. However, President Obama’s goal to have America produce the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020 seems unfeasible and impractical partly because of labor demands. If we look at where the current labor demands are, we notice that there are people who hold BAs and are unemployed or underemployed. CCAP’s study From Wall Street to Wal-Mart identifies that even though proportionately more Americans are achieving college degrees, the college-level job creation has not kept pace. This mismatch leaves 34% of college graduates underemployed. Therefore, I believe President Obama’s goal reinforces this disparity and I do not think we can benefit from having 60% of our population holding a BA degree when many workers already do not need a degree to competently perform their jobs.

There is a popular statistic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that has become the basis for arguments, like President Obama’s, that we need more college graduates. The data show that almost all of the fastest growing jobs require a college degree. However, as Auer Jones mentioned, our focus should actually be on which jobs are seeing the largest absolute growth, because that is where the most new jobs will be. From this list, only one-fifth of the largest growing jobs require a bachelor degree. Examples of jobs that are on this list are home and personal health aides, customer service representatives, office clerks, and truck drivers. The full BLS list is available here.

The Employment and Training Administration (ETA) is trying to ensure American workers receive high-quality training. While the ETA is looking for new ways to train workers efficiently and effectively, the Department of Education (ED) is trying to get people more Bachelor’s degrees, even though a Bachelor’s degree might not be the best way to train these future workers. These two government bureaucracies are not working together with a common goal. Along with this troublesome dichotomy, the market calls for workers in jobs that do not require Bachelor’s degrees. Do we need retail salespeople to be educated at an elite East Coast school? Do we need truck drivers to major in philosophy at a 4 year college? From an economic and practical stand point, the answer to those questions is no. These examples represent imbalanced and mismatched post-secondary education.

Certificates and apprenticeships are effective, productive, and quite affordable. They provide a pathway for students to be educated efficiently and a way for businesses to hire quality employees. Both the employee and the business make a well-informed decision to work or hire, which would drastically decrease mismatched pairs. Currently, there are only about 28,000 registered apprenticeship programs which are poorly advertised and many students are uninformed of this as a post-secondary option. Certificates that take a year or more to obtain are slightly fewer than 400,000. These are growing at a slow rate because of the community colleges are shifting the programs from long-term to short-term certificates. Certificates that are over a year have a great sustainability rate for the career at hand. The ETA and the ED should focus more on the advancement of apprenticeship programs and long-term certificates instead of aiming for more people to get BAs. Once the focus is shifted, these types of education programs will create a more productive, educated, and market-based society.

Richard Vedder on Lowering College Tuition

2011-02-24T17:25:00.002-05:00

Richard Vedder recently contributed to The New York Times "Room for Debate" forum on the recently announced move by the University of the South (also known as Sewanee) to cut their published tuition by 10% (an absolute reduction in price by nearly $5,000. Here's a little snippet:

This will be a great test of two rival perspectives. The traditional view is that students are not terribly price conscious, and, indeed, increasing tuition sometimes even raises enrollments because of perceived improvements in school quality. The alternative view, embraced by Sewanee, is that increasingly students, even those from prosperous families (only 12 percent of Sewanee students are on Pell Grants), are becoming sensitive to rising prices.

Links for 2/24/11

2011-02-24T08:00:00.000-05:00

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg

True reform of the cost of higher education will only come when the convergence of faculty, administrators and trustees recognize that the present model is broken and needs a major overhaul.

Burck Smith on fixing Higher Ed

1) Allow all student loans to be discharged at bankruptcy…
2) Accreditation should be done at the course level in addition to the institutional level…
3) Equivalent courses should receive equivalent credit…
4) State higher ed funding should be voucher based…

Robert M. Eisinger

incorporating experimental, untidy open-ended exercises in their classes.

This request is not an arbitrary one. To the contrary, it germinates from a belief that the liberal arts and sciences, and the students who take such courses, often thrive by appreciating complex questions that do not have easy answers. Precisely because students can retrieve facts instantaneously at their finger tips, I am asking faculty to revise their syllabuses to discuss and, yes, teach, ambiguity…

Peter Wood

the new report from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)…

Apparently it is well within the standards of academic fairness to investigate, report on, and censure institutions of higher education from a certain distance, but not faculty members. Alternatively, it is appropriate when the AAUP does it, but not when some other organization such as the National Association of Scholars does it…

Quality HBCUs?

2011-02-23T13:10:00.015-05:00

By Christopher Matgouranis

Over at the New York Times’s Economix Blog, an interesting piece ran yesterday discussing Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and the benefits (or lack thereof) of attending such an institution. According to the post, there is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that all else equal, attending an HBCU, instead of a traditional (white) college, adversely impacts a black student's future financial success. Citing data mostly from a paper by MIT’s Michael Greenstone and Harvard’s Roland Fryer, himself an African-American, the piece indicates that this was not the case in the past (circa early 1970s and prior), but rather that the wage premium began to decline in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Interestingly, the blog also mentions that evidence exists suggesting that traditional (white) colleges have become much more effective over time at educating African American students. Also, it should be noted that it did mention that in general, there are some non-economic benefits to attending an HBCU, such as enhanced socio-political engagement.

The post left out some interesting findings from the Greenstone/Fryer paper. There are vast disparities in institutional quality across the field of HBCUs. There are many of acknowledged poor quality, for example Paul Quinn College (four year graduation rate of 3%) or Central State University (20.8% student loan default rate), but there are those that are widely considered “better” (e.g. Howard, Spellman, Morehouse, Xavier). Greenstone and Fryer isolated these more prestigious HBCUs in this study and examined their labor market outcomes. Their findings: all else constant, even attending an elite HBCU has a negative impact on students’ future earnings. This effect has also become much stronger over time. Also an interesting finding, graduates of these elite HBCUs have experienced a decline, or in some cases a complete reversal, of the social/lifestyle benefits attributed to attending such a school.

The paper/blog post, along with others examine something important with regard to colleges in general: what are the outcomes? With HBCUs it seems that they are simply not delivering the goods, or as Greenstone/Fryer succinctly put it, are appearing to “retard black progress.” Setting aside arguments on whether racially cached institutions such as HBCUs should even exist in this age, one needs to consider whether it is prudent to fund (often federally in the case of HBCUs) and support institutions of inferior educational quality. To be sure, there are bigger problems in American higher education today than HBCUs (HBCUs make up only about 2% of total enrollment), but that shouldn’t give them a get out of jail free pass. If HBCUs are stifling African-American achievement, it may well be sensible public policy to rethink their continued public support. However, until we start to see more standardized and comprehensive measure of outcomes, both learning and financial, across all types of institutions, don’t hold your breath for much change on this front.

Links for 2/23/11

2011-02-23T08:00:00.000-05:00

Kevin Carey

the 180 or so regional public universities that were founded, often in the 19th century, as “normal schools” to train teachers. Over time, they’ve all followed the same pattern, first becoming “Teachers Colleges,” then dropping the “Teachers,” then trading the “College” for “University.” Now they have, or are trying to get, all the trappings of a research university: multiple colleges and academic departments, stadiums named after corporate sponsors, $20 million gymnasiums–sorry, “Integrated Wellness Centers”–and so forth.

The problem is that they’re not actually research universities. Most of them don’t train graduate students in significant number or conduct much funded research. So they’ve adopted the most expensive and student-indifferent organizational model available even though many of them are still responsible for what they were founded to do: training the state’s teachers. This makes them low-hanging fruit for future disruptive innovation…

Sandy Baum on fixing Higher Ed

2) Stop trying to make individual institutions be all things to all people…

3) Find ways to use technology to both improve the quality of teaching and reduce the cost of educating large numbers of students…

6) Collect better data so we can really understand what is happening…

7) Simplify pricing and student aid systems…

8) Loosen the anti-trust restrictions on colleges and universities so they can work together…

Thomas H. Benton

Students are adrift almost everywhere…

Here are some reasons:…

college professors routinely encounter students who have never written anything more than short answers on exams, who do not read much at all, who lack foundational skills in math and science, yet are completely convinced of their abilities and resist any criticism of their work… Such a combination makes some students nearly unteachable…

It has become difficult to give students honest feedback…

some majors have become an almost incoherent grab bag of marketable topics combined with required courses that have no uniform standards…

Scott Jaschik

The median base salary increase for senior administrators in 2010 was 1.4 percent, up from no increase at all in 2009…

Links for 2/22/11

2011-02-22T10:23:00.000-05:00

Tyler Cowen

David Leonhardt serves up a dialogue with Robert B. Archibald, and also David H. Feldman. Archibald starts by citing the cost disease and also the heavy use of skilled labor in the sector. I don't think they get to the heart of the matter, as there is no mention of entry barriers, whether legal, cultural, or economic. The price of higher education is rising -- rapidly -- and yet a) individual universities do not have strong incentives to take in larger classes, and b) it is hard to start a new, good college or university. The key question is how much a) and b) are remediable in the longer run and if so then there is some chance that the current structure of higher education is a bubble of sorts.

I never see the authors utter the sentence: "There are plenty wanna-bee professors discarded on the compost heap of academic history." Yet the best discard should not be much worse, and may even be better, than the marginally accepted professor. Such a large pool of surplus labor would play a significant role in an economic analysis of virtually any other sector.

When it comes to solving the access problem, the word which pops up is "financial aid," not "increased competition." Why might that be?...

DAVID LEONHARDT

A decade ago, two economists — Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger — published a research paper arguing that elite colleges did not seem to give most graduates an earnings boost. As you might expect, the paper received a ton of attention. Ms. Dale and Mr. Krueger have just finished a new version of the study — with vastly more and better data, covering people into their 40s and 50s, as well as looking at a set of more recent college graduates — and the new version comes to the same conclusion.

Given how counterintuitive that conclusion is and, that some other economists have been skeptical of it, I want to devote a post to the new paper…

Daniel devise

Eight ways to get higher education into shape:

1. Measure student learning
2. End merit aid
3. Three-year degrees
4. Core curriculum
5. More homework
6. Encourage completion
7. Cap athletic subsidies
8. Rethink remediation

Michael B. Goldstein

every state has its own rules and requirements for the chartering, authorization and oversight of institutions of higher education. And that oversight has been notable for its inconsistency across jurisdictions: states such as New York have long exercised very close control over every aspect of institutional operations for both public and independent colleges and universities, while other states have had a history of minimal regulation…

It was assumed, naively as it turned out, that as the technologies for distributing higher education services matured the barriers would fall in the face of interstate cooperation and the acceptance of "home" State recognition as sufficient regulatory oversight…

States and Student Loan Default Rates

2011-02-21T15:20:00.010-05:00

By Christopher Matgouranis

This chart depicts the ten U.S. states with the highest student loan default rates from fiscal year 2008 (the last year of data availability). There were several characteristics that these high default rate states had in common. First, on average the states with higher default rates were poorer, with 8 out of 10 having a per capita personal income below the U.S. average. Secondly, these states typically had higher unemployment rates. Neither of these two results are surprising since both low income levels and high unemployment would suggest that students would typically have a more difficult time earning enough to repay their loans. However, the high default states had more affordable colleges (that is, lower than average public tuition and fees) than the states with lower default rates.

Links for 2/21/11

2011-02-21T08:00:00.000-05:00

Doug Bennett via Daniel de Vise

tell colleges and universities they cannot award any federal financial aid (Title IV) if they award merit aid. That is, tell them they can award need-based federal financial aid only if they award only need-based aid. We need to be sure that as much financial aid as possible is being devoted to meet need. Every dollar of merit aid is a wasted dollar with regard to the national problem of access…

the higher education marketplace is much too dominated by considerations of prestige and much too little dominated by considerations of real value or effectiveness…

(1) that we do not have nearly enough instruments for assessing student learning, and (2) that too few institutions are prepared to publicly disclose what they know about whether and what students are learning…

Neal McCluskey

evidence of success has never been important in decisions to keep or kill programs...

Roy Flores

students testing into the lowest levels of developmental education have virtually no chance of ever moving beyond remedial work and achieving their educational goals. For those students and their families, developmental education is expensive and demoralizing…

the realization that we cannot help every student…

Paula Marantz Cohen

Chinese universities have been accused of copying American models as they seek to evolve, but there is evidence that they are also altering our models in original and effective ways. One noteworthy example is tenure, recently introduced in China but in a slightly different form from what we know in America. Contracts are granted not for life but for three-year periods, and while tenured professors are largely assured sustained employment, they undergo regular review. There are obvious political reasons for that approach, but it also has clear benefits, prodding faculty to remain engaged and productive for the length of their careers…

A related innovation has to do with teaching. Those university professors not judged to be good teachers are placed on a research track, which, far from being a reward as in the United States, prevents those assigned to it from achieving the highest rank in their fields. The result is to create good researchers who work hard to become good teachers…

Links for 2/18/11

2011-02-18T17:14:00.001-05:00

Weird tax avoidance by universities.

This is not from The Onion.

Links for 2/17/11

2011-02-17T17:12:00.000-05:00

Kevin Carey

If people talk about the budget in a way that identifies certain very broad categories of expenditure like “education” as inherently virtuous and all Obama proposals to cut programs within that category as, by definition, a betrayal of the progressive cause, we’re basically doomed to waste large amounts of scarce public resources forever. And in the future when there’s no money to support some vital new cause, this will be one of the reasons why…

Jay P. Greene

Inside most public policy wonks is a mini-dictator, waiting to come out. They dream about how things ought to be organized… if only they were in charge…

Scott Jaschik

The University of the South on Wednesday announced that it is cutting total student charges (tuition, fees and room and board) by 10 percent -- one of the more dramatic shifts in tuition policy announced by a competitive private college in recent years…

Sewanee's decision is based in part on competition with public flagship universities and in part on the conviction of the new president, John McCardell, that current economic trends for liberal arts colleges like his are "unsustainable" and may even represent "a slow death scenario."…

April Kelly-Woessner

in the midst of reflecting on what our students should do and know, we found ourselves acting out a scene from George Orwell's 1984. Adopting the correct "assessment" language seemed to take priority, and we circulated lists of approved and forbidden action verbs…

Although the goal of assessment is to improve teaching and learning, some faculty members argued that, in an effort to articulate what we could most easily measure, our new learning objectives actually reduced and narrowed our expectations of students…

The public is not demanding evidence of learning as much as it is demanding evidence of efficiency…

But institutions of higher education have chosen to ignore the efficiency aspect of accountability…

Links for 2/16/11

2011-02-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

Doug Lederman

the administration had to make "tough choices" to sustain the maximum grant at $5,550, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a call with reporters Monday.

The department's 2012 budget calls for ending a three-year experiment that allows students to qualify for two Pell Grants in a calendar year, to allow them to attend college year-round, and for eliminating the subsidy in which the government pays the interest on student loans for graduate students while they are in school. (The subsidy for undergraduate students would remain in place.)...

Jonathan Zimmerman

The cat is finally out of the bag about what our students are learning, and it isn't pretty…

But shame can be good, if it gets us to do the right thing. And in this case, I think it can…

More than half of the students in Arum and Roksa's sample had not taken a single class in the semester before they were surveyed that required a total of 20 pages of writing. That's not a misprint; it's a scandal…

So how can we change any of that?...
a peer—ideally, a colleague in the same department or division—would take each of those professors out for coffee, inform them about the below-average scores, and offer to help.
Before you start scoffing, you should know that the "cup-of-coffee method" has already been tried with physicians, and it works…

Chad Aldeman

Tenure was granted by the HR Department as breezily as sick days were accumulated or paychecks were mailed out...

Russell K. Nieli

Many of us are conflicted on the legacy issue. The case against legacy preferences presented by people like Kahlenberg, Golden, and Peter Sacks tugs at our meritocratic heart strings, but our pragmatic sense pulls in a different direction. There is something unseemly about lowering admissions standards to a highly competitive college because one's parents attended the college or because you have a billionaire father likely to make a seven-figure donation if you are admitted. In much of the rest of the world the American practice of granting preferences to the children of alumni is seen as indistinguishable from bribery.

But in those same places, colleges and universities are usually state-funded and don't have to go hat in hand looking for private money. Corrupt as the practice of legacy and wealthy donor preference clearly is, it may be one of those defensible corruptions that should be retained primarily because much good comes out of it and the alternatives, perhaps involving more state funding, are probably worse…

Megan McArdle

So my post on the liberal slant in academia has garnered what I believe to be a record number of comments…

Educated and Underemployed

2011-02-15T10:25:00.002-05:00

By Christopher Matgouranis

Relying on a unique data set from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, CCAP has written extensively (here, here and here ) about the growing trend of underemployment for our nation’s college graduates. We estimate that approximately 17 million Americans with college degrees are employed in jobs that do not require college-level skills. The majority of our previous work has examined college graduates in general, lumping together those with bachelor’s and graduate degrees. Recently, I disaggregated the data and found that rampant underemployment is not limited to those with just a bachelor’s degree.

In 2008 (the last year data are available), 7.87 million graduate degree holders were underemployed (that is, employed in jobs requiring less than a graduate degree). Further breaking the data down, 6.98 million held masters and another 1.18 million had PhDs or professional degrees. A full 59% of those employed holding a masters degree were classified as underemployed. PhD and Professional degree holders did better at 22% underemployed. Yet that is still a shockingly high figure considering the level of education that these individuals have attained. To further put things in perspective, the number of underemployed masters degree holders was more than the total number of masters degrees produced between 1998 and 2008 (5.75 million). Similarly for the PhDs/Professionals, 80% of the incremental increase in the total number of degree holders over that same period were considered underemployed.

It should be noted that the underemployment estimate for PhDs is on the conservative side. In calculating the totals, I did not count as underemployed the PhDs/Professionals working in jobs that the BLS classifies as requiring “a bachelor’s degree or higher” or “master’s degrees.” Workers in these fields were given the benefit of the doubt in whether or not they were truly underemployed because of the small ambiguities with these BLS classifications (i.e., are professional degree holders really underemployed if they work in a job requiring a master’s degree?). Had these two BLS classifications been included, PhD/Professional underemployment would have risen to 1.59 million.

A few thoughts come to mind when looking at this data. First, not all graduate degrees are created equal. Those with graduate degrees in finance, economics, and engineering for example likely have a better employment outlook (and are less likely to be underemployed) than those with graduate degrees in anthropology, English or sociology. This is not to say that no one should enter the latter type of fields, but that obtaining one of these degrees should be considered carefully. Secondly, as a recent book, has detailed, a significant number of undergraduates are learning little in college. A likely consequence of this is that more and more people are finding it “necessary” to get graduate degrees. The credential inflation problem associated with this issue could be alleviated somewhat if undergraduate education (and K-12 for that matter) was more rigorous and effective. Lastly, universities should take note of the employment opportunities for graduate degree holders. Graduate students are frequently subsidized (through tuition waivers, stipends, etc.) by their undergraduate counterparts. With an often bleak employment outlook for many graduate degrees/programs, universities should rethink their graduate degree subsidization. Reducing subsidies for graduate education will likely help realign the supply of graduate degree holders with realistic demand from employers.

This blog originally posted on CCAP's "Higher Education and the Economy" blog space at Forbes.com.

