Links for 9/22/10

Bill Dickens

if there was a much more efficient way to do whatever it is that education does, somewhere some society would have found it and we would all be trying to copy them…

I work for Northeastern University which has for decades distinguished itself by offering "co-op education." Students spend about a year during their time at the university working in jobs related to their field of interest. NU does OK (we have a niche market), but we aren't revolutionizing the way universities do business. If work was so much more productive at teaching what needs to be taught you would expect we would have a real leg up on other institutions. From what I can tell, our graduates don't do much better or much worse than other universities for time spent…

Bryan Caplan

I agree that education has some positive externalities that partially balance out the negative externalities of signaling. But I think that these positive externalities are overrated, and in any case stem from a tiny subset of coursework…

I'd like to be able to say that government is the whole problem. But that just seems false. Long before government subsidized higher education significantly, schools designed meaningless hoops, students jumped through them, and employers rewarded them for it…

David Glenn

If Fayetteville State students encounter classroom exercises like those seven or eight times a semester, they're likely to improve their scores when they take the actual CLA exam. But that does not mean, Mr. Valenti says, that this is a hollow teaching-to-the-test project. The thinking and writing skills captured by the assessment test, he says, are genuinely fundamental to a high-quality college education…

Dean Dad

Should professors with full-time positions at college A be allowed to teach as adjuncts at college B?...

Work is work. If the issue is competition, let’s take that one to court and see how well it holds up. Can police officers work private security? If so, why can’t professors at state schools moonlight at for-profits? Another commenter objected that for-profits are parasitic on the production of knowledge; taken literally, that comment would seem to apply to any teaching-focused institution…