Links for 9/30/10

Andrew J. Coulson

it has long been argued that we should introduce this or that aspect of free markets into the public school system. And that’s the problem. The free enterprise system is a system. It is not a smorgasbord from which we can pick an isolated incentive here and a particular freedom there, and expect to get the same results we’ve come to expect from full-fledged markets…

Thomas H. Benton

I can't remember a time when professors, particularly in the humanities and social sciences—already the survivors of a 40-year depression in the academic job market—had a stronger feeling of being under siege…

"hate" is not too strong a word, I think, for how nonacademics feel about us…

If everyone's biased, including professors, why not just "go with your gut"? It's much easier, and it empowers you against the academics whose admonitions—as we have lost influence—have become increasingly condescending, sanctimonious, and shrill…

we are no longer able to articulate a coherent vision of why others should value what we teach. And with that, I think, we have lost any remaining justification for our autonomy…

MG Siegler

Thiel is starting a new initiative that will offer grants of up to $100,000 for kids to drop out of school. Yes, you read that right. Though that’s not how Thiel puts it. Instead, he calls it “stopping out of school.”

The basic gist is that he will fund up to 20 kids under the age of 20 who apply for this grant. His hope, obviously, isn’t to ruin their lives, but instead to find the best minds thinking about big things early in life. This is where true disruption comes from, Thiel believes.
And it also solves another problem that many young people face today: crippling debt…

Paul Krugman
[AG: This was written in 1996 under the premise that it was written in 2096, looking back on how the world changed.]

The devaluation of higher education. In the 1990s everyone believed that education was the key to economic success, for both individuals and nations…

over the course of this century many of the jobs that used to require a college degree have been eliminated, while many of the rest can, it turns out, be done quite well by an intelligent person whether or not she has studied world literature.

This trend should have been obvious even in 1996…

Or consider the panic over "downsizing" that gripped America in 1996. As economists quickly pointed out, the rate at which Americans were losing jobs in the 90s was not especially high by historical standards. Why, then, did downsizing suddenly become news? Because for the first time white-collar, college-educated workers were being fired in large numbers, even while skilled machinists and other blue-collar workers were in high demand. This should have been a clear signal that the days of ever-rising wage premia for people with higher education were over, but somehow nobody noticed.

Eventually, of course, the eroding payoff to higher education created a crisis in the education industry itself… Many institutions of higher education could not survive this harsher environment. The famous universities mostly did manage to cope, but only by changing their character and reverting to an older role. Today a place like Harvard is, as it was in the 19th century, more of a social institution than a scholarly one…