Links for 2/15/11

2011-02-15T08:22:00.002-05:00

Eduwonk

For my part I really don’t care what Michelle Rhee’s value-add or gain scores would or would not have been in Baltimore almost two decades ago. Why? It’s not just that this whole thing is unprovable given the data available today. Rather, it’s because today she is pushing an actual education agenda that has ideas – with varying amounts of evidence and/or proof of concept behind them – and we should have a lively debate about those proposals. And it should be obvious that those ideas don’t hinge on her value-add scores or really much of anything that happened almost two-decades ago…

Jay Mathews

If we have managed to be the world's most powerful country, politically, economically and militarily, for the last 47 years despite our less than impressive math and science scores, maybe that flaw is not as important as film documentaries and political party platforms claim…

Sasha Chavkin, Cezary Podkul, Jeannette Neumann, and Ben Protess

Under federal law, borrowers who develop severe and lasting disabilities after taking out federal student loans are entitled to have their debts forgiven… But an investigation by ProPublica and the Center for Public Integrity has found that the process of discharging the loans of disabled borrowers is broken…

Neal McCluskey

Perhaps the most telling sign that the House GOP is not serious about really cutting Washington down to size, though, is that the laughable Exchanges with Historic Whaling and Trading Partners program is not on their chopping block. If you won't pick off this ridiculous, almost-on-the-ground-it's-hanging-so-low fruit, you simply aren't really trying…

Ben Miller

At some point Congress should consider a law that automatically eliminates any program that has been recommended for termination multiple times by presidents from different parties over a 10 year period. For example, the Historic Whaling Partners Program has been targeted for elimination in every one of the 10 budget requests that have been released since its creation–a period that spans both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Of the 13 education programs this year’s budget targets for elimination, six were also singled out in Bush’s 2009 fiscal year budget. The other eight weren’t signed into law after Bush had left office. There’s clear agreement across both parties to get rid of most of these programs, it’s a testament to the difficulty of the political process that they persist.

Is a $10,000 degree possible? Yes

2011-02-14T10:47:00.004-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

I’ve been a bit taken aback by the heat Texas Governor Rick Perry is taking for calling for $10,000 bachelor’s degrees. I’d like to make two points.

First, saying that the status quo is unable to achieve something is not the same as saying it can’t be achieved. For instance, we are currently unable to get 60% of young Americans to graduate with a degree. Yet most of the eduworld is aiming to do just that. Does that mean that they are naïve (as Gov. Perry has been called)? Of course not. The whole point of both proposals is to change the status quo in such a way that the new proposal can be achieved.

Second, even the status quo is within striking distance of delivering a $10,000 degree. To do so, they need to spend less than $2,500 per student per year. As Bob Samuels found, “the total average annual instructional cost per student is $1,456.” That leaves $1,000 per year for everything else. Of course, colleges currently spend much more than $1,000 on everything else, so while it wouldn’t be easy, it is certainly within the realm of possibility to lower that figure to $1,000. In fact, since you wouldn’t be touching instruction at all, the vast majority of students wouldn’t even notice the difference.

Links for 2/14/11

2011-02-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

Elena Silva

In 2008, 75 DCPS teachers, all on probationary status, were fired…

these teachers were clearly deemed to be “ineffective or worse” by their supervisors, with principal narratives describing problems such as “extremely poor classroom management skills,” “rude and aggressive demeanor toward paraprofessionals,” an “excessive failure rate at every marking period,” “excessive absences and latenesses, including 24 tardies, and 20 days of absences,” and “AWOL since May 5th.”…

the decision… sends the teachers back to the classroom…

Score one for no one. A bunch of beginning teachers who, with the nicest spin, weren’t doing well, are coming back into DC classrooms! DC now owes a bunch more money. DCPS gets to chase after teachers it doesn’t really want. And the union falls further from grace by living up to its image as the protector of bad teachers…

Andrew J. Rotherham

Teach For America (TFA)… has generated a great deal of research about how to improve the teacher training and selection strategies that are commonly used today. Yet the reaction from the education establishment remains one of intense hostility…

Pretty much every article about TFA states the boilerplate assertion that the research about its effectiveness is "mixed" or "inconclusive." Actually, that's only true if you think the best way to consume research is to literally pile all the different studies up and see which pile is higher. Again and again, the most rigorous studies show that TFA's selection process and boot-camp training produce teachers who are as good, and sometimes better, than non-TFA teachers, including those who have been trained in traditional education schools and those who have been teaching for decades…

Neil Raisman

the major difference between a good non-profit and for-profit school is an accounting system -- fund balance versus cash accrual. But there are also differences in four significant areas: the people who run the schools and who carry out the operations; the way people are compensated; the intensity of the efforts; and how the operations are accomplished…

In my personal history as a chancellor and consultant to career colleges, I have observed some leaders of companies, schools, and departments doing things to make numbers that were to be polite, very questionable. And yet, they were rewarded for doing so…

Richard Kahlenberg

British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg argued that universities in England were instruments of “social segregation,”…

no American president or vice president or education secretary has ever made a similar high-profile case for more economic diversity in America’s selective colleges…

Why have we allowed the British, who are known for their aristocratic history, to lead Americans in making universities more democratic?

Growth in Government Subsidies

2011-02-14T07:00:00.000-05:00

by Daniel L. Bennett

I'm working on an empirical study of educational inequality in the U.S. Part of the analysis is exploring the effect that governmental subsidies for postsecondary education (in addition to K-12 education) have had on inequality. While that analysis is still in the works, I have put together a chart below that shows real government subsidies by level, on a per student basis, over the past 90 years for postsecondary education.

As the chart reveals, federal subsidies were relatively constant for the first half of the 20th century before exploding as the second half of the century began. This coincides roughly with the birth of the federal government's financial aid system (beginning with the GI Bill in 1944 and later expanding to all students with the 1965 HEA).

State subsidies were relatively modest prior to the mid 20th century and experienced some volatility in the latter half of the century and beginning of the 21st century. Local government subsidies have traditionally been relatively modest, but have become increasingly more prevalent in recent years.

Interestingly, the more that we have subsidized college, the more expensive it seems to have become for students. This is a classic example of the unintended consequences that often result from public policies that artificially stimulate demand. See my colleague Andrew Gillen's paper on financial aid for an excellent read on this theory.

Note: Source of Data is National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). 2006-07 was latest year with complete data. It is not known to what extent local or state subsidies originated from a higher level of government to be distributed at the lower level. This limitation in the data could underestimate federal and/or state , and overestimate state and/or local subsidies in recent years.

Chart of the Week: Endowment Returns

2011-02-10T18:24:00.010-05:00

College endowments have begun their recovery from the recent financial crisis, as the median annual rate of return rose into positive territory for the first time in the past three years. However, given how sharp the decline in endowment value really was during the recession, endowments have a long way to go to return to their previous values. Interestingly enough, as this chart shows, the three year average annual rate of return for fiscal year 2010 is the lowest it's been in the for the past 22 years.

Links for 2/10/11

2011-02-10T09:36:00.001-05:00

Walt Gardner

The Golden Age of Education Never Was

SHARON OTTERMAN

only 23 percent of students in New York City graduated ready for college or careers in 2009…

TRIP GABRIEL

Grades are the currency of education…

Now U.S. News & World Report is planning to give A through F grades to more than 1,000 teachers’ colleges, and many of the schools are unhappy…

Matthew Yglesias

21st century standards Isaac Newton should have patented calculus (“A Method For Using Fluxions To Determine Instantaneous Rate of Change”) and then waited patiently until Leibniz published his superior method and then sued the pants off anyone who tried to take a derivative without coughing up a hefty license fee. But would that world have been a better place? The issue isn’t really so much the rents that Newton would have thereby extracted (I’m not going to begrudge one of human history’s greatest geniuses a fortune) but the barriers to entry that would have been created as a secondary consequence. A world in which smart people have access to the stock of existing human knowledge and are free to apply it in new ways is a world of competition and innovation. A world where you need to consult with an army of lawyers first isn’t...

Links for 2/9/11

2011-02-09T10:05:00.002-05:00

Jonathan Haidt via JOHN TIERNEY

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”…

John Lachs

There is a simple way to judge whether the old or the new idea of the university prevails in an institution. If education is primarily a business, managers hire the faculty. If universities are communities of students and scholars, faculty members hire the managers. The difference between the two strategies is immense, because it determines the locus of power...

Joseph A. Alutto

Until now, we have failed to develop a valid, reliable assessment process. This is a critical failing…

SOPHIA KISHKOVSKY

the Russian version of the American S.A.T. has gathered a number of critics and provoked angry reactions…

Before the E.G.E. was introduced, outright bribes to get into universities, which are, among other things, an outlet for young men to avoid military service, were widely acknowledged.
Now, critics say, corruption has shifted into the schools. Incidents have been reported by the government and in the news media of students cheating or teachers and administrators disseminating or altering test results…

Accreditation Reform

2011-02-08T12:37:00.003-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

There has been a flurry of activity concerning accreditation reform, which is not exactly normal. As luck would have it, we recently released a study on the topic. One thing that didn't make it into the study is a section I wrote on a proposed replacement system. I've copied it below for anyone who's interested, though this is a rough draft (both in writing and idea formulation), and the footnotes didn't copy and paste over (just get in touch if you'd like a word version with proper documentation).

*****

To paraphrase Alan E. Guskin (who was paraphrasing Michael Hammer and James Champy in a different context), the problem is that we are entering a new century with an outdated accreditation system designed to the address the problems of the last century. Given the problems that have arisen as a result, “it should be clear to the accreditation and higher education communities that a new model for quality assurance is needed, if for no other reason than to forestall future federal intrusion.”

In light of this, we believe that a better system could be devised, and should be implemented. In the words of CHEA’s president Judith S. Eaton, we need a focused system – one that holds colleges “accountable for achieving results” but does “not dictate how those results are to be achieved.” With that in mind, we propose the following replacement for accreditation. Our recommended system differs from the current system in three fundamental ways. First, eligibility for federal funding would be based on certification rather than accreditation. Second, certification would be granted to degree programs and courses rather than institutions. And third, multiple paths to certification would be available.

The most important change is that the new focus would be on certification, rather than accreditation. As Russell S. Kitchner notes,

“the notion of accreditation -- that process of determining if an institution is adequately positioned to fulfill its mission effectively -- is confused with certification, which often is an attempt to measure the degree to which an entity is, in fact, fulfilling someone else’s mission effectively. This difference is more than a matter of semantics, and historically, only the former concept was the purview of accreditors”

Accreditation is currently being used to determine if colleges are fulfilling the government’s goals in providing public money. But accreditation is not primarily concerned with the government’s goals, and is therefore not doing an adequate job of ensuring that they are met. A new certification system based on explicit measurement of the extent to which colleges are achieving the public’s goals with taxpayer money is highly desirable.

Second, certification of eligibility for federal funding would be granted for specific degree programs and even individual courses rather than accreditation being granted to entire institutions. Certifying individual programs and courses would, to paraphrase Hutchins, make colleges more like a series of separate programs and research centers held together by a central heating system. Ideally, this would be done with objective measures of student learning or other relevant outcomes. But such measures will not always be available, which brings up the third fundamental change.

The third major change is to have multiple paths to certification. As noted before, there is no one completely satisfactory method of determining which institutions should be eligible for federal aid. Because of this, it is important to have escape hatches to guard against the danger that any one path is inappropriately blocked, or is inappropriate for a particular type of educational program.

We recommend at least two tracks for certification.

Track 1: Meet Government Determined Cutoffs on Publicly Disclosed Data

More information about colleges needs to be disclosed to the public. This is already done for some categories of data, such as enrollment and employee counts and distributions by race and sex. But much more potentially useful data is not disclosed, or is disclosed but not in a manner that allows for meaningful comparisons. This needs to change. There are a number of potentially useful types of data that could be used for determining program or course eligibility.

One category of data that would be extremely useful for public accountability purposes would be information on what happens to students in the job market after they graduate. This information should be collected and disseminated for every degree program. Data on a number of outcome measures, such as job placement rates, passage rates on licensing exams, salary distribution etc., should be publicly available for every program that is offered.

If a program meets some cut off on a combination of these data, its students would be eligible for federal aid. For instance, a primarily monetary cutoff could be set for vocational programs, with institutions where every dollar spent in tuition (and appropriations?) yielded more than X dollars in higher starting salary for graduates being eligible for federal funding.

Another type of data that could be used for determining eligibility is student learning outcomes. This data could come from a variety of sources, including assessments specifically designed to measure the value added of a program or course. Another source of this data could be licensing exams that are in widespread use in a field, such as the CPA and the bar exam. Value added contributions to passage rates on those exams could be used to determine eligibility. Law schools that increase their students’ chances of passing the bar by a sufficient amount could automatically be eligible for federal aid. Data from other longitudinal databases could also be used for certification purposes. For instance, in Louisiana, the Board of Regents was able to match student performance with the colleges of education that trained their teachers. This allowed them to assess which programs produced the most capable teachers. Top performing programs on measures such as these could receive automatic eligibility.

One important issue is how the cutoffs would be determined. Making appropriate determinations is crucially important and we are more likely to see sound decisions if they are made in a technocratic manner that is shielded from political pressures. Fortunately, we have a model of a successful independent federal agency that makes technocratic decisions, namely the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is the country’s central bank, and is tasked with conducting monetary policy, an extremely technical task. Throughout history, central banks that were not independent routinely violated the principals of sound money management as they succumbed to political pressure to inflate. To avoid this, members of the Board of Governors are appointed for very long terms, which insulates them from political pressure and allows them to focus on long term considerations. We would favor the establishment of a similar institution for higher education to determine the appropriate terms of eligibility for those programs following the first path.

Track 2: Meet (Mostly Discipline Determined) Cutoffs for Learning Outcomes

A problem arises with the first path in that there are fields where there is no certification or licensing exam in use, and it is not appropriate to measure outcomes based primarily on job market data. While we favor the development of suitable exams to the extent possible, it is clear that this would not be appropriate for every field or course. Thus, alternative path(s) are needed.

Many feel that “the place for quality assurance should have remained… with specific program evaluation associations such as the American Medical Association licensing medical programs, the American Bar Association approving law schools, and other various, subject-specific associations and agencies certifying program integrity within their areas of expertise.” We largely agree, and the second track in our proposed system would involve individual programs and courses receiving certification from a recognized entity. To offer degrees in chemical engineering for example, a degree program would need to be certified by an organization recognized to certify chemical engineering programs (note that there can be and should be more than one recognized entity to guard against monopolistic behavior of certifiers).

The basic idea is to utilize field determined standards to the greatest extent possible. It is important to note that the standards in a field need to be determined by private experts in that field, not public bureaucrats. An appropriate model is the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), described by A. Lee Fritschler as

“a private organization that is supported and managed by industry itself… ANSI accreditors’ standards become law when governments license professionals, e.g., in areas from health to plumbing. But it is the private organization which, through self-regulation, defines the standards government enforces. The standards are the product of the industry that operates in the field.”

To be clear, the government would not license graduates, but would be licensing certifiers. The certifiers would in turn certify degree programs and courses for federal funding purposes based on their students’ performance on field determined certification measures. Of course, this raises the issue of how the certifiers would be recognized. It is likely that the recognition process for accreditation could serve as a model (subject to stricter regulation as will be discussed shortly), though if more independent decisions are desired, an agency based on the Federal Reserve model could be established here as well.

What effects would it have?

In determining the effects that a program and course based certification system would likely have, the devil is in the details. While we will not attempt to lay out all of the specific details, we have identified three potential problems that deserve special attention. The first is that like the current system, such an arrangement could be subject to serious conflicts of interest. Second, such entities could engage in guild like behavior, such as artificially limiting the number of students entering a profession to drive up wages when an exam is required for licensing purposes. Third, as we’ve already seen, left to their own devices, specialized accreditors (the closest analogy to certifiers) have a tendency to rely on measures of inputs to try and increase spending for their specific fields.

We believe that the establishment and enforcement of reasonable regulations could reduce these dangers to tolerable levels. For instance, certifiers could be barred from having a stake in institutions that offer educational services, and be required to have a significant share of outside board members (to guard against conflicts of interest). They could also be barred from using input and process requirements (to guard against irresponsible recommendations). In addition, they could be forbidden from requiring college attendance to take the exams (to guard against guild behavior). The results below presume that such regulations would be established and enforced.

Quality Improvement

By freeing accreditors from their quality assurance obligations, they would be able to focus more exclusively on the quality improvement mission. Moreover, because accreditation would no longer be a near necessity, accreditors could specialize to a greater extent, which would have the potential to allow them to study particular issues and give more useful advice and guidance. Thus, we believe that our proposed system would improve the quality improvement role of accreditation.

Quality Assurance

The dual track certification of colleges for federal funding purposes would also improve all aspects of quality assurance.

To the extent that there are measures of quality under the current system, they are inappropriate, focusing primarily on inputs and processes that are thought to be necessary and sufficient to guarantee an adequate education. They are neither. By focusing on actual measures of the value added education provided by a program, the new system would see a vast improvement in the definition of appropriate measures of quality.

Similarly, the certification of minimum quality would see vast improvement. No longer would sufficient educational quality be assumed based on a college following the dominant formula in terms of inputs and processes. Instead, programs would be judged based on what their students have learned and what they can do.

The public would also have access to much better information and data about colleges. For the dual track certification system to work, data on learning outcomes and/or employment outcomes for each degree program needs to be publicly disclosed. This will allow for extremely useful types of additional information to be determined. One example would be that student-college specific estimations could be made. For instance, using the newly available databases, websites would emerge that informed a student who scored 150 on the LSAT that they would have a 20% higher chance of passing the bar if they went to Law School X instead of Law School Y. This would be very valuable information for students to have, and would likely lead to better matching of students and schools. Another example of the useful information this would provide would be rankings that are based on value added educational output rather than reputation and resources.

Health and Efficiency

The new system would also increase institutional autonomy. Accreditors are currently able to infringe on institutional autonomy because they have regulatory-like power over their member colleges. Some accreditors have decided to use this power to dictate practices that have no impact on educational quality, while others have tried to impose their own priorities on institutions. Under the new system these and other practices that limit the freedom of colleges would cease. For those colleges on the first track, some would not have any interference from third parties at all, with their eligibility for aid money determined entirely on labor market or certification exam outcomes. Even on the second track, programs would be evaluated based on outcomes only, giving the programs complete freedom of action.

Diversity of institution types and missions would likely remain mostly unchanged. To be sure, in some sense, diversity would decline if the data showed that certain educational practices were superior, and colleges flocked to adopt them (this would be good even if it reduced diversity). However, two things would help mitigate against even this reducing diversity. First, because degree programs would be certified, rather than each institution, there would be much more diversity in the measure of quality. Currently, there is a one size fits all approach, based largely on input usage. That would change under the new system, as some institutions would be judged on their ability to increase the salaries of their graduates, and others would be judged on learning outcomes defined by the field. These different measures of quality would yield very different programs. The second reason we probably wouldn’t see a decline in institutional diversity is that it is likely that different practices work better in certain fields, and programs would have an incentive to find and adopt the most appropriate practices in each case.

Innovation by new and existing colleges would likewise be encouraged. The current accreditation process does not measure the ends, and because of this, they feel the need to impose restrictions on the means used to achieve ambiguous ends. Colleges are more or less free to aim for whatever they want, but must achieve it using a one size fits all recipe. Placing such restrictions on the inputs that colleges can use and the way in which they can be used suppresses innovation. The new system, by changing the focus of evaluation from means to ends, would leave colleges completely free to experiment with new ways of providing an education. Existing colleges would have an incentive to continually reinvent themselves, and new colleges would have the opportunity to demonstrate their effectiveness without first having to conform to the existing paradigm.

There are two main downsides to the proposed system. The first is that some types of innovation would face more obstacles. Similar to the problems with a qualifications framework or certification schemes, entirely new types of degrees as well as new multidisciplinary degrees would have more difficulty in being approved. Under the current system, once an institution has accreditation, they are largely free to concoct new and/or multidisciplinary degrees. But when approval is based at the lower program or course level, these ventures will face increased scrutiny.

The second downside is that direct costs would be higher. Of course, it is easy to keep the costs of the current system low because it does not actually provide quality assurance. Any system that does provide quality assurance would cost more, and this proposal is no exception. On the other hand, indirect costs would fall. Much of the indirect costs of the current system come from mandates to use various unnecessary and inappropriate inputs, and these would cease under the new system. No longer would regional accreditors be dictating maximum course loads, nor would specialized accreditors be able to insist on better facilities for departments in their field. Thus, overall, costs would likely decline.

