The U.S. Army is not know for its loose "take a few weeks off to go follow your dreams" policies, but Morgan somehow found time to practice…NYC has odd priorities – they spend money to keep the “wrong” people from recycling trash.
Seems fair to me.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Links for 12/31/10
Master Sergeant Mark Morgan is pretty awesome.
Seems fair to me.
Seems fair to me.
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Links for 12/30/10
Christian Helmers and Mark Rogers
Our main finding is that the quality and quantity of engineering and biological university research is positively associated with small-firm patenting. We do not find any statistically significant correlation between university research and large-firm patenting…David N. Bass
I made a decision early on that college was about getting a piece of paper, not an education. My goal wasn’t to become a better-rounded individual, or even to gain a greater understanding of my major area of study. Rather, it was to gain the educational credential that employers now use as a screening device for most jobs. And my experience confirmed what I had expected—that post-secondary education today has only a lackluster ability to provide real value aside from that credential…Michael Petrilli
Overall, I found my on-the-job experience far more valuable in terms of education than my college coursework… Reading about my major area of study was interesting—doing it was far more useful…
Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and now the New York Times editorial page have all come out in favor of squeezing teacher benefits, slashing regulations (including for special education), and consolidating schools. Keep that in mind this spring when the teachers unions try to paint cost-cutting governors and legislators as right-wing lunatics.Kevin Carey
the last guy who tried to get paid fair market value for his football services instead of tithing millions of dollars in free labor to the NCAA was OSU running back Maurice Clarett, who was released from the Toledo Correctional Institute earlier this year.
Pryor’s offense was to sell his 2008 Big Ten championship ring and a golden trinket that has been given to OSU football players every year since 1893 to commemorate their annual ritual humiliation of the University of Michigan. The word “his” has a slightly different meaning in NCAA world, translating roughly as “not his.”…
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Links for 12/29/10
JACQUES STEINBERG on whether it’s worth it to go to an elite college
“Prestige does pay,” Mr. Thomas said in an interview. “But prestige costs, too. The question is, is the cost less than the added return?”Jonah Lehrer
His answer was one he said he knew families would find maddening: “It depends.” …
One of the classic examples of selective reporting concerns the testing of acupuncture in different countries. While acupuncture is widely accepted as a medical treatment in various Asian countries, its use is much more contested in the West. These cultural differences have profoundly influenced the results of clinical trials. Between 1966 and 1995, there were forty-seven studies of acupuncture in China, Taiwan, and Japan, and every single trial concluded that acupuncture was an effective treatment. During the same period, there were ninety-four clinical trials of acupuncture in the United States, Sweden, and the U.K., and only fifty-six per cent of these studies found any therapeutic benefits. As Palmer notes, this wide discrepancy suggests that scientists find ways to confirm their preferred hypothesis, disregarding what they don't want to see. Our beliefs are a form of blindness…George Musser on Jonah Lehrer’s piece
this is why the decline effect is so troubling. Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren't surprising, at least for scientists.) And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn.) The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything…
Few who are familiar with science would deny that the process has its flaws (on which more later), but the fallibility of published papers is hardly one of them. Almost by definition, a discovery is at the limits of our ability to perceive it, so it is easily confounded with statistical flukes. The only way to tell is to publish the discovery, invite others to replicate it, and let it play out. The difficulties Lehrer describes do not signal a failing of the scientific method, but a triumph: our knowledge is so good that new discoveries are increasingly hard to make, indicating that scientists really are converging on some objective truth…Bob Samuels
error is the flip side of creativity…
Science is not received wisdom, but informed guesswork…
As I argue in my forthcoming book The Tuition Trap: Why Costs Go Up and Quality Goes Down at American Universities, the lack of any shared assessment criteria in higher ed simply allows schools to spend money on anything they want to pursue, and this usually means that schools use tuition dollars and state funds to support high compensation packages for its stars. After all, since universities are able to get away with substandard education, they can use money intended for educational activities to promote non-educational priorities…
since the only thing that controls the spending habits of schools is a lack of funds, universities spend a great sum of money trying to raise dollars from multiple revenue streams. The only solution to this problem is for schools to be ranked in part according to how well they teach their students, but this would require some type of shared assessment, and so far, schools have resisted any standardized testing…
Sunday, December 26, 2010
University Financial Crises: Lessons From Ancient Rome
In ancient times, the Romans engaged in enormous building programs, particularly in Rome itself, which they largely financed by raiding the provinces for tribute. Rome started to fall when the marginal costs of maintaining the empire began to exceed the marginal revenue extracted from it, coupled with excessive spending in Rome, under direction of emperors of dubious quality such as Nero.
