Links for 4/1/10

Lloyd Armstrong

The reality is that American higher education generally costs more than society can sustain into the future. This is true in both the public and private sectors, which have research and education functions that are organized very similarly even though the funding sources may differ. The “canaries in the educational coal mine” , the early warning system, are, in fact, the tuitions of the private sector of higher education. Those tuitions have grown for over 30 years at a rate that significantly exceeded the growth in either CPI or family income. It should have been obvious to all that a system that demanded such growth in order to operate would, in the end, crash into a cost barrier…

What are needed at this point are not more calls for a larger piece of the public pie for higher education. The present economic situation makes it highly unlikely that those calls will be answered in a meaningful way. What is really needed is a hard look at our present model of higher education…

EDWARD L. GLAESER

As the predicted unemployment rate increases by one percent, the actual unemployment rate goes up by 1.8 percent.

This is a puzzle.

The more than one-for-one relationship between metropolitan area unemployment and the rate predicted by educational composition is an example of what economists call “social multipliers,” which may exist when aggregate relationships are stronger than individual relationships…
Social multipliers may occur when one person’s actions, like being unemployed or getting educated, influence everyone else…

Human capital spillovers can explain the overly strong metropolitan area relationship between skills and unemployment…

The Economist

[UK] universities have enjoyed a funding boom for more than a decade. Their total income doubled between 1997 and 2009, whereas student numbers increased by just 20%. Academic pay rose and spending on the stuff that motivates many of them—that is, research—rocketed…

Nancy C. Rodriguez

Two months after the University of Louisville acknowledged it was paying a former lobbyist for not working, the university has confirmed it is providing more than $1million in pay and benefits to another employee asked to leave his job last year…