Links for 2/8/11

2011-02-08T08:00:00.000-05:00

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Nobody deserves tenure, with the possible exception of federal judges…

there are plenty of other ways to safeguard public employees from wrongful dismissal besides guaranteeing them lifetime jobs.

Kevin Carey

To be blunt, I believe the accreditors overseen by NACIQI should not be in the business of deciding whether for-profit colleges and universities should have access to the federal Title IV student aid system…

The existing accreditation system was not designed to accommodate them and it would be a mistake to try to bend or warp its mission to do so. It can’t be done. If accreditors try, they will fail, and they will be blamed for the consequences of that failure…

monolithic accreditation status is currently serving to obscure differences in quality between institutions rather than distinguish them…

Ilana Garon

"I'm not going to college."…

A few years ago, I would have been horrified at this pronouncement. I know there are plenty of teachers and administrators who still would be. But these days, I'm more inclined to be impressed by Danielle's self-awareness, foresight and her implicit understanding of a fact I wish our system leaders would see: that perpetuation of the current "college for all" trend in education is neither economically viable nor beneficial to all students…

Doug Lederman

said Peter Ewell… "there's a difference between prodding and fixing. Nothing fundamental ever changes in higher education without an outside push," he said, and "whatever you can do to scare [higher education leaders] into acting, if you will, is the road to go."...

Measuring Teaching Quality

2011-02-07T11:36:00.001-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

Robert Martin and I have a new piece out over at Minding the Campus:

A popular notion within the academy is that teaching quality cannot be measured, but this is an article of faith, not a demonstrated fact...

Changes Coming to CCAP Blog and Website

2011-02-07T10:45:00.000-05:00

We're currently in the process of revamping our website, including integrating our blog with our main website (http://centerforcollegeaffordability.org/), so we will be ceasing our use of our Blogger account). Within the next several days, our sites will be under construction as we go live on our new server and migrate our posts to our revamped site. We will keep you updated as necessary. If you subscribe to our email newsletter or RSS feed, we will have new subscription links available in the next few weeks. We appreciate your patience and look forward to improving the experience for our readers.

Links for 2/7/11

2011-02-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

Doug Lederman

the Education Department's two-day forum on higher education accreditation…

The basic gist on which there was general agreement:
• Higher education accreditation is imperfect (seriously so, in the eyes of some), with many commentators citing how rarely the agencies punish colleges and how inscrutable and mysterious their process is to the public.
• Politicians and regulators are asking accrediting agencies to do things they were never intended to do, like make sure colleges don't defraud students.
• Despite those flaws, most seemed less than eager to try to create a wholly different system to assure the quality of America's colleges and universities, because they see it as either difficult or undesirable…

Michael Pomeranz

Louisiana's Board of Regents have engaged in one of the most rigorous reviews the nation has seen in recent memory. It will serve as a model for other states. The Regents reviewed every student program. Those programs that have failed to graduate more than a handful of students, the Regents designated as "low-completers." Each campus will have the opportunity to explain why the low-completers make sense both from a financial and from a mission point of view for the school; the Regents will then terminate failed, redundant, and costly programs…

Peter Wood

The university needs science, but how much does science need the university?

Steve Peha

People have had a decade to take shots at NCLB. Many started shooting before it even passed. (I’ll admit to being one of them.) Now we get the chance to fix all the things we said we never liked about it…

People don’t like AYP. Fine. Come up with a better way to tell schools and the people who go to them how they’re doing. People don’t like testing. Fine. Come up with a better way—a viable, actionable, scaleable way—that we can get a read on how kids are doing in school. Same goes for teacher quality. Don’t like VAMs and being held accountable for student progress under measures you don’t trust? Propose other approaches that help teachers improve, reward people for results, and increase the respect of the profession…

I find it hard to see how weakening accountability, giving back more control to the states, or removing sanctions and labels—as odious as they are—will make things better…

It’s easy to look at the decade before NCLB and the decade after and see that NCLB has made a positive difference—at least to the degree that increasing student achievement, especially for poor kids and those of color, is now a topic we discuss regularly, profess to care about, and occasionally take action toward…

Links for 2/4/11

2011-02-04T15:57:00.003-05:00

Lance Lochner

A growing body of work suggests that education offers a wide-range of benefits that extend beyond increases in labor market productivity. Improvements in education can lower crime, improve health, and increase voting and democratic participation. This chapter reviews recent developments on these ‘non-production’ benefits of education with an emphasis on contributions made by economists.

Kevin Lang and Erez Siniver

In this paper we compare the labor market performance of Israeli students who graduated from one of the leading universities, Hebrew University (HU), with those who graduated from a professional undergraduate college, College of Management Academic Studies (COMAS). Our results support a model in which employers have good information about the quality of HU graduates and pay them according to their ability, but in which the market has relatively little information about COMAS graduates. Hence, high-skill COMAS graduates are initially treated as if they were the average COMAS graduate, who is weaker that a HU graduate, consequently earning less than UH graduates. However, over time the market differentiates among them so that after several years of experience, COMAS and HU graduates with similar entry scores have similar earnings. Our results are therefore consistent with the view that employers use education information to screen workers but that the market acquires information fairly rapidly.

Randall Reback, Jonah Rockoff, and Heather L. Schwartz

The most sweeping federal education law in decades, the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, requires states to administer standardized exams and to punish schools that do not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the fraction of students passing these exams. While the literature on school accountability is well-established, there exists no nationwide study of the strong short-term incentives created by NCLB for schools on the margin of failing AYP. We assemble the first comprehensive, national, school-level dataset concerning detailed performance measures used to calculate AYP, and demonstrate that idiosyncrasies in state policies create numerous cases where schools near the margin for satisfying their own state’s AYP requirements would have almost certainly failed or almost certainly made AYP if they were located in other states. Using this variation as a means of identification, we examine the impact of NCLB on the behavior of school personnel and students’ academic achievement in nationally representative samples. We find that accountability pressure from NCLB lowers teachers’ perceptions of job security and causes untenured teachers in high-stakes grades to work longer hours than their peers. We also find that NCLB pressure has either neutral or positive effects on students’ enjoyment of learning and their achievement gains on low-stakes exams in reading, math, and science.

This is funny (unless you’re currently a grad student).

Ignorance Is Not Bliss Regarding Spending on Athletics

2011-02-04T09:02:00.000-05:00

By Richard Vedder*

Amidst fiscal problems requiring growing austerity in higher education, intercollegiate athletic programs still continue to grow, despite increasing subsidies coming from college/university general funding. What do students think about this?

To answer this question, my colleagues Matt Denhart and David Ridpath (also a professor at Ohio University) surveyed about 1,000 students at Ohio University, which is a member of the Mid-American Conference and is a fairly typical mid-quality state university. Their results, just published by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (which I direct) in Ending the Arms Race: A Case Study of Student Athletic Fees, are very revealing. They find that:

Most students severely underestimate the amount that their fee payments to the university subsidizes intercollegiate athletics (ICA);
a majority felt that their were other sorts of extracurricular activities deserving of subsidy support more than ICA (but which, in fact, receive far less support);
Fewer than 7 percent of respondents felts ICA reputation was “important” or “extremely important” in their enrollment decision—a majority thought it was “extremely unimportant;”
Over 35 percent of students attend no sporting events, despite having to pay $765 in fees to support ICA, about 8 percent of their total charges;
On average, each surveyed student paid indirectly well over $150 for each athletic event attended.

In short, most students are relatively indifferent about sporting events, are ignorant of the costs, and not in favor of as high athletic subsidies as they are being charged. I would suspect if the same questionnaire were given to their parents, the preference to scale down ICA subsidies would be even more pronounced.

The CCAP study will be criticized on two major grounds. First, it is not representative of students at Ohio University, and second, Ohio University is not representative of American higher education in general. The first criticism is largely bogus, I suspect, while the second one may be correct, but the CCAP study points to the need for more research.

My reading of the study suggests the sample selected, while clearly is not random (although all students were invite to participate—not all did), was probably pretty representative of the student body. For example, the typical number of sporting events attended annually for the sample (the mean was about five) seems to be pretty close to that for the student body as a whole. Looking more broadly, the Denhart/Ridpath results are quite consistent with those reported on a similar survey at the University of Toledo, suggesting the findings are probably representative of a broader body of schools than just Ohio U. Still, the study points out the need to explore this at schools where the subsidization of athletics is less (Ohio U. is well above average regarding subsidization of ICA). Denhart and Ridpath want to do this, and I hope funding is secured to allow that to happen.

Two questions arise. Why is this university, and probably others, spending far more on ICA than its customers (and almost certainly their parents, not to mention the school’s faculty) want? Two, what can and should be done about it?

Successful university presidents (in the sense of being popular with high job security) stay in office by raising lots of money and bribing various interest groups—by giving students a low workload and access to booze and sex; giving faculty low teaching loads and the freedom to teach what they want (more or less) for decent pay; and giving alums good success in ICA, along with nice new facilities to visit while on campus. Unfortunately, in their zeal to satisfy one group (alumni and perhaps trustees) with fairly high quality ICA (although ironically, Ohio U.’s success can at best be termed “modest” in recent years), presidents have created increasing unrest with other constituent groups angry about the continued high ICA budgets amidst falling budgets elsewhere in the university and rising costs to students.

With respect to solutions, this is like the arms race during the Cold War. One side is not going to unilaterally disarm. All parties need to sit down and impose limits—maximum size budgets (with accounting procedures uniformly defined), for example. “All parties” could be a grouping as small as the university presidents of a single athletic conference, but more likely would require even bigger disarmament deals—say, involving presidents of all BCS schools, all Division II schools, etc. (The cost explosion is present at Division II and III schools as well as the Division I institutions, if NCAA statistics are to be believed.)

The worst part of all of this the lack of transparency. Often students, faculty, major donors, etc., are in the dark as to the finances of ICA, and even what they are paying. Often this is accompanied by misleading statements by administrators on the alleged benefits of ICA, almost always grossly exaggerated. Increasingly universities are spending large parts of their budgets on things unrelated to the core academic mission. Whether universities should be in the entertainment business (e.g., ICA), food and lodging business, etc., is highly dubious to me. Institutions that focus with a laser beam on one or at most two tasks are more successful, I think, than those trying to be all things to all people. The new CCAP study needs to be replicated by others to strengthen the hand of those wanting athletics disarmament.

*This post originally appeared on the "Innovations" blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on January 31, 2011.

Chart of the Week: Grants and Loans by Class Level

2011-02-02T09:44:00.000-05:00

For today's Chart of the Week, we take a look at undergraduate grant aid and loans (for 2008) by undergraduate class level, as reported in the Dept. of Ed's Data Analysis System. As this chart shows, the average freshman and sophomore receive the lowest amount of grant aid but also take out, on average, smaller loans than upperclassmen. While juniors and fourth year seniors receive the most generous grant aid, fifth year seniors have the greatest disparity between the grant aid they receive and the loans they take out, suggesting that fifth year seniors rely more heavily upon loans for financing college than other undergraduate students.

Links for 2/2/11

2011-02-02T08:00:00.000-05:00

Greg Beato

while college tuition and fees keep rising, it sometimes seems as if the higher education industry is investing in everything but education…

But while it may be an American tradition to pay for the nuts and bolts of higher education—the salaries of instructors, the construction of libraries and classrooms—is it really a national priority to ensure every 19-year-old has equal access to luxury dorm rooms and top-notch diversity coordinators?...

total construction costs for the nation’s colleges ranged from $6 billion to $7 billion per year in the last half of the 1990s. Then there was a construction boom, with $113 billion in new construction occurring between 2001 and 2009…

Lloyd Armstrong

it seems that some are rethinking the statement that critical thinking should be (or is) the “principal aim of undergraduate education” as they are faced with increasing data that it isn’t happening. Instead, there are statements along the lines of “ the students are certainly learning domain knowledge.” Unfortunately, that also does not seem to be the case…

we should not continue to spend time picking at the flaws of current instruments that seek to measure learning – rather, we should focus on developing better instruments. At a minimum, this will require that we in higher education ask ourselves what we believe the valuable outcomes of higher education to be… With that information in hand, we can begin to develop better instruments to measure these outcomes. And using these new instruments, we can work much more effectively to improve learning in our institutions…

Dean Dad

As someone whose job it is to actually hire faculty, I can attest that merit is only a small part of the picture…

there’s also the basic incompatibility of life tenure with the idea of meritocracy. If incumbents don’t have to keep proving themselves against newcomers, then you do not have a meritocracy…

EduBubble

Egypt’s universities are dramatically cheaper than their counterparts in the United States and the students graduate without debt. But there are no jobs waiting for them and so they take to the streets. Imagine how angry the Egyptian kids would be if they were buried in American-scale debt?

If I were to be a cynical Machiavellian evil doer, I might say that it seems like a smarter plan to overload the American kids with debt because it seems to depress them and rob them of their initiative. If a kid can’t get a job, send him/her to grad school and that will crush whatever spirit they have left. Giving the education away free may be a mistake because the kids undervalue it and fail to blame themselves enough. Instead they take to the streets and blame the government and that’s bad from the standpoint of a cynical Machiavellian manipulator...

Links for 2/1/11

2011-02-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

Sandra Stotsky

Once upon a time, making students “college ready” meant strengthening, not weakening, the high school curriculum…

Sean Cavanagh

Lawmakers in Hoosierland are considering a proposal that would give high schoolers who graduate early a chunk of state per-pupil aid—$3,500—to pay for college, during what would otherwise have been their senior years…

Chad Aldeman

In 1998, Congress inserted a provision into the Higher Education Act that required states to hold their teacher preparation programs accountable…

27 states have never identified a single low-performing program…

Ainsley Thomson

[In the UK] The Office of National Statistics said the jobless rate for new university graduates reached 20% between July and September last year…

Michael Wei

Getting Into Harvard Easier Than McDonald's University in China

CCAP Releases New Study on Intercollegiate Athletics

2011-01-31T15:02:00.002-05:00

Today CCAP is releasing Funding the Arms Race: A Case Study of Student Athletic Fees, co-authored by Matthew Denhart and David Ridpath. Surveying roughly 1,000 students at Ohio University, a fairly typical mid-sized state university, Denhart and Ridpath find that intercollegiate athletics (ICA) is the largest recipient of general fee revenues, despite having low support among students. Other results include findings that:

Over 70 percent of students favored ICA receiving modest to little general fee support, instead of being the most important use of those funds;

Over 78 percent of students regarded ICA as an "unimportant" or "extremely unimportant" factor in deciding to enroll at Ohio University;

63 percent of respondents favor reducing the fee devoted to ICA, while 18 percent favor leaving it the same. Fewer than 10 percent of students favored a healthy ($30+ a year) increase in the fee to maintain ICA's current status;

This study largely corroborates the results of a similar survey conducted by Katherine Ott at the University of Toledo in 2009.

Urging more transparency in the reporting of athletic fees, Denhart and Ridpath also call for additional research to be completed at other institutions to examine this issue on a broader, national scale.

Links for 1/31/11

2011-01-31T08:00:00.000-05:00

Stephen Brockmann

If I go to a doctor’s office and witness doctors and nurses fighting about whether or not I should take a particular medication, I’m likely to go elsewhere for my health care needs. I think something analogous happened to the humanities in the 1980s, and it is continuing to happen today…

Michael Alison Chandler

South Korea… newly minted admissions officers, who have undergone training to evaluate hard-to-quantify traits, such as leadership potential and independent thinking. The change in admissions is the centerpiece of a slate of policy reforms aimed at coaxing creativity from students trained to memorize…

But reversing a centuries-old testing culture could prove to be as difficult here as anywhere. High schools and families need time to catch up in a society where "extracurricular" is often understood to mean extra English or math classes, and where competition is so stiff for entrance to top colleges that extra tutoring is hard to avoid and students don't have time to do anything except study…

the country's famed education system is blamed for a plummeting birth rate, record numbers of suicides, and a deepening rift between rich and poor…

Derek Neal

This chapter analyzes the design of incentive schemes in education while reviewing empirical studies that evaluate performance pay programs for educators. Several themes emerge. First, it is difficult to use one assessment system to create both educator performance metrics and measures of student achievement. To mitigate incentives for coaching, incentive systems should employ assessments that vary in both format and item content. Separate no-stakes assessments provide more reliable information about student achievement because they create no incentives for educators to take hidden actions that contaminate student test scores. Second, relative performance schemes are rare in education even though they are more difficult to manipulate than systems built around psychometric or subjective performance standards. Third, assessment-based incentive schemes are mechanisms that complement rather than substitute for systems that promote parental choice, e.g. vouchers and charter schools.

The Chronicle on this year’s freshman.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

A Sign of the Recovery? Law School Applications Fall

Links for 1/28/11

2011-01-28T16:00:00.000-05:00

The Journal of Universal Rejection

all submissions, regardless of quality, will be rejected. Despite that apparent drawback, here are a number of reasons you may choose to submit to the JofUR:
• You can send your manuscript here without suffering waves of anxiety regarding the eventual fate of your submission. You know with 100% certainty that it will not be accepted for publication.
• There are no page-fees.
• You may claim to have submitted to the most prestigious journal (judged by acceptance rate).
• The JofUR is one-of-a-kind. Merely submitting work to it may be considered a badge of honor.
• You retain complete rights to your work, and are free to resubmit to other journals even before our review process is complete.
• Decisions are often (though not always) rendered within hours of submission.

This is cool.

So is this.

The 'Holy Grail' of Higher Ed Reform

2011-01-28T09:59:00.001-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

Robert Martin and I have a piece over at Inside Higher Ed.

There is a thriving market for senior scholars in higher education -- a market that brings plenty of release time from teaching, along with high salaries and fame.
There is no corresponding market for world-class teachers…

The critical reason why one market exists and the other does not is the information available to potential employers…

The “holy grail” of higher education reform should be the creation of a market for exceptional college teachers. The vigorous market for scholars provides the keys to this project. First, the information required does not have to be perfect in order for the market to be efficient (the information about scholars is not perfect). Second, the source of this information should be independent of the individual teachers, their home institutions, and their potential employers…

Links for 1/27/11

2011-01-27T08:00:00.000-05:00

Grover J. "Russ" Whitehurst

For education… more federal dollars and more federal control.

There are two opposing schools of thought on this. I will call the first “principled”, not necessarily in praise of its tenets but in recognition that it emerges from a coherent conceptual position. It has two facets: classic federalism,… and a market-based approach to the provision of services…

the second school of thought “opportunistic.” It is motivated to improve education outcomes for children… It identifies reforms and programs that are thought to be desirable and uses the federal government as a means to advance them…

Whether the nation will follow the opportunistic or the principled approach will be the education battle line in the 112th Congress…

This will not be a fight between good guys and bad guys – both sides care about education. It will be a fight between dramatically different visions of how the nation’s education future will be determined.

DAVID LEONHARDT

protecting higher education from across-the-board budget cuts, as Mr. Obama is urging, makes sense.

But the status quo is not worth protecting. Both the federal government and the states spend money on higher education in terribly wasteful ways. They don’t offer incentives for success, and they demand little accountability from colleges. Colleges that do a masterful job of graduating students receive no reward, and those that do a subpar job — of which there are many — go unpunished, giving them little reason to improve.

In the federal budget, the obvious candidates for cutbacks come from a grab bag of programs that cost about $12 billion a year and make up about one-fourth of federal spending on colleges…

Most of the $12 billion subsidizes student loans so that interest doesn’t accrue while students are still in college. That may be a nice little benefit, but it does not help students stay in school…

The remainder of the $12 billion is no better. Many of these dollars are matching funds for financial aid awarded by colleges, which means much of the money ends up going to wealthy private colleges…

Parul Sehgal via Scott McLemee

I studied political science. I wanted to understand "who gets what and why," but I was instead waylaid by theory, theories about theories, and texts so mazy that they seemed to have been explicitly designed to baffle… As a student, you're forced to build up your stamina as a reader -- I'm sure many students in the humanities experience this. You learn to sit with the text past any point of desire or even comprehension. And it makes you humble. It makes you the supplicant…

Axel Leijonhufvud on the greatest scam of our times. Btw, he also wrote perhaps the best economics paper ever.