Sounds pretty similar to American higher education. Vast spending and empire-building in the 1970s through 1990s was partially financed by taking tribute from taxpayers and private philanthropists. In the last few years, though, tribute collections (taxpayer support) became more limited while the spending on a lavish capital (i.e. the university campus) continued relatively unabated. Rome built the Colosseum shortly after Nero’s disastrous rule, late in the first century A.D., and the “bread and circuses” approach to appease restless masses did not stem the decline: It actually accelerated it.
Fast forward a couple thousand years to American college campuses. Like in ancient Rome, stadium-building and other forms of bread and circuses today (climbing walls and luxury dorms) are hiding an increasingly rotten institutional setting that often suffers from both mission failure and excessive spending. Most colleges and universities have not clearly articulated what they want to do, have done a crummy job of even measuring what they have accomplished, and have viewed university resources as something that need to be spent in a way to minimize discontent from alumni, administrators, and occasionally students and faculty—rather than to achieve a well defined academic goal.
I was reminded of all of this in the last week or two at my own university. Like most states, Ohio is having huge budget problems, and my university likely faces sharp (15 percent or more) reductions in state subsidy payments in the coming couple of years. Prospects are great that staff will be discharged, programs will be eliminated, etc. Already I am told that my telephone probably will have to go, and if I want to talk to anyone more than a few feet away, I will have to pay for it myself. But is the university really engaging in austerity programs, looking for new models to teach more cheaply, lower costs of auxiliary services, etc.?
Maybe, but actions speak louder than words, and the reality is that it is actually accelerating spending on what is apparently its top priority: intercollegiate athletics. (Under the current president, the academic reputation of Ohio University has sagged, falling more than 20 positions in the U.S. News & World Report rankings in just 6 years. Never mind: The path to success, we are told, is being very good at throwing balls).
Our moderately decent football team managed to win eight games and get into the least prestigious of the bowl games, the iconic R+L Carriers New Orleans Bowl—one of 35 bowl games this season. Attendance was allegedly 29,159, but most observers I know guessed the number at much less (and there were at least 43,809 empty seats in the Super Dome). Ohio University was correctly worried that hardly any students would attend, which would be embarrassing, so they offered several hundred students transportation from several Ohio cities, lodging (at a Hilton hotel), tickets, etc.—all for $40. This promotion cost the university conservatively $150,000, more than the annual subsidy of its highly regarded Ohio University Press, which will probably close because of declining university support.
Our team got slaughtered in a lopsided contest, and beyond having to heavily subsidize students to attend, it costs the university to participate—as opposed to major bowls, like the Rose Bowl, where participants reap millions in revenues.
But that is not all. We are told we cannot “reach the next level” in athletic greatness without a new indoor practice facility, so, voila, a $10-million grant for a “multipurpose” facility (translation: indoor football field) has just been announced from a wealthy alum who obviously has been conned into believing the bread-and-circus approach to greatness. No doubt, had that facility existed, my university would have lost to Troy State by maybe only 10 points instead of more than 25.
Meanwhile, funding for other politically correct but otherwise dubious smaller projects continues, including replacing a “sustainability coordinator” whose main claim to fame was advocating that we eat locally grown organic foods, which is a bit hard in a area with very little farming and poor soil.
