Links for 9/8/10

Richard Posner

There probably are diminishing returns to providing higher education, because IQ provides a ceiling beyond which educational effort is wasted on students. The United States may be in that position today. Many colleges offer what amounts to a remedial high school education, postponing the students’ entry into the work force. If we had better high schools, we might have fewer colleges (or more—if better high schools improved intellectual motivation and performance). With ever-increasing specialization of the workforce, there is an argument for making education increasingly vocational…

Presumably the way for a developing country to proceed, therefore, is to send its brightest young people abroad for advanced education. Some will remain abroad but those who return to their native country will supply the elite teachers of the next generation. This by the way suggests that the teaching of English should be a priority for pre-collegiate education in developing countries, since the best universities are in English-speaking countries.

Gary Becker

Economists and other students of economic development have learned only in recent years about the great significance also of higher education for countries that want to progress beyond middle-income status. Higher education has become important to the development process mainly because of the growing value in the modern world of command over information and knowledge. The spread of university education and training toward a much larger fraction of young persons is crucial to producing efficiently the kinds of products and services that would help developing countries continue to drive forward…

Earnings of persons with college education increased faster in recent decades not only in developed countries, but also in many rapidly developing countries, such as China and Brazil, that are supposedly specializing in goods that use less human capital…

the main message of my comments is that in order for poorer countries to continue to grow at fast rates, they must move beyond specialization in goods produced with relatively unskilled labor. They need to upgrade the goods they produce by utilizing more advanced technologies, and more skilled workers and entrepreneurs…

Kevin Carey

according to EPI, schools shouldn’t adopt commonsense management techniques like paying people for producing results absent some Olympian standard of evidence. But when there is actual evidence produced by reputable scholars supporting an idea that the authors find disconcerting–that teacher effectiveness varies over time–that evidence should be discounted because it conflicts with “most people’s notions.” Isn’t replacing superstition with evidence more or less the whole point of scholarship?...

Robin Wilson

A survey last year by the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment found that provosts at doctoral universities identified "faculty engagement" as their No. 1 challenge in making greater efforts to assess student learning. Faculty members have long enjoyed autonomy in the classroom, and persuading them to change the way they teach is more difficult than it might sound…

Even professors who believe they are good teachers with high standards often have no real way to confirm that…