Links for 1/26/11

2011-01-26T08:00:00.000-05:00

Doug Lederman

the Lumina Foundation for Education is today releasing a draft of its Degree Qualifications Profile…

intended to establish, in more specific ways than has historically been the case, what the recipients of associate, bachelor's and master's degrees (regardless of discipline) should know and be able to do…

"it's a heck of a lot better than what we have now," Adelman said -- a situation in which politicians perceive colleges to pay too little attention to learning and constantly threaten to wade in and fix the problem.

And they will, Adelman warned, if colleges (and accreditors, whom he sees playing a key role) don't confront their perceived failings themselves…

Mark C. Taylor

When there is pressure to teach large classes to help the bottom line, the wisest policy is to assign little reading or writing and to grade easily. Teaching well takes lots of time and helping student to learn to read critically and write well cannot be done in lecture halls with hundreds of students…

Adam Kissel

Michigan State University… MSU's draconian e-mail policy. Unlike virtually all colleges and universities, MSU claims in its policy that "The University's e-mail services are not intended as a forum for the expression of personal opinions."

Greg Mankiw

we often remind policymakers that their decisions should be based on objective, empirical research rather than uninformed supposition. Yet when we are the decision makers, as we are when we run our own educational programs, we often have little data-driven analysis on which to base on our judgments. This kind of research should, over time, lead to a better educational system...

Consider now the fact that many students drop out of graduate school ... it is likely that in many cases their choice to drop out is optimal. They entered graduate school without fully knowing what it was like and whether it was a good match for them. After a couple of years, they decided it wasn’t. In light of the inherent uncertainty when choosing a path in life, a bit of experimentation is desirable...

Links for 1/25/11

2011-01-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

Jonathan B. Imber

True teachers must live with the prospect that most of those they teach over a lifetime will not remember their names or what they were taught. They must endure George Bernard Shaw's famous aphorism that "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." That was in Shaw's The Revolutionist's Handbook. In the same section of aphorisms, under the heading "Education," he added, "No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot."…

TAMAR LEWIN

In most states, it is now tuition payments, not state appropriations, that cover most of the budget…

Daniel J. Ennis

nobody has offered a compelling reason why America continues to overproduce doctorates in the face of a market that screams "stop!"…

until we wrestle the Smugness Angel to the ground we won’t get a handle on the doctoral overproduction problem (if there is one). It isn't the hope of some future job satisfaction that pushes folks to burn a near-decade of life on a piece of paper, it is self-satisfaction…

The Knowledge Maven

Do We Really Need More College Graduates? 20 Must-Read Analyses.

Do for-profits exist to make profit? Yes.

2011-01-25T07:00:00.003-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

I’ve got a bunch of new faces in my RSS reader thanks to great lists from Ben Miller and Linda Perlstein. One of the new ones is Walt Gardner, who writes

This attitude calls into question whether proprietary schools are more interested in making a profit or providing education and training.

This type of statement perfectly illustrates the difference between those who can’t stand for-profits, and those that think for-profits are very useful (I have no idea which camp Walt is in as this was the first post of his that I have read).

The primary purpose of any for profit institution, whether a school or a bakery, is to make profit. In a well functioning market for education, the only way to obtain sustainable profits would be to create value (a good education for the price), just as the only way to make a sustainable profit in the bakery business is to create value (a good baked good for the price).

But we don’t have a normally functioning market for higher ed. We have a system where the quality of education provided is unknown and outcomes (such as job placement rates and average salaries) are deliberately hidden. This means that profits and value creation do not necessarily go together.

Those who can’t stand for-profits see profits and say “How terrible. Money that could have been used to teach students is lining the pockets of corporate shareholders instead.” Those who hold out hope for for-profits see this and say “That’s unusual. There must be something dysfunctional about the functioning of higher ed.” They then look for peculiar aspects of the industry to explain the anomaly. They aren’t hard to find (see number 25 or our recent project for a brief introduction to them).

Given the loose connection between quality and profit, there are probably lots of examples of undeserved profits out there. But obsessing over their existences is akin to worrying about the symptom rather than the disease. The same system that allows for undeserved profits for for-profit schools also allows for them in public and private-non-profit schools. While they don’t distribute their “profits” to shareholders, as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa have shown, they aren’t using them to provide an education either.

Instead of trying to banish the symptom (what we think are undeserved profits), we should treat the disease that allows them to exist. If we create a system where the connection between profit and value creation is strong, then the only way for-profits can make a profit will be to provide a good education. Importantly, such a strong connection would also fix the dysfunctional incentives of public and private-non-profit schools.

We can either fix the incentives of the system, which would lead to better for-profit, public and private-non-profit institutions alike, or we can continue in our quest to eradicate the for-profits, letting the dysfunction in public and private-non-profits fester. Doesn’t seem like a hard choice to me.

Academically Adrift: A Must Read

2011-01-24T11:25:00.000-05:00

By Richard Vedder*

The most significant book on higher education written in recent years is out, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia. While I have not read every word of this new University of Chicago Press book, I have read enough of it and an accompanying summary to know that it is very, very important, and extremely devastating in what it says about American higher education today. Basically, students study little and, as a consequence, learn little.

Arum and Roksa wed data from two very important but underutilized test instruments, the Critical Learning Assessment (CLA), and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). These instruments are used at hundreds of schools, and the Arum and Roksa book is based on detailed results from a good sized sample of students from 29 institutions. The CLA measures things such as aptitude with respect to critical learning and writing skills, while the NSSE mostly measures how students are engaged at school, in large part measured by how they use their time.

For the reader not familiar with some of the findings, Arum and Roksa conclude:

“gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills (i.e., general collegiate skills) are either exceedingly small or empirically non-existent for a large proportion of students”;
36 percent of students experienced no significant improvement in learning (as measured by the CLA) over four years of schooling;
less than one-half of seniors had completed over 20 pages of writing for a course in the prior semester;
total time spent in academic pursuits is 16 percent; students are academically engaged, typically, well under 30 hours per week;
scholarship from earlier decades suggest there has been a sharp decline in both academic work effort and learning;
“students…majoring in traditional liberal-arts fields…demonstrated significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study. Students majoring in business, education, social work , and communications had the lowest measurable gains”;
35 percent of the students sampled spent five hours or less a week studying alone; the average for all students was under 9 hours.

Critics will no doubt argue that the CLA is an imperfect test instrument or that the sample of schools was too small and unrepresentative. What strikes me most, however, is that these findings are similar to those found in other studies (e.g. the Time Use Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics), and with my own personal observations based on a half century of involvement in higher education in all types of institutions ranging from mid-quality state universities to elite private liberal-arts colleges and prestigious private research institutions.

Moreover, the survey seems to confirm that many of the modern-day trends in higher education have lowered the quality of the educational experience. “Collaborative learning” is all the rage, and students are encouraged to work in groups—the Arum and Roksa study, however, suggests that studying alone is more effective than studying in groups. Another trend is the decline in the “market share” of the traditional liberal arts disciplines—social and natural sciences and the humanities—yet students in these disciplines seem to be learning more. To be sure, the communications and business majors are sometimes picking up vocational skills that are useful, which are not measured by the CLA.

To me, this above all further strengthens the thinking of scholars ranging from Robert Hutchins and James Bryant Conant (to go back more than a half a century) to Charles Murray today. As the proportion of the population going to college rises, more and more of them are simply not suited for academically rigorous forms of higher learning. Consequently, schools dumb down the curriculum, engage in grade inflation, etc.

Why, then, do college graduates continue to earn a healthy premium over high school graduates? In part, because, despite being relatively lazy and relatively unchallenged in school, college graduates are still smarter, more ambitious and more disciplined than the graduates of our relatively mediocre (on average) secondary schools. College is an expensive (to students) screening device, and one that is increasingly emphasizing the socialization dimensions of young adulthood over the dissemination of true knowledge and ideas. We are sending too many kids to school to learn too little to get jobs for which often the little that they do learn is not even necessary.

Ultimately, the public policy question is why the financially strapped federal government provides billions of dollars to subsidize students participating in the increasingly expensive and hedonistic experience we call “higher education?” Why do states subsidize the institutions that are responsible for this decline, rather than directly supporting a modest number of serious, hard-working and financially needy students? Why is higher education so dysfunctional, and becoming more so daily? When is the bubble going to burst? Run; do not walk, to the store to get this book.

*This post originally appeared on the "Innovations" blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on January 20, 2011.

Links for 1/24/11

2011-01-24T09:53:00.002-05:00

William G. Bowen

a recurring theme is that on more than one occasion I failed to look closely enough at real evidence. I sometimes relied too much on what I assumed to be reality—or feared might be reality. I learned that it was easy to succumb to the temptation to believe what I wanted to believe or to accept at face value assertions made by others. There is simply no substitute for framing questions carefully and then looking with a cold eye at properly organized sets of facts.

Richard Posner

there is no reason to subsidize tuition of persons able and willing to pay it without subsidy...

William Major

On our final day of discussing Walden in my literature course for sophomores, I ask students to get out their BlackBerries and smartphones and lay them on their desks. I then offer the extra credit they've been begging for since day one: They'll get it if they let me keep their phones for five days…

Mike Mandel

Friday Wrap-up

2011-01-21T13:19:00.005-05:00

by Jonathan Robe

I wonder if this owl was in college taking one of these courses...

Quality in Higher Ed (and Art)

2011-01-21T05:00:00.001-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

A. Lee Fritschler had a piece a while back on quality in higher ed. In it, he does a pretty good job of reminding those of us (such as myself) that constantly bemoan the low quality of college that we are awfully vague when it comes to defining what quality means. Fair enough. But he then goes on to tell us that various proposals for reforming higher ed would unquestionably reduce quality. My first reaction was one of incomprehension. Saying that you can’t define quality, but that doing X or Y would nonetheless lower quality strikes me as just throwing everything you can find against X and Y and seeing what sticks. While a common form of argument, especially in DC, this is generally not very persuasive.

But I know from reading some of Fritschler’s prior work that he is an informed, astute, articulate, and passionate observer of higher education issues, so I reread the article, and discovered that the argument is a bit more nuanced. A careful rereading reveals that the argument is not that no one can judge quality, but that only experts/practitioners can do so, and that trying to force them to implement “objective” measures of quality would be largely infeasible, and even if accomplished, would have a host of negative consequences such as hindering progress and innovation. This is a much more plausible argument.

But even if correct, I have a sneaking suspicion that if faculty are to be their own judges of quality, then we will be assured that they are all awesome. The straw man counterpoint to this is similar to the old army joke about how to improve accuracy: Shoot first, then call whatever you hit the target.

But suppose you grant the premise: i.e., that only experts/practitioners can judge quality. Wouldn't this place higher education in a situation similar to that of artists? Perhaps that is where they properly belong. Perhaps not. Either way, I have another sneaking suspicion that academics would be very unhappy with the levels of public funding that artists typically receive.

When it comes to judging the quality of art, we are told that we should listen to artists, who are the only legitimate judges of quality. They tell us art is extremely valuable and worthy of public funding, but a skeptical public is not content to just take their word for it. As a result, art has never been generously financed by the public because there is no way to convince the public that it is of high quality.

Higher education has been generously funded by the public in the past because it was widely seen as being of high quality. Rightly or wrongly, public perceptions of the quality of higher ed are being revised downward. If the best that the higher ed establishment can do is to say, “we are the only ones qualified to judge quality, and we can assure you that everything we do is great,” then they are making the same claim artists make and will increasingly receive the same level of public financing. Needless to say, that wouldn’t be good for the industry.

It is in higher ed’s best interest to develop measures of quality that can convince the public that its money is being spent wisely. The alternatives are either to have such measures forced upon them, or to see funding wither away.

Richard Vedder on Problems in Higher Ed

2011-01-20T11:05:00.006-05:00

Today's edition of Inside Higher Ed features, "For Many, College Isn't Worth It," an article from CCAP Director Richard Vedder. In it, Dr. Vedder offers a counter to a recent post by Anthony Carnvale on the topic of underemployment and the use of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data. Vedder asserts that while college may be a good investment for many Americans, for the large group of students that fails to graduate and find good jobs, that proposition is problematic. He further argues that the call by "many higher education advocates to rapidly and radically increase the number of college graduates is fundamentally off-base." We hope you will weigh-in on this debate.

Also, Richard Vedder has a new post over at the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Innovations" blog. In "Academically Adrift: A Must Read," Vedder summarizes Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's important new book which provides startling evidence that many students learn little while in college. Vedder questions why "the financially strapped federal government provides billions of dollars to subsidize students participating in the increasingly expensive and hedonistic experience we call 'higher education?'"

Links for 1/20/11

2011-01-20T10:30:00.000-05:00

Paul Basken

Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles.

"It's a Ponzi scheme," said Kenneth G. Mann, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Vermont, whose concerns were described by Nature. "Eventually you'll have a situation where you're not even producing the feedstock into the system."…

"Nobody has ever asked me how good my papers were, and I think you would find that universally true," he said, "They basically say, Well, how many research dollars are you bringing in?"…

Anthony Carnevale

Those who make the “skip college” argument often bolster their arguments with official state and national Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data suggesting that the U.S. higher education system has been turning out far more college grads than current or future job openings require…

The most persuasive evidence that the BLS numbers are wrong are earnings data, which show that employers across the country pay a "wage premium" to college graduates, even in occupations that BLS does not consider "college" jobs…

To dismiss the significance of wage data requires a belief that employers across the country have systematically hired overqualified workers for their job openings and then grossly overpaid them for the past three decades…

Paul E. Harrington and Andrew M. Sum

Unlike virtually any other analyst of labor market activity, the Georgetown authors define the size of the college labor market as equal to the total number of college graduates that are employed. BLS and most other college labor market analysts define the college labor market as essentially a set of occupations that most often require persons to earn a college degree in order to be fully qualified for employment in that occupations…

for the Georgetown analysts, all the college graduates working as bartenders are part of the college labor market…

BLS analysts disagree. They would not assign any bartender employment to the college labor market because, although one in four bartenders are college graduates, these jobs do not typically utilize the knowledge, skills and abilities acquired in college…

If malemployment among college graduates simply does not exist, as the Georgetown forecasters argue, then there should be little difference in the earnings among college graduates regardless of whether they were employed in college labor market occupations or not... Not surprisingly we found very large and statistically significant difference in the annual earnings of college graduates based on their malemployment status…

Jason Delisle

the recovery rate for a student loan in default is 122 percent. That is, for every $100 in loans that default, the government ultimately collects $122…

These budget numbers have misled reporters, student-loan borrower advocates and industry lobbyists alike…

the default recovery rates are not what they appear. That is, the figures don’t represent the real cost of a default because they don’t factor in how much the government spends to collect a delinquent loan or when the funds are actually collected. Both OMB and the Department of Education will admit that once those costs are included, the recovery rate falls well below 100 percent…

a 2007 Congressional Budget Office study that examined student loan collection information in the National Student Loan Data System found that after accounting for collection costs and the time it takes to collect on a loan, recovery rates are actually only about 50 percent…

Does the Root Problem Lie with Colleges of Education?

2011-01-20T06:00:00.002-05:00

by Jonathan Robe

Last April, Richard Vedder suggested (here and here) that there might, just might, be a connection between low-quality collegiate instruction at colleges of education (notorious across campuses for providing routinely easy A's) and the abysmal performance of those elementary and secondary students the graduates of such colleges teach. Some of the evidence unearthed in Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa earth-shattering new book, Academically Adrift, brought this back to mind. As Kevin Carey puts in his latest column for the Chronicle (emphasis mine), Arum and Roksa

found significant differences [in learning] by field of study. Students majoring in the humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, and math—again, controlling for their background—did relatively well. Students majoring in business, education, and social work did not. Our future teachers aren't learning much in college, apparently, which goes a long way toward explaining why students arrive in college unprepared in the first place.

This observation, of course, makes perfect sense. If we dumb down college curricula (particularly for future educators), we shouldn't be surprised to see students at elementary and secondary schools exhibit lower levels of academic achievement than should be expected of them.

The Study of Beer: Maybe One Reason College Students Don't Learn Much

2011-01-19T15:25:00.005-05:00

by: Matthew Denhart

I began this morning like I have every morning so far this year, tearing away a page to reveal the current date on the 2011 "page a day" calendar of the Stupidest Things Ever Said that I received for Christmas. I was surprised to see that today's entry focuses on higher education. Specifically, the entry features actual college course names/descriptions at three well-known American universities. Here they are:

From Indiana University:

"Art & Science of Beer: We will explore the place of beer in ancient as well as modern life, and the role beer has played in important achievements in microbiology, biotechnology, and physics."

From Duke University:

"Campus Culture and Drinking: The cultural understandings that motivate and shape undergraduate drinking.

From Oklahoma State University:

"International Beverage Education: The history of beverages such as wine, distilled spirits, and beers. Prerequisite: Must be 21 years of age."

Coincidentally, a new book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, was just released by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Arum and Roksa provide strong evidence that little learning actually occurs on college campuses. One wonders why this might be the case.

Threats to Autonomy

2011-01-19T10:00:00.001-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

Dean Dad gets it almost right when he writes

university leaders in several states are proposing a form of fiscal secession from their states. The idea is that in exchange for acceding to ever-greater budget cuts from the state, they will be granted much greater autonomy in decisionmaking…

(It’s also hard to imagine that the alleged autonomy would last very long. As long as there are political points to be scored one way or the other, there will be interference. And the giant sucking sound from public money being hoovered by the plutocracy won’t suddenly stop just because subsidies go away. Next they’ll want PILOTs -- Payments in Lieu of Taxes -- and an end to student loan subsidies.)…

This is almost right, but not quite. The threat to autonomy doesn’t come from the fact that “there are political points to be scored,” but rather from the fact that public money is being spent. You can’t determine someone’s stance on this issue if all you know is their politics. A much better determinant is whether they are happy with the current state of higher education. If so, they are very likely to favor autonomy. If not, they are very likely to favor less autonomy (usually called accountability). Since neither the right nor left has a monopoly on dissatisfaction with the current state of higher ed, politics is not the driving force.

