Links for 11/2/10

STEVEN D. LEVITT

The first academic paper I ever published was an empirical analysis of the “midterm gap” in American politics. (I couldn’t find an ungated version, but it’s not really worth reading anyway!)…

The paper ended up having a very typical life for an academic paper. It got rejected from the first journal I sent it to. Then it got rejected from a second journal. Finally, I got a letter back from the editor at a third journal that was so cryptic I wasn’t sure whether the paper had been accepted or rejected. I showed the letter to my MIT advisor Jim Poterba, and he gave me some sound advice: when in doubt, act like the paper has been accepted. So I revised it and sent it back, and indeed it was accepted at long last. That was in 1994. In the last 16 years, it has managed to collect a whopping four citations…

The first rule of paper writing, he told me, is to never make predictions about the future….

College Board

Over the decade from 2000 01 to 2010 11, published tuition and fees at public four year colleges and universities increased at an average rate of 5.6% per year beyond the rate of general inflation…

Jeffrey Brainard

100 institutions are charging $50,000 or more for tuition, fees, room, and board in 2010-11, according to a Chronicle analysis of data released last week by the College Board. That's well above the 58 universities and colleges that charged that much in 2009-10, and a major jump from the year before, when only five colleges were priced over $50,000.

This year marks a milestone as the first public institution has joined that elite club: the University of California at Berkeley is charging out-of-state residents $50,649 for tuition, fees, room, and board. (The price for in-state residents is only $27,770.)

Jorge Klor de Alva

dispel several myths concerning proprietary online education…

The first myth is that online education has been aggressively marketed by for-profit colleges and universities because it makes possible huge classes of hundreds, if not thousands, of students, thereby sharply reducing instructional costs…

at Phoenix… a student-faculty ratio of just over 14 to 1…

A second myth, closely related to the first, is that for-profit online courses lack the rigor of their face-to-face counterparts…

A third myth is that employers are hesitant to hire graduates with degrees earned online from for-profit colleges…

A fourth myth is that for-profit online colleges have a responsibility to maximize shareholder value and therefore put profits ahead of educational quality whenever possible…