Links for 5/6/10

James Kwak

you internalize the rationalizations for the work you are doing...

It’s easier for college professors to think that, by training the next generation of young minds (or, even more improbably, writing papers on esoteric subjects), they are changing the world than to think that they are teaching and researching instead of changing the world...

A college student asked me at a book talk what I thought about undergraduates who go work on Wall Street. And individually, I have nothing against them...But as a system, it’s a bad thing that a small handful of highly profitable firms are able to invest those profits into skimming off some of the top students at American universities — universities that, even if nominally private, are partially funded by taxpayer money in the form of research grants and federal subsidies for student loans –and absorbing them into the banking-consulting-lawyering Borg...

Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks find a

10 hour decline in the average weekly study time of full-time college students at four-year colleges in the United States, from about 24 hours per week in 1961 to about 14 hours per week in 2003.

Arnold Kling asks

What sort of model can reconcile this with secular increases in college attendance and the college wage premium? Possibilities
1. A secular increase in credentialism, which would make you want to get a college degree with the least effort possible.
2. An increase in the efficiency of students, which allows human capital formation to be maintained with less effort.
3. Professors have failed to adapt to the Flynn Effect, so that many students are sliding by easily on the basis of ability rather than effort.

Jane Wellman via Jack Stripling

the tough conversations about pension plans in public universities aren’t going away any time soon. A number of benefit plans reduced retirement ages or increased benefits when market returns were good, and now the “chickens are coming home to roost,"...

The University of California and its employees haven’t paid into the retirement plan for about 20 years... The university’s unfunded post-retirement liability is $1.9 billion, and it’s expected to grow to $18 billion by 2013...

“If they don’t take care of that problem, they don’t have a University of California,” she said. “And they are acting like this is an 'oh by the way.' ” “If they don’t take care of that problem, they don’t have a University of California,” she said. “And they are acting like this is an 'oh by the way.' ”