But don’t take my word for it. Here is Armen A. Alchian

THE FACULTY AND administration… have learned to use that political structure… They praise politicians for statesmanlike, responsible behavior when the university budget is increased; but if it is decreased, they cry of political interference. Having accepted almost exclusive dependence on financing directly from the political and legislative processes, they should not complain of “political interference” when that same political process examines more intently the budget and the operations of the university…

Either the students pay and control, or the political processes and politicians do. Yet some of the faculty seem to think they can avoid both…

Links for 1/19/11

2011-01-19T08:00:00.000-05:00

Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

"With regard to the quality of research, we tend to evaluate faculty the way the Michelin guide evaluates restaurants," Lee Shulman, former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently noted. "We ask, 'How high is the quality of this cuisine relative to the genre of food? How excellent is it?' With regard to teaching, the evaluation is done more in the style of the Board of Health. The question is, 'Is it safe to eat here?'" Our research suggests that for many students currently enrolled in higher education, the answer is: not particularly… At least 45 percent of students in our sample did not demonstrate any statistically significant improvement in Collegiate Learning Assessment [CLA] performance during the first two years of college… large numbers of U.S. college students can be accurately described as academically adrift. They might graduate, but they are failing to develop the higher-order cognitive skills that it is widely assumed college students should master…

The U.S. higher-education system has in recent years arguably been living off its reputation as being the best in the world. The findings in our study, however, should remind us that the system's international reputation—largely derived from graduate programs at a handful of elite public and private universities—serves as no guarantee that undergraduate students are being appropriately challenged or exposed to educational experiences…

Scott Jaschik

The main culprit for lack of academic progress of students, according to the authors, is a lack of rigor…

Kevin Carey

there are two kinds of college students in America. A minority of them start with a good high-school education and attend colleges that challenge them with hard work. They learn some things worth knowing. The rest—most college students—start underprepared, and go to colleges that ask little of them and provide little in return. Their learning gains are minimal or nonexistent. Among them, those with a reasonable facility for getting out of bed in the morning and navigating a bureaucracy receive a credential that falsely certifies learning. Others don't get even that…

we have overcomplicated the practice of higher education. It comes down to what it always has—deep engagement with complex ideas and texts, difficult and often solitary study, the discipline to write, revise, and write again. What students need most aren't additional social opportunities and elaborate services. They need professors who assign a lot of reading and writing. Professors, in turn, need a structure of compensation and prestige that rewards a commitment to teaching…

Deep down, everyone knows that learning has long been neglected. But they don't want to know. Policy makers who have poured gigantic sums of money into financial-aid programs designed to get people into college don't want to know that many of the graduates, leaving with degrees in hand, didn't learn anything. College presidents don't want to know, because fixing the problem means arguing with faculty. Faculty don't want to know, because it would expose the weakness of their teaching and take time from research. Students don't want to know, because they'd have to work harder, and it would undermine the value of their credentials.
It has been a conspiracy of convenience…

Arnold Kling

I suspect that this explains some of the wage differential that shows up for college graduates. Graduating high school shows that you can submit to external discipline. Graduating college shows that you can operate under internal discipline…

CCAP in the News

2011-01-18T10:00:00.001-05:00

CCAP's recent study, Intercollegiate Athletics Subsidies: A Regressive Tax, was featured in the most recent edition of Change Magazine. In the magazine's cover story article, Karen Weaver makes the case for athletics reform and highlights CCAP's work on the regressive and inequitable nature of student athletic fees. Here are some more good quotes from Weaver:

College sports, as played by the top universities, have entered an entirely new era. Television is willing to pay substantial sums for lucrative marquee match-ups each week. The Universities of Texas and Notre Dame just signed to play each other for four consecutive years—imagine the television ratings for those games! Next we may find ourselves with a “super-conference,” where four national conferences of 16 teams each will dominate the media and the revenues.

This creates a dilemma for the next group of 70–90 schools. How should they respond? One possible move would be to stop participating in Division I sports and redesign their programs to meet the needs of students. But there are signs that instead, most have ramped up their efforts to join the winners' circle.

On January 6th, The Chronicle of Higher Education revealed that Richard Vedder's "Innovations" blog "Why Did 17 Million Students Go to College?" was its third most read story of 2010.

Also on January 6th, the Austin American Statesman published an opinion article by Richard Vedder examining faculty productivity at Texas A&M University.

Links for 1/18/11

2011-01-18T08:00:00.000-05:00

DAN FROSCH

Nic Ramos, paid his entire spring semester tuition — all $14,309.51 of it — using dollar bills, a 50-cent piece and a penny…

[And the video interview.]

Martha Ann Overland

when students are paying up to $1,000 for books each year…

the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges… has started an ambitious program to develop low-cost, online instructional materials for its community and technical colleges…

DANIEL HAMERMESH

sometimes my own papers are held by scholarly journals for a year, as the journal waits on reviews by one or more delinquent reviewers. David Figlio of Northwestern University has proposed a clever matching mechanism that seems to offer the right incentives on both sides of the market: The editor of scholarly journals can base the author/reviewer match in part on the author’s reviewing speed when s/he has reviewed...

Mark Kantrowitz

Federal law requires colleges to reduce a student’s need-based financial aid package when the student receives a private scholarship. This is referred to as an overaward. After all, receipt of a scholarship reduces the student’s financial need.

Most colleges will reduce their own financial aid funds to eliminate the overaward, rather than decrease the federal financial aid…

Colleges do have flexibility in how they reduce the aid package. Some colleges will substitute the scholarship for their own grant funds, yielding no net financial benefit to the student. Other colleges will let the scholarship replace the loans, effectively reducing the out-of-pocket cost to the student…

WINNIE HU

proposals, meant to introduce competition, choice and incentives to improve education performance — something he calls “market models of school reform” — are becoming more popular, attracting the support of the Obama administration and influential groups like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

In New Jersey, as in other states, the teachers and their unions are resisting…

Links for 1/17/11

2011-01-17T08:00:00.000-05:00

Bob Samuels

I have put together a comprehensive proposal to save vital services, while absorbing the latest round of budget cuts:

1. Reduce senior management group by 20%...

2. Institute a UC tax on all auxiliaries of 10%...

3. Reduce the number of grants that do not bring in at least 50% in indirect cost recoveries…

4. Cap administrative salaries, raises, and supplemental retirement perks. This will reduce future costs and help motivate some overpaid administrators to leave. (cost: priceless).

5. Prevent athletic subsidies…

Bill Tucker

When you see companies no longer touting just enrollment growth, but also graduation and other measures of student success as reasons to invest, then we’ll know that we’ve got the incentives right.

Leonard Cassuto

We teach graduate students to want the kinds of jobs that most of them won't ever get…

Neal McCluskey

You don’t have to suffer from tinfoil-hat paranoia to see real and potential government abuse all over this sorry episode. First, opportunist politicians and others misused the initial GAO report to smear the whole for-profit sector. Then, once the damage was done, the GAO made significant changes to their report without even so much as issuing a press release. And now, as even the amended report is being ripped to shreds, the GAO’s response is basically “you can’t have access to the evidence being used against you, and you don’t need it: We’ve already decided we’re right and you’re wrong.”

Now, are for-profit schools pure and blameless? Absolutely not: Norton/Norris confirmed several of the GAO’s findings, and some findings they questioned are probably accurate. Moreoever, as I’ve pointed out before, many for-profit schools are happy to take students carrying taxpayer dollars despite knowing there’s little chance that those students will ever finish their studies. Of course, that makes those institutions no different from many public and nonprofit private schools about which Sen. Harkin evinces no concern…

Alexandra M. Lord

employers looking to hire a Ph.D. historian tend to balk when the job applicant has absolutely no experience outside of academe. Consequently, jobs with tremendous potential to transform how the American public understands history often go to people who lack extensive academic training in the subject…

Links for 1/14/11

2011-01-14T17:50:00.000-05:00

David Stockton via RTE

a story told by Nobel laureate Ken Arrow. During World War II, Arrow was assigned to a team of statisticians to produce long-range weather forecasts. After a time, Arrow and his team determined that their forecasts were not much better than pulling predictions out of a hat. They wrote their superiors, asking to be relieved of the duty. They received the following reply, and I quote “The Commanding General is well aware that the forecasts are no good. However, he needs them for planning purposes.”

Math jokes:

The logging problem

1960s:

A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four-fifths of that amount. What is his profit?

1970s:
A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is four-fifths of that amount, i.e. $80. What is his profit?

1970s (new math):
A logger exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100. The set C of production costs contains 20 fewer points. What is the cardinality of Set P of profits?

1980s:
A logger cuts and sells a truckload of lumber for $100. Her cost is $80 and her profit is $20. Find and circle the number 20.

1990s:
An unenlightened logger cuts down a beautiful stand of 100 trees in order to make a $20 profit. Write an essay explaining how you feel about this as a way to make money. Topic for discussion: How did the forest birds and squirrels feel?

“Good reasons for not doing your math homework”

I accidentally divided by zero and my paper burst into flames.
I have the proof, but there isn’t room to write it in this margin.
I could only get arbitrarily close to my textbook. I couldn’t actually reach it.
I couldn’t figure out whether i am the square of negative one or i is the square root of negative one.
I’ve included a reference to the solutions manual, reducing this assignment to one previously solved.
I had too much π and got sick.

And Anagrams

committees – cost me time

New Evidence That College is a Risky Investment

2011-01-14T11:01:00.000-05:00

By Richard Vedder*

Many published studies argue that higher education as a private investment yields a high rate of return—10 percent is a commonly cited figure. It is argued that you can do much better investing in higher education than in, say, real estate, stocks, or bonds. I have always been very skeptical of these studies, and two new papers support my view.

I have been saying for years that there is a huge risk that new college entrants will drop out, and that published academic studies usually implicitly look at those who graduate, ignoring a roughly equal number who fail to graduate from college in a timely manner. That is the huge flaw in the Does College Pay? studies annually produced by Sandy Baum for the College Board.

Now two studies, both presented at the American Economic Association meetings in Denver last week, make the same point. In “College Risk and Return,” Gonzalo Castex suggests a large part of the extraordinary (above normal) returns of college are explainable by the compensation needed for risk-averse persons to take the risks of going to college—the risk they might not make it through. Roughly the same thing is argued, albeit a bit differently, by Kartik Athreya and Janice Eberly in “The Education Risk Premium.”

When the return on something is high, investors flock to it, eventually reducing the return to a more “normal” return. Thus when Apple seemed to be making millions of new profits from the hugely popular iPad, dozens of imitators appeared with tablet devices—within months. But seemingly that phenomenon has not happened in higher education—enrollments have risen, but rather sluggishly, and not enough, it would seem, to increase the supply of college graduates enough to depress their average wage and thus the return on college investments.

The reason is that in some risk-adjusted sense, the return to higher education is NOT that unusually high, since the risks associated with “buying” an education are actually greater than buying, say, stock in Procter & Gamble: The probability of essentially losing the investment (by failure to graduate) is greater in higher education than in blue-chip stocks or certainly bonds.

Other evidence suggests that we may be entering an age where the risk-adjusted return on higher education, actually near that of other investments in the past, may be falling below the gains from these alternative opportunities. Tuition fees continue to rise sharply relative to the incomes of college graduates. More college graduates are taking low-paying jobs, say as waiters or cashiers in stores.

As former Spellings Commission chair Charles Miller reminded me the other day, if we reduce the price of higher education through productivity-enhancing changes in higher education, the rate of return will rise. Lower-than-normal returns in higher education can be remedied two ways: by reducing costs (and thus the size of the investment) or by increasing the wage premium associated with college by restricting the supply of growth of new college graduates. Or both.

*This post originally appeared on the "Innovations" blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on January 10, 2011.

The College Athletic Cost Explosion Spreads to Divisions II & III

2011-01-13T11:04:00.000-05:00

By Richard Vedder*

As we, at last, come to the end of the 35 college football bowl games, I would note that part of the expense of producing these ball throwing contests was incurred by the students and their parents currently attending college through tuition or activity fees. I always knew intercollegiate athletics was a huge financial activity at the top football/basketball schools like Texas, Ohio State, USC, and even Duke (see this recent report on the topic), but not at the generally smaller, lower athletic budget schools such as the non-flagship state universities and even private liberal arts colleges. New NCAA data suggests this is flatly wrong.

A new NCAA report on revenues and expenses of Division II schools (of which there are 309) reveals the following:

Division II athletics spending for schools with football rose 10.6 percent a year from 2004 to 2009, not much less than the 11.49 percent annual increase for top Football Bowl Subdivision teams;

Even Division III (of which there are 444) schools with football saw spending rise nearly 45 percent even after adjusting for inflation;

Division III teams without football saw total athletic spending more than double in five years;

Athletics spending in Division II now constitutes nearly 6 percent of the total institutional budget at a typical school;

The share of athletic expenses coming from generated revenues fell from 17 to 12 percent at Division II schools with football from 2004 to 2009.

The NCAA would have one believe that Division II athletic spending is rising no more than total institutional expenditures, which seems dubious to me as I read the data, although admittedly there was a spending spree in all of higher education in most of the period under discussion. An argument for athletic spending at Division 3 (and to some extent, Division 2) schools is that it is an important student recruiting device: at some liberal arts schools, 30-40 percent of students are on some intercollegiate team, and the figure is 10 percent or so at some Division 2 schools (as opposed to well under 5 percent at most FBS powerhouses). But the data suggest the cost of all of this has been very high, contributing to the tuition fee explosion at many schools.

The numbers in the information given out about the NCAA report are a bit sketchy, and no doubt there are accounting issues in assessing revenues and expenditures. For example, the data provided seem to be median figures instead of means (averages). I suspect because of skewness in spending, the means are greater than the medians. It would appear, however, that total athletic spending at the Division 2 schools well exceeds one billion dollars a year, and probably two billion dollars annually for Division II and III combined. I am wondering if our obsession with promoting sports is having a dual undesirable effect of downplaying the academic purpose of schools while all the while adding importantly to the cost explosion. There are schools that have recently announced they are adding football, which strikes me as an incredibly dubious move in these times of budget stringency. Perhaps it is time for the federal government to remove tax exempt status for donations to the non-academic activities of colleges and universities.

*This post originally appeared on CCAP's "Higher Education and the Economy" blog at Forbes.com on January 11, 2010.

Links for 1/13/11

2011-01-13T08:00:00.000-05:00

Michael Poliakoff

the verdict of sociologists Richard Arum from New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia in a recent interview with the New York Times. The details are grim. After tracking a cohort of 2,300 students who started college in fall 2005 and graduated in spring 2009, they report that 36% have moved back home with their parents, almost one-tenth carry over $60,000 in debt. It gets worse: two-thirds earn less than $35,000 and 45% earn less than $15,000…

"large numbers [of students] don't seem to be learning very much."…

Michele McNeil

What $1 Million in Education Stimulus Money Buys

4.2 jobs.

Mark Kantrowitz

529 college savings plans owned by a dependent student or the student’s parent are reported as a parent asset on the Fafsa. In a worst case scenario this will reduce eligibility for need-based financial aid by up to 5.64 percent of the college savings plans.

That still leaves you with 94.36 percent of your money, a significant financial advantage over someone who did not save.

Every dollar you save is a dollar less you will need to borrow (er, 94 cents). Every dollar you borrow will cost you about two dollars by the time you pay back the loan. It is literally cheaper to save than to borrow…

Lee Burdette Williams

Our students are different people late at night. In our classrooms and offices during the day or the library or practice rooms in the evening, they are smart, charming, ambitious, clear-headed and reasonably nice to one another. But like a collegiate version of Teen Wolf, as the clock ticks closer to midnight, they become unrecognizable to us…

If we were to design a similar staffing structure in the retail world, we would be out of business in short order. Imagine a convenience store that closed at noon, a shopping mall that shuttered its doors on the weekends, a train schedule that ignored common commuter times. Imagine a restaurant that served exquisite dinners… at 2 p.m. Or a pub that opened at 8 a.m. and closed at 4 p.m. None would survive, and on the way to their demise, people would say, “Geez. What were they thinking?” But on our campuses, many of us miss the big stuff that happens daily (and nightly) for our students…

Links for 1/12/11

2011-01-12T08:00:00.000-05:00

Dan Ariely

If empirical observation is incompatible with a model, the model must be trashed or amended, even if it is conceptually beautiful, logically appealing, or mathematically convenient...

Michael Huemer

Should I Go to Graduate School in Philosophy?

However smart you may be, when you apply for that coveted position at the University of Colorado, your application will go into a pile of 300 others, of which at least 20 will look about equally good. All 20 of those people will have been the best philosophy students at their colleges. Think about the smartest person you have ever known. Now imagine that there are 20 copies of that person competing with you for a job. That is roughly what it will be like...

Once you’ve received your Ph.D. from somewhere other than a top-twenty school, it is extremely difficult to advance in the field... Hiring committees are lazy and very prestige-oriented...

Since 1940, about 400,000 philosophy books and articles have appeared. What proportion of those do you suppose the average person in the field has read?...

Roxanna Elden

failure IS an option. Ironically enough, it tends to be an especially popular option at schools with giant "Failure is not an option!" posters in front of the main office...

the term paradigm shift has undergone a shift of its own. It has become a code word in any presentation that means, "You can stop listening now."...

Paul E. Peterson

the evidence is showing that schools of choice are compiling a consistently better record than that of traditional public schools.

The Institute of Education Sciences study headed up by Patrick Wolf found students more likely to graduate from voucher schools in Washington, D. C. Kevin Booker, Tim R. Sass, Brian Gill and Ron Zimmer found the same for charter schools in Chicago and Florida. Now a new report from John Warren shows similar results for voucher schools in Milwaukee…

Just why schools of choice produce higher graduation rates—even when, as in Milwaukee and D. C., test score results are not noticeably different—remains a puzzle…

Anne Neal Discussing "What Will They Learn" for the Wall Street Journal

2011-01-11T13:04:00.005-05:00

In today's Opinion Journal, Anne Neal, President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), goes beyond the bowls to discuss how well BCS participants fare when evaluated on their curriculum requirements for students. You will probably be surprised with what ACTA has uncovered. Check it out.

Coverage of the For-Profit Higher Education Industry

2011-01-11T09:00:00.000-05:00

by: Matthew Denhart

Back early last month I had the pleasure of participating on the media panel of the higher education symposium put on by the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU). The discussion revolved around the extremely negative publicity the industry has been receiving over the past year. I was joined on the panel by a reporter for NPR and another from the National Journal. Both explained that media stories of the industry have been mostly negative because they are covering the Senate committee hearings and U.S. Department of Education proposed industry regulations (which I have argued are counter-productive) that themselves have cast for-profit colleges in a negative light. Even if a news story provides both sides, readers are still presented a negative viewpoint on a for-profit industry that otherwise rarely makes the press.

This seems logical, but there is more to the story. Last week, The Village Voice announced that it was retracting its article "For-Profit Blues" because the article's author, Rob Sgobbo, had fabricated significant parts of the story. Specifically, Sgobbo invented a fake student named Tamicka Bourges and claimed that she had accumulated large debts at Berkeley College. Additionally, Sgobbo claimed he spoke with a representative at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) named Matt Fraser about the GAO's recent report that questioned the recruiting practices of many for-profit institutions. The only problem is that the GAO has no employees by that name.

This follows the announcement in December that the GAO's own report required several revisions. As Frederick Hess and Andrew Kelly pointed out, all the errors were such that they originally made the for-profit industry appear in a more negative light than was justified. I'll take a pass on speculating whether or not this was a mere accident on the part of the GAO, but either way it is another example of the industry receiving undeserved bad publicity.

Amidst all this bad publicity for higher education, one wonders why the traditional higher ed sector has escaped. Congress and the Department of Ed have focused rather keenly upon for-profit schools but ignored the reality that many non-profit institutions have very poor outcomes (for example, the University of the District of Columbia -- a mere 6 miles from the U.S. Capitol -- has a 4 year graduation rate of 3 percent). Rather than singularly attacking the for-profit industry, and sometimes using totally inaccurate claims, the media could provide a valuable service to the American people by telling these stories as well.

Links for 1/11/11

2011-01-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

Kelli Space

I had bought into every piece of college propaganda on the supposed personal and financial benefits of campus life and getting my degree. Unfortunately, I had also overlooked the minor detail of how I would pay for this coveted experience. “Private loans,” advisers suggested. “Everyone does it. It’s good debt!”…

Elyse Ashburn

legacy applicants got a 23.3-percentage-point increase in their probability of admission…

Josh Fischman

“We have a boutique problem,” said Mark David Milliron, deputy director of higher education for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who joined Ms. Thor on the panel, which was about using technology to improve graduation rates. There are plenty of good ideas, the two said, but colleges are reluctant to adopt solutions that did not arise from their own campuses.
There is an institutional mind-set, Mr. Milliron said, that if something was not invented on a particular campus, it is not appropriate for that particular campus…

“Higher education has been good at creating islands of innovation,”…

DAVID SEGAL

He spent it on a law degree. And from every angle, this now looks like a catastrophic investment.

Well, every angle except one: the view from law schools. To judge from data that law schools collect, and which is published in the closely parsed U.S. News and World Report annual rankings, the prospects of young doctors of jurisprudence are downright rosy.

In reality, and based on every other source of information, Mr. Wallerstein and a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades…

How do law schools depict a feast amid so much famine?