Across the country, schools are following the Emperor Nero approach of overbuilding, overspending, and ignoring reality (a cautionary note: it caught up with Nero, who died at the age of 30 after a reign of but 14 years). The University of Michigan, in the midst of high double-digit unemployment and declining state-subsidy support, spent an amount approaching a good hunk of the annual GDP of some small poor nations on making its stadium bigger and providing more comfort for the über-rich attending football games. At some schools, where academics gets more than lip service, the spending is for superstar faculty who rarely see students; at others, for sumptuous facilities, to create a country club El Dorado around those boring things called classrooms, libraries, and laboratories.
Will this continue indefinitely, or will sanity and realism finally reach the academy? Already, cash-flow problems are forcing schools to furlough staff, reduce salaries (University of California), and the like out of desperation. But is this the beginning of a true rationalization and restructuring of a bloated enterprise that has been for far too long accountable to no one? I don’t think so—not without more fundamental organizational reforms—but stay tuned.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Unintended Consequences Apply to Federal Government's Student Aid Programs
by Daniel L. Bennett
CCAP has been talking a lot about the growth in college degrees issued lately (check out our latest report on the topic here). One of the main questions that we've been raising is whether the supply of college degrees exceeds labor market demand for college educated persons. Earlier this week, my colleague Matt Denhart questioned whether America is overinvested in graduate education as well. While the chart does not specifically address these issues, it does show the rapid growth in college degrees conferred in the U.S. over the past 140 years.
In the 1869-70 academic year, less than 10,000 bachelor's degrees and only 1 doctorate degree were issued. A decade later, nearly 13,000 bachelor's and a whopping 54 doctoral degrees were conferred. By the turn of the century, nearly 27,500 bachelor's and 382 doctorate degrees were granted, along with 1,600 Master's degrees. By mid century, these numbers jumped up to 432,000, 6, 400 and 58,100, respectively, average decadal increases of 295, 316 and 715 percent.
Fast forward to 2007-08 and there were nearly 1.6 million bachelor's, 63,700 doctorates and 625,000 master's degrees conferred. Since the 1949-50 year, these were average decadal increases of 46, 155 and 169 percent. Interestingly, this later period also happens to roughly coincide with the federal government's involvement in the financing of students. Recall that the feds first got involved in financing students with the 1944 GI Bill that provided financial assistance for veterans who wished to pursue a college education upon return from WWII. The federal government would later expand its role in providing need-based financial assistance to non-veteran students beginning with the 1965 Higher Education Act. As time has passed, the federal government has extended financial assistance to virtually all students, regardless of need or merit.
So the history lesson for the day is unintended consequences: The growth rate of college degree conferment grew faster before the federal government became involved in financing students than since it has been involved. This suggests that the goal of increasing college attainment rates through financial aid may have actually had opposite the intended effect, it may have actually slowed the rate. Would the U.S. have produced a similar amount of college graduates today had the government never actually got involved in the financial assistance game? That is a question that is unanswerable, as the experiment has already occurred. However, as previous CCAP work suggests, the government's subsidization of higher education has likely increased the costs of higher education more than would have occurred in the absence of subsidization.
Note: There are obviously some concerns regarding the accuracy of data and the base year used for comparison. I rely on the accuracy of government data reporting in the above. The time periods used were roughly equivalent and coincided with the start of the federal government's involvement in providing financial assistance.
Is America Over-Invested in Doctoral Education?
by: Matthew Denhart
Last week CCAP released From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: Why College Graduates are not Getting Good Jobs. In it we presented data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) which show that an alarmingly large percentage (35.3 percent in 2008) of college graduates are "underemployed."
While we focused on Bachelor's degree recipients, one wonders about the job prospects for America's most highly educated individuals as well, namely those possessing PhDs. A recent article from the Economist suggests that they are not too encouraging. Although individuals possessing PhDs do enjoy a wage premium 26 percent greater than those with only Bachelor's degrees, this premium barely exceeds the 23 percent figure for those with Master's degrees. From an earnings perspective, investing in a PhD may not be as advantageous as many suppose.