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson… “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”…

Apparently, there is no shortage of 22-year-olds who think that law school is the perfect place to wait out a lousy economy and the gasoline that fuels this system — federally backed student loans — is still widely available…

law school is a pie-eating contest where the first prize is more pie…

Law School: Lottery or Tournament?

2011-01-10T11:39:00.000-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

David Segal's piece on law school in the NY Times is deservedly getting lots of attention. The moral of his story is that the overproduction of lawyers is reducing salaries to such an extent that recent graduates have a very hard time paying back their student loans. The only ones that don’t struggle are those that win the lottery for the few high paying jobs available.

Kevin Carey thinks this is off; that it is not a lottery but a tournament:

there was nothing random about it… Everyone applying to law school takes the same standardized test. Classes are graded on a curve and class rank is relative to other students who took the same classes. It’s not perfect–nothing is–but law school is about as close to a fully-transparent pure meritocracy as you’ll find in American education.

It’s a valid point, but it misses something pretty fundamental about tournaments – the prizes are known in advance.

That is clearly not the case with law school. Many law schools report average salaries of $160k, leading many students to think they have a good shot at getting a job paying $160k after graduating. But they don't. Nor is $160k an accurate figure even for the best schools. As Felix Salmon explains,

Even at Harvard and Yale I’m suspicious of that $160,000 figure; for the non-top-tier colleges, it’s clearly fictional. No matter how many of your graduates go on to $160,000-a-year jobs, there’s always going to be a significant number who earn a lot less than that and there are going to be almost none who earn more. As a result, the mode might be $160,000, but the median will never be that high.

How do they report such high numbers? As Segal reports,

“Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson… “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.”…

Top students may get exactly what they expected. But many students just below them could reasonably expect, based on what law schools tell them, that "second place winners" get a prize too, only to discover at the end that there is no prize for second place.

Overall, I view the process of law school itself as a tournament, but going to law school as a lottery. I buy Carey’s argument that entrance and progression through law school can be thought of as a tournament. But Segal’s piece dealt with the end result, not the process leading up to it. And from the student’s perspective, there is a large random element in the end result relative to the reasonably expected result. This difference is primarily determined by the extent to which law school’s lie to their students. A tournament with uncertain winnings for most of the winners is basically a lottery.

Help With the Matching Problem

2011-01-10T10:11:00.004-05:00

by Daniel L. Bennett
Note: This is a satirical piece

Economists often discuss the matching problem in the labor market. In other words, the labor supply may equal the labor demand, but there are sometimes problems in matching prospective employees with certain skills with employers seeking employees with certain skills. Part of the problem is that there are information and search costs involved. Being one who likes to solve problems, I've identified a possible employee-employer match.

According to Inside Higher Ed, Rob Sgobbo is an award-winning graduate of Columbia University's journalism school. His award was for education reporting. He recently wrote a freelance piece for The Village Voice that was highly critical of for-profit colleges and universities. The article was later rescinded when the publication realized that at least part of his story was a fabrication. In addition to the fabrications, Sgobbo also apparently has trouble regurgitating statistics, as he stated in his article that for-profit enrollments grew from 365,000 in 2005 to 1.8 million in 2009. A quick glance at Figure 1 of CCAP's report on for-profit education reveals that enrollments in the sector have been well above 365,000 since the mid 90s.

Looks like Scobbo is a great match for the GAO's investigative arm.

Links for 1/10/11

2011-01-10T08:00:00.001-05:00

Collin Hitt

Today, teacher evaluations are not used to inform personnel decisions. Therefore, on balance, they are not conducted with earnest. Therefore, they lack accurate information. Therefore, as poor meters of quality, they have no business being used to inform school-level policy. Therefore, they cannot be used to inform personnel decisions…

Richard B. Freeman, Stephen Machin, and Martina Viarengo

the highest-scoring countries are those with the least inequality in test scores, suggesting a “virtuous” equity-efficiency trade-off...

EduBubble

it’s all about getting warm bodies to apply and get rejected, just so the suckers who do get in feel good about spending so much...

Joanne Jacobs

What happens when a disorganized, dysfunctional school gets a bunch of computers? Nothing…

Too Many Ph.D.’s and Professionals?

2011-01-10T04:00:00.003-05:00

by Richard Vedder*

In two blogs in this space (here and here) that stirred up some interest (80 comments), I presented evidence that a large portion of those receiving bachelor’s degrees at American colleges and universities these days are getting jobs requiring less-than-college-level educational skills. I went on to argue that this is further evidence that the strategy of trying to dramatically increase the number of those with degrees may be counterproductive, and that we in fact in one sense are “overinvested” in higher education—that more people are getting degrees than the number of jobs available that traditionally have gone to college graduates (for a complete study on this topic, click here).

Mentioning this, however, leads to two fears. One is that some people, for whom college is almost certainly likely to be a good investment of time and money, might decide to forgo an education, to their detriment and that of society. There are still a good number of students who benefit from a college education.

However, I have a second, seemingly contradictory fear: that as college grads learn of the job/degree imbalance, they will try to get around the problem in some cases by inappropriately going to school even more, by getting a master’s or even doctoral degree, or perhaps become a member of the professions—becoming, say, a lawyer. The Bureau of Labor Statistics data suggest that the problem of underemployment or over-education (taking jobs requiring vastly less education than that acquired) extends very much to still higher levels of learning, to advanced degrees.

Consider the following. Looking at BLS data for 2008, over 10,500 persons with Ph.D. or professional degrees were employed as “cashiers” (excluding gaming); over 27,400 were retail salespersons; and well over 4,700 were hairdressers, hairstylists, or cosmetologists. My sidekick Chris Matgouranis found 10 occupations like these: the ones listed above plus waiters and waitresses, landscaping workers, amusement and recreation attendants, receptionists and information clerks, secretaries (except legal, medical, and executive), truck drivers (heavy and tractor-trailer) and electricians. Collectively, these occupations had well over 74,000 with doctorates or such professional degrees as a J.D. Other evidence confirms this. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that 29 percent of new lawyers were not doing legal work, consistent with the notion that there is a glut of those with doctorates and some professional degrees. The Economist recently published an article presenting evidence of very dim job prospects for many new Ph.D.’s.

To be sure, some of this is related to the recent prolonged economic downturn. Yet stories of, say, historians, with doctorates doing all sorts of non-history type work, have been around for years. Training Ph.D.’s and professionals is extremely expensive—often six-digit amounts for the post-bachelor’s training, only part of which is billed to the student. Why are we doing this? Why, for example, doesn’t the U.S. go to perhaps 30 or 40 Ph.D. programs in history (instead of 100 or more), to train perhaps one-third the number of students that we train now? That would be enough to keep us from losing touch with our heritage, and would allow us to continually record and analyze our ever-growing past, and continue to disseminate that knowledge to a broader public.

The argument sometimes used to keep graduate programs is they are is that relatively low-paid graduate students are doing a lot of the undergraduate teaching. But does that not really mean that such students are doing work traditionally done by faculty, who don’t want to have to stoop to teaching lowly undergraduates? And the fact that graduate students in some disciplines, including the humanities, often take eight or more years to get their degrees suggests that the true cost of these degrees (including the value of work foregone while in school) is even higher than the mere tuition fees, etc., would indicate.

Many programs are kept, of course, because the faculty members teaching them want to keep their jobs, or simply prefer teaching advanced graduate students. In other cases, the institution equates prestige and status with offering a large number of graduate/professional programs, and thus resists abandoning them. One of the healthy byproducts of the financial squeeze facing some schools as a consequence of weak business conditions is that out of sheer desperation they are being forced to abandon some of these programs that make little sense on any sort of rational cost-benefit analysis.

In a pure unfettered market economy, there are no such things as “shortages” or “gluts” of any type of worker—wages adjust to meet market conditions. If we are turning out too many historians, their pay will reach such low levels that few new candidates will pursue that field. But the combination of subsidies (mostly publicly but some privately financed) and nonprofit institutional status leads us to continue to produce highly trained individuals who do things that society does not find very valuable. When the political process, rather than market process, controls resource allocation and compensation, we tend to get undesirable results.

*This post originally appeared on the "Innovations" blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on January 5, 2011.

Attacking Higher Ed Cost Inflation: Reform Academic Employment Policies

2011-01-07T10:30:00.001-05:00

By Daniel L. Bennett*

With the November midterm elections delivering what President Obama called a “shellacking” to the Democratic party, many have suggested that there could be political gridlock in Washington for the next few years. With the 112^th Congress taking seat this week, there is still a lot of speculation about whether the President and a newly divided Congress will be able to meet in the middle to pass any meaningful legislation. One policy concern that both sides of the aisle could and should address, however, is reigning in the rapidly increasing cost of college. Past political efforts to slow tuition inflation have been largely ineffective as the generosity of lawmakers to dole out cash in the form of student financial aid and institutional subsidies have been swallowed up and spit back out in the form of tuition hikes by college administrators whose spending habits (i.e., spend all of their revenues and then some) resemble those of Washington.

To slow the growth of tuition, we need reforms that attack the inefficient cost structure and low productivity in higher education. We have recently suggested a number of such reforms in our book-length policy research tool, 25 Ways to Reduce the Cost of College, which features 25 chapters, organized into five topical sections, each describing a different way that college administrators and policy leaders can make college less expensive. One such policy suggests that colleges reform their academic employment policies by replacing tenure with one of a number of alternatives that would preserve the holy grail of higher education, academic freedom, which is necessary to prevent faculty from being arbitrarily dismissed for saying or writing things that administrators or influential outsiders consider wrong or offensive.

As the 1940 AAUP Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure describes, tenure is merely a “means to certain ends,” suggesting that it is not the only mechanism to protect academic freedom. In fact, it is an economically inefficient means of doing it. One theory behind tenure is that “only those professors who have proven their worth through excellence in teaching, research, and service during the probationary period will be awarded tenure.”^[1]

Under most private sector employment policies, however, when an employee has demonstrated that his/her work no longer meets a minimum standard of quality (and often after efforts to rehabilitate have failed), the employer initiates action to terminate that unproductive employee. Under a tenure policy, however, the employer effectively loses this flexibility to eliminate tenured faculty whose quality of work fails to meet a minimally acceptable level or whose productivity has dwindled over the years. This is often referred to as the deadwood dilemma. And while deadwood faculty are by no means the norm in higher education (the majority of faculty surely pulls its own weight), the mere inability to remove unproductive faculty is economically inefficient for colleges and unjust to the students paying tuition and forced to sit through classes with professors who view them as a nuisance.

The dynamic nature of the global economy requires that organizations have the flexibility to adapt to changes in the world. The presence of tenure in higher education significantly reduces a college’s ability to efficiently reallocate resources in response to consumer demand–a hindrance that would be life-threatening to an organization in a healthy market economy. A tenure policy increases the cost of college, as institutions are forced to hire additional faculty to teach courses in popular disciplines with high demand, rather than being able to reallocate faculty resources from subjects that are in low demand by students and the labor market.

In addition to being a costly employment policy, tenure also results in a reward structure that is largely misaligned with the interest of the public, as tenure rewards research and public stature, while it punishes teaching. This opinion appears to be quite common among scholars, as it has been suggested that “academic culture is not merely indifferent to teaching, it is actively hostile to it,” and that “receiving an award for good teaching is considered the kiss of death for an untenured professor [implying that] anyone who spends so much time preparing for class must somehow be deficient in research.”^[2] The current tenure system provides an incentive for professors to neglect their teaching and service duties in pursuit of publishing research, a questionable reward structure that appears to be misaligned with one of the primary missions of higher education – to educate citizens and the future workforce.

There are several alternatives to tenure, some of which colleges have widely adopted. For instance, many colleges have steadily increased their use of contingent, or non-tenure track, faculty. In public institutions, for example, the percentage of full-time contingent faculty increased from 19 to 32 percent between 1989 and 2007.^[3] Additionally, most institutions have adopted a post-tenure performance review policy; however, many have criticized such policies as largely inconsequential. For example, the President of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Anne Neal, described the current post-tenure review process as a “ritualistic exercise in rubberstamping,” suggesting that while widely implemented, "it carries little value as an effective practice of increasing accountability among faculty.”^[4]

There are several other prospective employment policies that would increase the economic efficiency of colleges, but have yet to be widely implemented. One alternative would be to replace tenure with long-term, renewable faculty contracts. Such contracts could be structured for an initial probationary period of three to five years, with the criteria for performance evaluation (a detailed outline of teaching, scholarly, and service expectations)^[5] specified in the contract, including a clause pertaining to academic freedom to avoid diminishing it. If after the probationary period, a faculty member passed his/her performance review and there was still a need for the position at the college, then the contract would be renewed, with a subsequent performance review similar to the initial one. This contract renewal process would continue, with perhaps an increase in the length of additional contracts, not to exceed ten years, as a reward for continued successful performance. Several institutions, such as the Franklin W. Olin College, Lindenwood University, and Quest University in Canada, have adopted such a policy and have experienced some early successes.

Another alternative, an idea similar to that proposed by my colleague Richard Vedder in his book Going Broke by Degree, would be to offer tenure (or enhanced job security) as one of a number of compensation options for which individual faculty choose from a menu of compensation items, including salary, health and life insurance plans, retirement contributions, and time off, etc. Each faculty member would be allowed a given level of total benefits and would make trade-offs among the various options in accordance with their individual risk tolerance and familial needs. For example, a mid-career professor who is risk averse and has small children at home might elect job security in exchange for a reduction in his or her annual salary or other benefit levels; whereas a single and highly sought-after researcher might elect a higher salary and retirement contributions over job security. This would be a much more efficient means of allocating university resources, and would better meet the needs of individual employees.

The alternatives mentioned, if implemented judiciously, offer some generalized approaches to reducing the cost inefficiencies imposed by tenure without requiring a low-ball pay structure or imperiling academic freedom; however, there is no one-size-fits all solution. The optimal strategy for one institution type may vary from what is most effective at another. For instance, research-intensive universities might benefit most from a hybrid of renewable long-term contracts and fringe benefit trade-offs, whereas it may be most efficient for teaching colleges to utilize a combination of contingent faculty and renewable contracts. Tenure as an employment policy, however, is no longer economically sustainable if we want to solve the price inflation problem in higher education. You can read a more detailed analysis of this, as well as 24 other ideas to reign in college cost inflation, in CCAP’s publication, 25 Ways to Reduce the Cost of College. Free PDF downloads of each individual chapter, the entire 234 page report, or a 43 page summary of the report, are available on the CCAP website.

[1]Robert McGee and Walter Block, “Academic Tenure: An Economic Critique,” Academic Freedom and Tenure: Ethical Issues, (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 1997).

[2] Ibid

[3] http://www.centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/25_Ways_Ch03.pdf

[4] Anne Neal, “Reviewing Post-Tenure Review,” Academe Online, September-October 2008.

[5] Victor Davis Hanson, “Reconsidering Tenure: Its Time Has Come,” Tribune Media Services, 16 May 2005.

*This post originally appeared on the Forbes blog site on January 3, 2010.

Links for 1/7/11

2011-01-07T08:00:00.000-05:00

Funny comment and reply.

Anonymous

Because…

If you thought underemployment among US college graduates was bad, get a load of this:

over 4,000 people — some with university degrees — applied for 33 rat catcher positions.

Measuring College Affordability

2011-01-06T10:33:00.003-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

Robert Martin and I have a new working paper available at SSRN. From the abstract:

The effect of rising net attendance prices on college students and their families is a contested issue. Traditionally, this financial burden is measured by the share of income taken by the net price of attendance. Recently, some claim the residual real income left after paying for college should be the measure of this financial burden: if residual real income increases, the household must be better off. Using a household utility function we demonstrate that the residual income argument is flawed since the substitution effect leads to an increase in non-college expenditures regardless of the change in utility. On the other hand, we find that changes in utility are a function of the share of income accounted for by the net attendance price and the ratio of the growth rate in net price to the growth rate in income.

In general, household utility declines as net price increases for low income households and for households with slow growing incomes. Hence, rising real net attendance price is a "regressive tax" that is particularly burdensome for low income households. Further, when net price increases, households substitute away from college attendance, causing increases in expenditures for composite commodities, regardless of whether or not household utility is increasing or decreasing. Therefore, changes in expenditures for other goods tell us nothing about the burden imposed by rising net attendance prices. Finally, the model suggests a variety of empirical results for measuring changes in affordability. We also pursue these results in the paper.

Links for 1/6/11

2011-01-06T09:54:00.001-05:00

Keith Hampson

anybody above the age of, say, 25, and that holds a college degree should know that quality must ALWAYS be understood in terms of cost. Cost and quality two sides of the concept we call “value”. To discuss one without the other in this context is naïve, silly even…

they could grasp it theoretically, and the participating faculty members may have even applied the concepts to a client for whom they consult, but they have never struggled with it in the context of the institution in which they work.

And I understand why this is the case. Many people can spend an entire career in higher education without ever measuring output in relation to input – particularly academics…

Joshua Angrist, Philip Oreopoulos, Tyler Williams

The award scheme offered linear cash incentives for course grades above 70… overall treatment effects were small… We argue that these results fit in with an emerging picture of mostly modest effects for cash award programs of this type at the post-secondary level.

Charlotte Allen

the colleges themselves have already figured out on their own how to lower instruction costs drastically, and have done so quite ruthlessly without trimming their ever-escalating overall costs one whit…

Joanne Jacobs

Community college students in career programs aren’t pondering the meaning of life, but neither are most four-year students, who are piling up a lot of debt for that sociology degree.

'A Crazy Quilt of Discounting'

2011-01-06T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Jonathan Robe

Mark Schneider had a rather good (though short) post Tuesday over at the The Enterprise Blog in which he noted that the rise in college tuition from the 2007-08 to 2009-10 academic years was roughly three times higher than inflation as measured by the CPI. This observation is not, it goes without saying, a new one. After all, historically, annual rates of increase in college tuition have routinely outpaced (even quite substantially so) the annual rates of increase in the CPI (see Table 1-1 of Going Broke by Degree, for data on the 1979-2003 period).

What's even more interesting (and disturbing), though, is that since the start of the recent recession (during a time when household incomes experienced a sharp decline), the annual rate of increase in college tuition slowed only slightly: growth went from 6.4% in 2007 to 6.3% in 2008 to 5.9% in 2009 to 5.8% this past year.* Basically, what Schneider notes is that while students and their families' ability to pay was decreasing (in real terms), the real price of college was increasing.

Of course, as Schneider also notes, one of the primary ways in which colleges try to mitigate this fundamental disconnect in pricing is through price discrimination. (Because Schneider restricts his discussion only to institutional grants, his graphs understate the extent of price discrimination for students). Nevertheless, even looking only at institutional aid reveals college pricing to be the mess that it is:

This crazy quilt of discounting creates a complicated pricing system that is hard for anyone to understand—and probably benefits nobody, except perhaps colleges and universities.... [W]e have no idea how many students are scared off from applying to college by the high and ever-increasing tuition that schools post, and we are yet to find out how well schools do in displaying their net price and how much such information will affect student choice.

*To compute these annual rates of increase, I took the May-to-May percent increase in the college tuition and fees index numbers reported by the BLS.

Links for 1/5/11

2011-01-05T08:00:00.000-05:00

Publius Audax

Tie the salaries of professors and lecturers to the number of students they attract to their classes…

Completely eliminate all direct subsidies from the state to colleges and universities… In their place, we increase scholarships and college-loan subsidies that go directly to students

Abolish tenure…

Require every state college to provide third-party assessment of its students’ progress in meeting its stated educational objectives…

Jung Ha-Won

Almost 30 robots have started teaching English to youngsters in a South Korean city…

The robots, which display an avatar face of a Caucasian woman, are controlled remotely by teachers of English in the Philippines – who can see and hear the children via a remote control system…

Myra H. Strober

The three common explanations for a lack of faculty interest in interdisciplinary work are that the academic reward system militates against it (hiring, promotion, salary increases, and most prizes are controlled by single disciplines, not by multiple disciplines), that there is insufficient funding for it, and that evaluating it is fraught with conflict…

I found an even more fundamental barrier to interdisciplinary work: Talking across disciplines is as difficult as talking to someone from another culture… What is much more difficult is coming to understand and accept the way colleagues from different disciplines think—their assumptions and their methods of discerning, evaluating, and reporting "truth"—their disciplinary cultures and habits of mind…

MICHAEL VASQUEZ

Bachelor's degree recipients from the state's 11 public universities earned an average starting salary of $36,552 in 2009.

Meanwhile, those who received associate in science degrees from Florida community colleges earned an average of $47,708…

Stephanie Landsman

The American Bar Association has officially issued a warning on its website.

The ABA is now making the case to persuade college students not to go to law school.

Chart of the Week: College Enrollment Growth

2011-01-05T00:01:00.003-05:00

by Daniel L. Bennett

To start off 2011, CCAP brings you two charts of the week, although they do go hand in hand. The first shows the growth in college enrollments by institutional control. The data represent decennial periods beginning in fall 1869. College enrollment grew from around 52,000 in 1869 to 238,000 by 1899. By 1939, enrollments soared to nearly 1.5 million - prior to the federal government offering student financial assistance, which began with the 1944 GI Bill. By 1969, enrollment topped 8 million, and is approaching 20 million today.

While the first chart shows the absolute growth in enrollment, the second chart shows the growth rate (percentage change) of college enrollments by decade since 1869. As can be seen, the growth rate of college enrollment grew steadily prior to the start of the Great Depression, with growth rates resuming as WWI winded down. The GI Bill likely had a significant impact in providing many returning veterans with financial support to attend college. The growth rate would subside in the following decade, but would resume explosive growth between 1959 and 1969. This likely had a lot to do with passage of the 1965 Higher Education Act, which marked the beginning of the federal government's financial aid system. The growth rate has declined each decade since then, with the exception of the most recent decade in which enrollment growth has resumed.

Links for 1/4/11

2011-01-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

Joanne Jacobs

Money isn’t everything. Five years ago, donors offered to pay college tuition for all graduates of public schools in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Students can use the offer at any public college or university in the state. While 81 percent of graduates receive a scholarship, only 54 percent have earned a degree…

Most promise-style scholarships reward residency in a school district, city or state, rather than academic merit, though some set minimum grade-point averages or college-entrance exam scores. The effect is to encourage less-prepared students to try college…

Brian T. Sullivan

The academic library died alone, largely neglected and forgotten by a world that once revered it as the heart of the university. On its deathbed, it could be heard mumbling curses against Google…

As databases became more intuitive and simpler to use, library instruction in the use of archaic tools was no longer needed…

since it became so easy and inexpensive to find adequate resources, paying significantly more for the absolute best was no longer an option for perpetually cash-strapped colleges…

Bob Samuels

36 UC execs have called on President Yudof to “do the right thing” and allow their pensions to go beyond the IRS income limit shows in bright strokes how the university has taken on the logic of a Wall Street firm. Not only does the upper management seek to reduce labor costs by
lowering benefits, reducing salaries, busting unions, and eliminating positions, but there is an insatiable hunger to transfer wealth and power to the top…

ACT

only one third to one-half of the 11th-grade students are reaching a college and career readiness level of achievement.

Bryan Caplan

I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley during the heydey of political correctness. Everyone in the dorms was urged to attend DARE seminars - not "Drug Abuse Resistance Education" but "Diversity Awareness Through Resources and Education." The goal, quite plainly, was to create a one-sided educational culture so the next generation would accept the self-styled awareness raisers' agenda as gospel. Political correctness isn't justhypersensitivity; it's hypersensitivity designed to place a permanent stamp on impressionable young minds. From this perspective, political correctness isn't essentially leftist. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight, leftist political correctness hasn't been all that effective. The full-blown triumph of political correctness, of hypersensitivity plus one-sided education, is patriotism.

Schooling That Works: Four Great Innovations

2011-01-03T14:13:00.001-05:00

By: Richard Vedder

Readers of my rants about higher education know that I generally believe that higher education in America is highly inefficient, overpriced, and produces dubious outcomes, including many graduates who end up in relatively low end jobs. But not all of higher education is like that. I would like to discuss four examples of schools or ideas that work –that lead to either a higher quality or lower cost educational experience –or both. This list is hardly exhaustive, but it is indicative of how higher education could transform itself into being more effective.

Acton School of Business

No doubt the most unusual M.B.A. program in the country is run by the Acton School of Business in Texas. It is built on the premise that incentives matter and that higher education’s failures are usually attributable to a lack of proper incentives. The school is the brainchild of Jeff Sandefer, a Texas business professor and entrepreneur who started the institution. As I understand it, new entering students pay a relatively high private school tuition to attend their first semester. They work like dogs –sort of a boot camp for entrepreneurs, working typically more than 12 hour days at least six days weekly –no 30 hour work weeks as is common in academia. Students successfully completing the first semester are given the second semester free of charge. If they complete the second (and last) semester, they get a rebate on the tuition for the first semester. They are expected, however, to pledge eventually make donations to the school at least equal to the value of the tuition if they feel they benefited materially from it (this is more of a moral than legal obligation, I understand).

Not only are students incentivized to work hard, so are faculty members.Salaries are modest –$5,000 or so per course. But huge bonuses are given for superior teaching performance ($20,000 or more per course). And each year, the lowest performing professor, based on student evaluations, is dropped from the faculty –no tenure here. Princeton Review considers it one of the nation’s top MBA programs, and my guess is its reputation among employers, etc., will grow over time. Obviously, a lot of private funds are needed to make this program work, and its advantage is less the cost savings per student (which are nonetheless real) than the high quality of the finished product.

Berea College

In many regards, Berea is a fairly typical liberal arts college, with a pretty good reputation for quality. What makes it different is that its leaders take extremely seriously the notion that college should be affordable. Most students are from relatively low income backgrounds in the surrounding Appalachian region. They pay no tuition fees beyond which are covered by external grants (e.g., Pell Grants). All students work at the college to reduce non-academic personnel costs. The college’s great commitment to access and affordability has led to loyal alums and others giving the school a lot of money, so it has a huge endowment that covers tuition charges rather than spending on costly administrators, fancy buildings, etc. Located in one of the nation’s poorest regions, the school offers affordable high quality (but low frill) college to poor students. Berea is not alone in pursuing this type of mission –College of the Ozarks in Missouri and Coopers Union in New York City have similar commitments, but this focused concern for the customer as opposed to the wishes of others (faculty, administrative staff, etc.) is relatively rare and refreshing.

Olin School of Engineering

In just eight years, the Olin School of Engineering has become one of the best undergraduate schools of engineering in the U.S. It is small (a bit over 300 students), extremely selective and unique in several ways. Until recently, there were no tuition charges, a policy dropped because of the 2008 financial crisis, but the school hopes to revert to 100 percent scholarships for all students. It is a teaching not a research institution. Most engineering schools load the students up on a heavy dose of theory and basics early in the career, and have only modest amounts of hands-on training with real engineering problems. Olin gets students into hands-on real-world like experiences early, although the standard basic cources in math, etc., are still taught, and rigorously. (Like many good engineering schools, students work very hard, but largely because they want to — these kids seem to love the place).

The school is focused on one narrow mission. It does not pretend to be a research powerhouse. Teachers are hired because they are bright, innovative, but above all good in the classroom. The school emphasizes the real-world a good bit, and realizes that many engineers end up as corporate managers and even entrepreneurs –hence some emphasis also on entrepreneurship and the liberal arts. I have talked to several very successful business executives who are high on this school, and hope others are learning lessons from this new venture.

StraighterLine

One of the most innovative entrepreneurs in higher education is Burck Smith, who founded and runs StraighterLine and a companion company called SmartThinking. A Williams College and Harvard graduate, Smith has strayed far from his traditional elitist educational background, offering cheap courses on line in many subjects that can then be transferred to accredited colleges and universities with which he has developed a working relationship. Many of these schools are for profit institutions like Kaplan, Capella, or Ashford University, but some are more traditional state schools, like Fort Hays State in Kansas (run for over 23 years by the estimable Edward Hammond, himself one of the greatest public sector entrepreneurs in America), or Western Governors University, a non-profit private on-line university with relatively high standards (and run by another visionary leader, Bob Mendenhall).

StraighterLine claims a person can take a year’s worth of college courses for a thousand bucks. Even if you buy á la carte off their menu (catalogue) of courses, the cost of a year’s education is far less than most four year schools. Yet StraighterLine offers no degrees itself, and is not accredited, although it apparently has a good relationship with the premier trade organization for higher education, the American Council of Education.

Most courses use McGraw-Hill text materials. The economics course uses the iconic McConnell and Brue textbook. Campbell McConnell decades ago wrote a slightly watered down but still sound version of the flagship text by Paul Samuelson. It has been updated forever. I used the book to teach principles of economics over 40 years ago. Although some would say it is a little light with the latest theoretical fads in economics, it still remains a good rendition of basic economic principles. Students taking the course have some use of on-line tutoring services, of no doubt varying quality and accessibility. While not perfect, I think StraigherLine is a neat concept and one worth emulating —and a great argument for expanding the ease of credit transferability.

Note: all of these innovations are in the private sector. There are some good examples of new innovations at public schools such as Fort Hays State, but I think a disproportionate part of positive change in higher education will come from private sector innovators, many incentivized by the same profit motive that gave us such innovations as the personal computer, iPhone and iPad, and, for that matter, Scotch tape and probably sliced bread.

This post originally appeared on CCAP's "Higher Education and the Economy" blog at Forbes.com on December 28, 2010.

Links for 1/3/11

2011-01-03T08:00:00.000-05:00

RiShawn Biddle and Jay Mathews

Mathews: I was intrigued by your argument that what happens in the classroom is NOT the most important part of improving schools. What do you think is more important, and why?

Biddle: Certainly you can't improve schools without improving what happens in classrooms. All that said, you can’t fix what happens in classrooms until you deal with the systemic problems plaguing American public education today: Low teacher quality; abysmal curricula; the failure to inform parents and let them be lead players in education decision-making; and a culture of low expectations set by teachers, administrators, parents and community leaders alike…

TAMAR LEWIN

if everybody in the class gets an A, what does an A mean?...

Princeton adopted guidelines in 2004 providing that no more than 35 percent of undergraduate grades should be A’s, a policy that remains controversial on campus…

Dartmouth transcripts include median grades, along with the number of courses in which the student exceeded, equaled or came in lower than those medians. Columbia transcripts show the percentage of students in the course who earned an A…

a study by three Cornell economists found a large increase in enrollment in courses with a median grade of A — further driving grade inflation…

JAMES WARREN

Heckman marshals ample data to suggest that better teaching, higher standards, smaller classrooms and more Internet access “have less impact than we think,”…

He urges more effectively educating children before they step into a classroom where, as Chicago teachers tell me, they often are clueless about letters, numbers and colors — and lack the attentiveness and persistence to ever catch up…

Stuart Rojstaczer & Christopher Healy

nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade… They also may help explain why undergraduate students are increasingly disengaged from learning and why the US has difficulty filling its employment needs in engineering and technology…

Links for 12/31/10

2010-12-31T08:00:00.000-05:00

Master Sergeant Mark Morgan is pretty awesome.

The U.S. Army is not know for its loose "take a few weeks off to go follow your dreams" policies, but Morgan somehow found time to practice…

NYC has odd priorities – they spend money to keep the “wrong” people from recycling trash.

Seems fair to me.

Links for 12/30/10

2010-12-30T08:00:00.000-05:00

Christian Helmers and Mark Rogers

Our main finding is that the quality and quantity of engineering and biological university research is positively associated with small-firm patenting. We do not find any statistically significant correlation between university research and large-firm patenting…

David N. Bass

I made a decision early on that college was about getting a piece of paper, not an education. My goal wasn’t to become a better-rounded individual, or even to gain a greater understanding of my major area of study. Rather, it was to gain the educational credential that employers now use as a screening device for most jobs. And my experience confirmed what I had expected—that post-secondary education today has only a lackluster ability to provide real value aside from that credential…

Overall, I found my on-the-job experience far more valuable in terms of education than my college coursework… Reading about my major area of study was interesting—doing it was far more useful…

Michael Petrilli

Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and now the New York Times editorial page have all come out in favor of squeezing teacher benefits, slashing regulations (including for special education), and consolidating schools. Keep that in mind this spring when the teachers unions try to paint cost-cutting governors and legislators as right-wing lunatics.

Kevin Carey

the last guy who tried to get paid fair market value for his football services instead of tithing millions of dollars in free labor to the NCAA was OSU running back Maurice Clarett, who was released from the Toledo Correctional Institute earlier this year.

Pryor’s offense was to sell his 2008 Big Ten championship ring and a golden trinket that has been given to OSU football players every year since 1893 to commemorate their annual ritual humiliation of the University of Michigan. The word “his” has a slightly different meaning in NCAA world, translating roughly as “not his.”…

Links for 12/29/10

2010-12-29T08:00:00.001-05:00

JACQUES STEINBERG on whether it’s worth it to go to an elite college

“Prestige does pay,” Mr. Thomas said in an interview. “But prestige costs, too. The question is, is the cost less than the added return?”

His answer was one he said he knew families would find maddening: “It depends.” …

Jonah Lehrer

One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials. Between 1966 and 1995, there were forty-seven studies of acupuncture in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and every single trial concluded that acupuncture was an effective treatment. During the same period, there were ninety-four clinical trials of acupuncture in the United States, Sweden, and the U.K., and only fifty-six per cent of these studies found any therapeutic benefits. As Palmer notes, this wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don't want to see. Our beliefs are a form of blindness…

this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren't surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything…

George Musser on Jonah Lehrer’s piece

Few who are familiar with science would deny that the process has its flaws (on which more later), but the fallibility of published papers is hardly one of them. Almost by definition, a discovery is at the limits of our ability to perceive it, so it is easily confounded with statistical flukes. The only way to tell is to publish the discovery, invite others to replicate it, and let it play out. The difficulties Lehrer describes do not signal a failing of the scientific method, but a triumph: our knowledge is so good that new discoveries are increasingly hard to make, indicating that scientists really are converging on some objective truth…

error is the flip side of creativity…

Science is not received wisdom, but informed guesswork…

Bob Samuels

As I argue in my forthcoming book The Tuition Trap: Why Costs Go Up and Quality Goes Down at American Universities, the lack of any shared assessment criteria in higher ed simply allows schools to spend money on anything they want to pursue, and this usually means that schools use tuition dollars and state funds to support high compensation packages for its stars. After all, since universities are able to get away with substandard education, they can use money intended for educational activities to promote non-educational priorities…

since the only thing that controls the spending habits of schools is a lack of funds, universities spend a great sum of money trying to raise dollars from multiple revenue streams. The only solution to this problem is for schools to be ranked in part according to how well they teach their students, but this would require some type of shared assessment, and so far, schools have resisted any standardized testing…

University Financial Crises: Lessons From Ancient Rome

2010-12-26T09:10:00.002-05:00

By Richard Vedder

In ancient times, the Romans engaged in enormous building programs, particularly in Rome itself, which they largely financed by raiding the provinces for tribute. Rome started to fall when the marginal costs of maintaining the empire began to exceed the marginal revenue extracted from it, coupled with excessive spending in Rome, under direction of emperors of dubious quality such as Nero.

Sounds pretty similar to American higher education. Vast spending and empire-building in the 1970s through 1990s was partially financed by taking tribute from taxpayers and private philanthropists. In the last few years, though, tribute collections (taxpayer support) became more limited while the spending on a lavish capital (i.e. the university campus) continued relatively unabated. Rome built the Colosseum shortly after Nero’s disastrous rule, late in the first century A.D., and the “bread and circuses” approach to appease restless masses did not stem the decline: It actually accelerated it.

Fast forward a couple thousand years to American college campuses. Like in ancient Rome, stadium-building and other forms of bread and circuses today (climbing walls and luxury dorms) are hiding an increasingly rotten institutional setting that often suffers from both mission failure and excessive spending. Most colleges and universities have not clearly articulated what they want to do, have done a crummy job of even measuring what they have accomplished, and have viewed university resources as something that need to be spent in a way to minimize discontent from alumni, administrators, and occasionally students and faculty—rather than to achieve a well defined academic goal.

I was reminded of all of this in the last week or two at my own university. Like most states, Ohio is having huge budget problems, and my university likely faces sharp (15 percent or more) reductions in state subsidy payments in the coming couple of years. Prospects are great that staff will be discharged, programs will be eliminated, etc. Already I am told that my telephone probably will have to go, and if I want to talk to anyone more than a few feet away, I will have to pay for it myself. But is the university really engaging in austerity programs, looking for new models to teach more cheaply, lower costs of auxiliary services, etc.?

Maybe, but actions speak louder than words, and the reality is that it is actually accelerating spending on what is apparently its top priority: intercollegiate athletics. (Under the current president, the academic reputation of Ohio University has sagged, falling more than 20 positions in the U.S. News & World Report rankings in just 6 years. Never mind: The path to success, we are told, is being very good at throwing balls).

Our moderately decent football team managed to win eight games and get into the least prestigious of the bowl games, the iconic R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl—one of 35 bowl games this season. Attendance was allegedly 29,159, but most observers I know guessed the number at much less (and there were at least 43,809 empty seats in the Super Dome). Ohio University was correctly worried that hardly any students would attend, which would be embarrassing, so they offered several hundred students transportation from several Ohio cities, lodging (at a Hilton hotel), tickets, etc.—all for $40. This promotion cost the university conservatively $150,000, more than the annual subsidy of its highly regarded Ohio University Press, which will probably close because of declining university support.

Our team got slaughtered in a lopsided contest, and beyond having to heavily subsidize students to attend, it costs the university to participate—as opposed to major bowls, like the Rose Bowl, where participants reap millions in revenues.

But that is not all. We are told we cannot “reach the next level” in athletic greatness without a new indoor practice facility, so, voila, a $10-million grant for a “multipurpose” facility (translation: indoor football field) has just been announced from a wealthy alum who obviously has been conned into believing the bread-and-circus approach to greatness. No doubt, had that facility existed, my university would have lost to Troy State by maybe only 10 points instead of more than 25.

Meanwhile, funding for other politically correct but otherwise dubious smaller projects continues, including replacing a “sustainability coordinator” whose main claim to fame was advocating that we eat locally grown organic foods, which is a bit hard in a area with very little farming and poor soil.

Across the country, schools are following the Emperor Nero approach of overbuilding, overspending, and ignoring reality (a cautionary note: it caught up with Nero, who died at the age of 30 after a reign of but 14 years). The University of Michigan, in the midst of high double-digit unemployment and declining state-subsidy support, spent an amount approaching a good hunk of the annual GDP of some small poor nations on making its stadium bigger and providing more comfort for the über-rich attending football games. At some schools, where academics gets more than lip service, the spending is for superstar faculty who rarely see students; at others, for sumptuous facilities, to create a country club El Dorado around those boring things called classrooms, libraries, and laboratories.

Will this continue indefinitely, or will sanity and realism finally reach the academy? Already, cash-flow problems are forcing schools to furlough staff, reduce salaries (University of California), and the like out of desperation. But is this the beginning of a true rationalization and restructuring of a bloated enterprise that has been for far too long accountable to no one? I don’t think so—not without more fundamental organizational reforms—but stay tuned.

This post originally appeared on the "Innovations" blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on December 21, 2010.

Unintended Consequences Apply to Federal Government's Student Aid Programs

2010-12-23T10:43:00.003-05:00

by Daniel L. Bennett

CCAP has been talking a lot about the growth in college degrees issued lately (check out our latest report on the topic here). One of the main questions that we've been raising is whether the supply of college degrees exceeds labor market demand for college educated persons. Earlier this week, my colleague Matt Denhart questioned whether America is overinvested in graduate education as well. While the chart does not specifically address these issues, it does show the rapid growth in college degrees conferred in the U.S. over the past 140 years.

In the 1869-70 academic year, less than 10,000 bachelor's degrees and only 1 doctorate degree were issued. A decade later, nearly 13,000 bachelor's and a whopping 54 doctoral degrees were conferred. By the turn of the century, nearly 27,500 bachelor's and 382 doctorate degrees were granted, along with 1,600 Master's degrees. By mid century, these numbers jumped up to 432,000, 6, 400 and 58,100, respectively, average decadal increases of 295, 316 and 715 percent.

Fast forward to 2007-08 and there were nearly 1.6 million bachelor's, 63,700 doctorates and 625,000 master's degrees conferred. Since the 1949-50 year, these were average decadal increases of 46, 155 and 169 percent. Interestingly, this later period also happens to roughly coincide with the federal government's involvement in the financing of students. Recall that the feds first got involved in financing students with the 1944 GI Bill that provided financial assistance for veterans who wished to pursue a college education upon return from WWII. The federal government would later expand its role in providing need-based financial assistance to non-veteran students beginning with the 1965 Higher Education Act. As time has passed, the federal government has extended financial assistance to virtually all students, regardless of need or merit.

So the history lesson for the day is unintended consequences: The growth rate of college degree conferment grew faster before the federal government became involved in financing students than since it has been involved. This suggests that the goal of increasing college attainment rates through financial aid may have actually had opposite the intended effect, it may have actually slowed the rate. Would the U.S. have produced a similar amount of college graduates today had the government never actually got involved in the financial assistance game? That is a question that is unanswerable, as the experiment has already occurred. However, as previous CCAP work suggests, the government's subsidization of higher education has likely increased the costs of higher education more than would have occurred in the absence of subsidization.

Note: There are obviously some concerns regarding the accuracy of data and the base year used for comparison. I rely on the accuracy of government data reporting in the above. The time periods used were roughly equivalent and coincided with the start of the federal government's involvement in providing financial assistance.

Is America Over-Invested in Doctoral Education?

2010-12-23T00:01:00.000-05:00

by: Matthew Denhart

Last week CCAP released From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: Why College Graduates are not Getting Good Jobs. In it we presented data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) which show that an alarmingly large percentage (35.3 percent in 2008) of college graduates are "underemployed."

While we focused on Bachelor's degree recipients, one wonders about the job prospects for America's most highly educated individuals as well, namely those possessing PhDs. A recent article from the Economist suggests that they are not too encouraging. Although individuals possessing PhDs do enjoy a wage premium 26 percent greater than those with only Bachelor's degrees, this premium barely exceeds the 23 percent figure for those with Master's degrees. From an earnings perspective, investing in a PhD may not be as advantageous as many suppose.

A major reason to pursue a doctoral degree is to enable one's self to have a career in academia. However, freshly minted PhDs are finding it increasingly difficult to find university employment. Indeed, according to the new book Higher Education? by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, between 2005 and 2009, America produced 100,000 new doctoral degrees for only 16,000 new professorships. Clearly, our country's colleges and universities cannot employ all of the PhDs they are producing.

So why do universities keep turning out such a large number of PhDs? The Economist article suggests the main explanation is that it is in their best interest to have loads of cheap research and teaching help around. This, however, is likely not in the best interest of the students themselves. The article puts it more eloquently:

The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other are not well aligned.

Some university departments and academics regard numbers of PhD graduates as an indicator of success and compete to produce more. For students, a measure of how quickly those students get a permanent job, and what they earn, would be more useful.

This of course is not to suggest that learning for learning's sake is a bad thing. It may be that even if doctoral students knew there was a zero percent chance of them ever obtaining university employment or finding a high paying job, they would still pursue the PhD. Yet, in a society with limited resources, it is a legitimate public policy question to ask how much we want the government to subsidize this behavior. Given the poor employment prospects for many college graduates, including even those with PhDs, the answer may very well be that we are currently over-invested in higher education.

Weathering the Political Storm

2010-12-22T16:36:00.002-05:00

by Daniel L. Bennett

Recently, my esteemed CCAP colleague Richard Vedder wrote in the pages of Forbes a very provocative piece entitled An $8 Billion Misunderstanding, in which he chastised the Obama Administration's attack on the for-profit sector. Awhile back, I submitted an article to Career College Central entitled Weathering the Political Storm: History Repeats Itself in the for-profit sector, which is the lead story in the latest issue of CCC. My article offers a similar castigation of the Obama Administration's handling of the sector. In the article, I draw comparisons to the current regulatory manifestations to those experienced in the late 1980's that, although they resulted in the closing of many career schools and reduced the sector's share of federal aid, only temporarily interrupted the growth of the sector. Click here to download and read a pdf of the article (kudos to the CCC team for their usual excellent graphics work). You can also access and read the entire magazine here.

Quote of the Day

2010-12-22T10:16:00.000-05:00

Frank Donoghue

But isn’t the student-loan industry, as it currently exists in the U.S. and will soon exist in England, neatly anticipated by the subprime mortgage industry? The consequences, though they could be years off, are potentially just as ominous.

CCAP in the News

2010-12-21T20:20:00.000-05:00

Since CCAP released its report last week on college graduate underemployment, titled From Wall Street to Wal-Mart, a number of writers have provided their reaction and critique of our study, especially over at Minding the Campus, where they had an extended forum on the subject. Here's what a number of them had to say.

George Leef:

I suspect that this report, if anything, understates the “underemployment” problem. That is because there are now quite a few jobs that generally exclude high-school graduates not because they couldn’t possibly do the work, but because there are so many college graduates in the labor force that employers can afford to screen out non-graduates. This is the “credential inflation” problem... If it were possible to do an analysis of the labor force that looked only at jobs that require post-secondary education in a knowledge sense (rather than a credential sense), the underemployment percentage would increase greatly.

Charles Murray:

What Richard Vedder's stunning statistics about the jobs of college graduates tell us is an indictment of a system that has held up a false god, the BA, as something that is required for social respectability. It is a system that doesn't even think about helping all young people find something they love to do and teaching them how to do it well.

Jackson Toby:

If we keep in mind the difference between "jobs" and "careers," the fact that college graduates take low-level jobs in the years immediately following graduation is not necessarily a failure of college education or of the graduates themselves.

Patrick Deneen

What disturbs me about arguments such as those found in the Vedder report is the implication that education should be fitted to the narrow vocational needs of airline attendants and cashiers, that an appropriate education will prepare them as efficiently as possible for a life of menial labor. I lament that a major thrust is afoot to dismantle whatever remnant of our older liberal arts tradition persists and to replace it with measurable forms of study that produce narrowly-trained careerists.

Carson Jerema

Of course, people can pursue an education for reasons other than employment or economic gain, but that is not how education is marketed either in the United States or in Canada, and creeping credentialism has long been flagged as a problem on both sides of the border.

The obvious beneficiaries of ever increasing enrolment in college and universities are, of course, the institutions themselves, who gain tuition and funding for each student they admit, but also businesses who can use the holding of a degree as a signal device without having to invest resources into properly vetting job candidates. And, as Vedder notes, the trend points to growing inefficiencies in the education system. Whereas not that long ago, it took the system 12 or 13 years to prepare most people for adulthood, it now takes 17 or 18 years.

Bob Adelmann

Vedder holds that many of these students have bought the line promoted by the College Board and the education establishment: namely, more education translates into higher lifetime wages. This is promoted by those heavily involved in higher education, starting with the Obama administration...

CCAP Contributions to Forbes.com

2010-12-21T14:05:00.004-05:00

As we mentioned a few days ago, CCAP is now regularly blogging for Forbes.com. Our two most recent posts directly relate to our most recent study where we take a look at BLS data suggesting that over one-third of college graduates in 2008 were employed in below-college jobs. Here are some snippets from the two posts.

Is America Saturated with College Grads?

In the United States (using 2008 data), we have estimated that there were approximately 17.4 million college graduates working in occupations requiring less than a bachelor’s degree (our favorite example: the 317,000 college educated waiters)...
In light of our research, we find it difficult to justify public policy aimed at increasing the nation’s stock of college graduates as the cure for its economic ills.

Should Government Support Higher Education?

The ability and desire of taxpayers to heavily subsidize higher education with all of its inefficiencies diminishes daily. We are moving towards de facto privatization of some state universities, for example. As we increasingly recognize that higher education is largely a private good primarily conferring benefits on its users, we will back off our huge governmental financial commitment to colleges and universities, most of which are organized on a costly medieval model primarily using instructional methods dating back to when Socrates taught the youth of Athens. I think this public disinvestment is a good move, and higher education will be forced to adjust to it.

You can read all of our contributions to Forbes.com here.

Links for 12/21/10

2010-12-21T09:44:00.002-05:00

C. Kirabo Jackson

Peer quality can account for about one tenth of school value-added on average, but over one-third among the top quartile of schools…

Eric A. Hanushek

A teacher one standard deviation above the mean effectiveness annually generates marginal gains of over $400,000 in present value of student future earnings with a class size of 20 and proportionately higher with larger class sizes. Alternatively, replacing the bottom 5-8 percent of teachers with average teachers could move the U.S. near the top of international math and science rankings with a present value of $100 trillion.

Cameron Neylon via Paul Jump

Once you start looking at how the scholarly communication system works with any degree of outside perspective, it looks utterly insane."

The Economist

Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings…

Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships…

In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment… Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam…

Academics tend to regard asking whether a PhD is worthwhile as analogous to wondering whether there is too much art or culture in the world…

Links for 12/20/10

2010-12-20T12:06:00.001-05:00

Bob Samuels

failure to grasp basic math and accounting…

the university simply refuses to admit that undergraduates are now subsidizing everything else in the UC system, and the only solution the university finds to any problem is to increase student tuition and to cheapen the quality of undergraduate education by turning to online classes, reduced requirements, summer courses, and fast degrees…

the regents will not be able to maintain the fiscal health and educational quality of the university if they cannot do simple math, and if they spend the majority of the time blaming the state for all of the UC’s problems, nothing will ever change…

Mark J. Perry

Living the Good Life Working A 9-Month "Year": 14,000 Illinois High School Teachers Make +$100k

Kent Jenkins

The value of the education provided by private-sector colleges such as Corinthian cannot, and should not, be determined solely on the basis of loan-repayment data…

The value of the education obtained in a career college should rightfully be assessed based on job placement in the field for which the student was trained…

repayment and default rates are not closely related to the type of school a student attends, but rather to certain socioeconomic factors…

Steve Kolowich

Bollen is principal investigator for MESUR (Metrics for Scholarly Usage of Resources), a project founded in 2006 on a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that is trying to shift how scholarly impact is measured away from citations — which he describes as inherently “backwards-looking … kind of like astronomers looking at a galaxy whose light reaches us 50 million years after the events that cause that light to happen” — and toward the sort of real-time usage metrics that Web-based consumption enables…

the availability of “usage data” — information on how many times a digital article has been downloaded, and in what context — means that people like Bollen can track the spread of an idea in a scholarly community using the same principles that epidemiologists use to track the spread of a virus in a village…

Eigenfactor, a project based at the University of Washington, measures the influence of scholarly journals using the old-fashioned method of counting citations, but adds an algorithmic wrinkle… takes into account how many times that journal is cited by other journals that are themselves frequently cited…

Burck Smith (and Salman Khan) = Plato

2010-12-20T00:01:00.000-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

One of the professors in Serena Golden’s story on online courses from StraighterLine declared

“I don’t think online is really teaching, to be quite honest with you”

I think this sentiment more than anything else gets to the heart of the controversy concerning higher education’s future. Until recently, I thought that online education was a new development with new controversies, but I was wrong.

As Brad DeLong reminds us, Socrates didn’t think books could do as good of a job of providing an education as “discussion and apprenticeship to an excellent thinker.” He was right of course. But that was beside the point. There are simply not enough great thinkers for that model to provide education to enough people.

In contrast, Plato acknowledged the superiority of the discussion and apprenticeship model, but saw the potential of the written word to spread ideas to a much greater audience and across much greater stretches of time then a single mentor ever could. He too was right.

Many professors take the Socratic stance with regard to online courses (though notably not for books). But this is the wrong way to look at the issue. To use a beautiful quote from Michael Hammer and James Champy out of context

“The fundamental error that most [professors] commit when they look at technology is to view it through the lens of their [existing] processes… the real power of technology is not that it can make the old processes work better, but that it enables organizations to break old rules and create new ways of working.”

What Plato did with books, Burck Smith and others like Salmon Khan are doing with the internet. The book revolutionized the provision of education. The internet will too.

Kudos to Inside Higher Ed

2010-12-17T10:00:00.001-05:00

by Andrew Gillen

Serena Golden has a loooong piece in IHE about her experience taking an online course through StraighterLine. StraighterLine comes off as neither a miracle cure nor as a diploma mill. While I would have liked to see a few things done differently, overall, the approach was just right - focusing on her direct experience while asking the obvious follow-up questions to the obvious players involved.

If you can’t read the whole piece, here is the 21 word version, courtesy of the founder of StraighterLine, Burck Smith:

“We’re not in the business of making the best courses. We are in the business of making the best value courses.”

We Have Oversold College in America

2010-12-16T15:01:00.003-05:00

This afternoon CCAP has released its latest study, titled From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: Why College Graduates Are Not Getting Good Jobs, in which we take a deeper look at employment data for college graduates over the past half century. Shockingly, the data reveal that, as of 2008, more than one-third of all employed college graduates were in non-college level jobs and fully 60% of the incremental increase in college graduates since 1992 have wound up in occupations requiring less than a college degree. While there were 5.1 million under-employed college graduates in 1992 (a year in which the unemployment rate of college graduates was above-average), there were over 17 million under-employed graduates by 2008 (a year with below-average college graduate unemployment for the first half of the year).

Here's how lead author Richard Vedder summarized the report's findings in an essay for Minding the Campus:

We have created a Potemkin Village -a few truly good universities that come close to meeting the former academic standards, but a vaster melange of institutions that are often neither "higher" nor even "education" in the classical sense, particularly since the typical student spends less than 30 hours a week on academics. Bottom line: too many people go to college.

This study presents more detailed analysis of the data we have discussed previously, here as well as over at the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Innovations blog (here and here).

The full version of the study is available for free download from our website (in pdf format). In the future we look to do even more detailed and sophisticated analyses of these data.

Partially Correct Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription

2010-12-16T09:36:00.000-05:00

by Daniel L. Bennett

The NY Times published an editorial yesterday discussing how college graduates find it increasingly difficult to find good paying jobs. According to the Times:

A college education is better than no college education and correlates with higher pay. But as a cure for unemployment or as a way to narrow the chasm between the rich and everyone else, “more college” is a too-easy answer. Over the past year, for example, the unemployment rate for college grads under age 25 has averaged 9.2 percent, up from 8.8 percent a year earlier and 5.8 percent in the first year of the recession that began in December 2007. That means recent grads have about the same level of unemployment as the general population. It also suggests that many employed recent grads may be doing work that doesn’t require a college degree.

The Times is right: there is a positive correlation between pay and college education. But that in no way implies a causal relationship. It is highly possible that, on average, individuals with the most ability and highest IQ levels are those who chose to go to college. This suggests that it is innate ability, rather than college attendance, that results in greater earnings in the labor market, although studying certain disciplines such as accounting, computer science, or engineering, for example, likely has a greater positive impact on earning potential.

There are also some issues with The Times data. As Education Sector points out, the

...unemployment rate for Americans under the age of 25 with only a high school diploma is 23 percent, compared to only 7 percent for those with a college degree. So college is even better for recent grads than it is for the overall population. Bad evidence leads to bad conclusions

The Times is correct in suggesting that many recent grads are working at jobs that don't require a college education. However, the tale of the underemployed college grad is not merely a product of the current recession, but part of a longer term trend that has been growing over time. My colleagues at CCAP have been working tirelessly to amass a data-set that indicates, as Richard Vedder recently wrote in a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education:

approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation’s stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor’s degree or more.

this shows that the current problem of college student employability is not a new, and merely temporary, problem.

Vedder suggests that the mindless effort to expand college enrollments and the number of graduates is the primary factor in this developing trend. The economics of this are simple - As a nation, we've grown the pool (in both relative and absolute terms) of college-educated workers in the labor force quicker than we've created jobs that require college education. This has resulted in employers being able to be more selective about who they hire, including requiring degrees for jobs that historically haven't required them. This has resulted in a form of credential inflation - people seek increasingly higher levels of education and certifications in order to make them more attractive in the labor market, when inflated credentials likely have little impact on how well a worker performs his or her job. The teaching profession is a great example. Many school systems base promotions on whether or not a teacher has earned a graduate degree in education, although there is little to no evidence that earning such a degree leads to better job performance. There is some evidence that there may in fact be in a negative correlation.

As a nation, it is time that we begin to question the "conventional wisdom" that extending the number of years that young people spend in the education system will solve all of our problems, especially our economic ones. As such, we also need to abandon age-old vodoo prescriptions to our ailments, such as the NY Times suggestion to:

preserve and improve the policies, programs and institutions that have fostered shared prosperity and broad opportunity — Social Security, Medicare, public schools, progressive taxation, unions, affirmative action, regulation of financial markets and enforcement of labor laws.

Such institutions and policies, although they surely make some feel good about themselves, are of exactly the type that have resulted in our country becoming increasingly dependent on big brother, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, and have made it increasingly difficult for private businesses to earn a profit in this country and hence, driven many jobs to countries that are more hospitable to business and thankful for the jobs that they create.

Education is a great tool to advance society, but like all goods and services, there are diminishing returns on investment. CCAP believes that the U.S. has surpassed the optimal point of higher educational investment. Continuing to funnel more students and resources to college campuses is proving to be a bad investment for our nation and those who take on huge debt loads for a promise that for many, cannot be fulfilled.

Links for 12/16/10 Human Capital Edition

2010-12-16T08:00:00.000-05:00

John Whalley and Xiliang Zhao

human capital plays a much more important role in China’s economic growth than available literature suggests… In addition, because human capital formation accelerated following the major educational expansion increases after 1999 (college enrollment in China increased nearly fivefold between 1997 and 2007) while growth rates of GDP are little changed over the period after 1999, total factor productivity increases fall if human capital is used in growth accounting as we suggest… this contribution is -7.03% between 1999 and 2008. Negative TFP growth along with the high contribution of physical and human capital to economic growth seem to suggest that there have been decreased in the efficiency of inputs usage in China or worsened misallocation of physical and human capital in recent years…

Raphael Auer

trade with richer nations tends to decrease the relative wage of skilled workers in poorer nations, which reduces the incentives to invest in human capital. So, does trade with rich nations "de-skill" emerging economies?...

proximity to skilled labour is associated with a 15% reduction of higher education, but only a 10% reduction in primary education…

Mike Mandel

The build-up of debt was a symptom of the real underlying problem: A massive write-down of U.S. knowledge capital over the past 10-15 years, combined with anti-innovation policies on the part of the government…

The value of knowledge capital depends, in part, on how rare it is…

Over the past 10-15 years, the strengthening of information flows into developing countries meant that knowledge capital was being distributed much more quickly around the world. As a result, the normal process of knowledge capital depreciation greatly accelerated in the U.S. and Europe–beneath the radar screen, because no statistical agency constructs a set of knowledge capital accounts.

What we should have been doing is boosting our investment in knowledge capital creation–education, R&D, business innovation. Instead, we borrowed to support consumption…

Tyler Cowen on Mike Mandel

I agree with the conclusion but I am not sure that globalization was the mechanism…

The more that your economy "looks like" the music sector, the more rapid the rate of depreciation for production capital and knowledge capital. This means we may be overestimating our national wealth…