A major reason to pursue a doctoral degree is to enable one's self to have a career in academia. However, freshly minted PhDs are finding it increasingly difficult to find university employment. Indeed, according to the new book Higher Education? by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, between 2005 and 2009, America produced 100,000 new doctoral degrees for only 16,000 new professorships. Clearly, our country's colleges and universities cannot employ all of the PhDs they are producing.
So why do universities keep turning out such a large number of PhDs? The Economist article suggests the main explanation is that it is in their best interest to have loads of cheap research and teaching help around. This, however, is likely not in the best interest of the students themselves. The article puts it more eloquently:
Last week CCAP released From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: Why College Graduates are not Getting Good Jobs. In it we presented data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) which show that an alarmingly large percentage (35.3 percent in 2008) of college graduates are "underemployed."
While we focused on Bachelor's degree recipients, one wonders about the job prospects for America's most highly educated individuals as well, namely those possessing PhDs. A recent article from the Economist suggests that they are not too encouraging. Although individuals possessing PhDs do enjoy a wage premium 26 percent greater than those with only Bachelor's degrees, this premium barely exceeds the 23 percent figure for those with Master's degrees. From an earnings perspective, investing in a PhD may not be as advantageous as many suppose.
A major reason to pursue a doctoral degree is to enable one's self to have a career in academia. However, freshly minted PhDs are finding it increasingly difficult to find university employment. Indeed, according to the new book Higher Education? by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, between 2005 and 2009, America produced 100,000 new doctoral degrees for only 16,000 new professorships. Clearly, our country's colleges and universities cannot employ all of the PhDs they are producing.
So why do universities keep turning out such a large number of PhDs? The Economist article suggests the main explanation is that it is in their best interest to have loads of cheap research and teaching help around. This, however, is likely not in the best interest of the students themselves. The article puts it more eloquently:
The interests of academics and universities on the one hand and PhD students on the other are not well aligned.This of course is not to suggest that learning for learning's sake is a bad thing. It may be that even if doctoral students knew there was a zero percent chance of them ever obtaining university employment or finding a high paying job, they would still pursue the PhD. Yet, in a society with limited resources, it is a legitimate public policy question to ask how much we want the government to subsidize this behavior. Given the poor employment prospects for many college graduates, including even those with PhDs, the answer may very well be that we are currently over-invested in higher education.
Some university departments and academics regard numbers of PhD graduates as an indicator of success and compete to produce more. For students, a measure of how quickly those students get a permanent job, and what they earn, would be more useful.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Weathering the Political Storm
by Daniel L. Bennett
Recently, my esteemed CCAP colleague Richard Vedder wrote in the pages of Forbes a very provocative piece entitled An $8 Billion Misunderstanding, in which he chastised the Obama Administration's attack on the for-profit sector. Awhile back, I submitted an article to Career College Central entitled Weathering the Political Storm: History Repeats Itself in the for-profit sector, which is the lead story in the latest issue of CCC. My article offers a similar castigation of the Obama Administration's handling of the sector. In the article, I draw comparisons to the current regulatory manifestations to those experienced in the late 1980's that, although they resulted in the closing of many career schools and reduced the sector's share of federal aid, only temporarily interrupted the growth of the sector. Click here to download and read a pdf of the article (kudos to the CCC team for their usual excellent graphics work). You can also access and read the entire magazine here.
Recently, my esteemed CCAP colleague Richard Vedder wrote in the pages of Forbes a very provocative piece entitled An $8 Billion Misunderstanding, in which he chastised the Obama Administration's attack on the for-profit sector. Awhile back, I submitted an article to Career College Central entitled Weathering the Political Storm: History Repeats Itself in the for-profit sector, which is the lead story in the latest issue of CCC. My article offers a similar castigation of the Obama Administration's handling of the sector. In the article, I draw comparisons to the current regulatory manifestations to those experienced in the late 1980's that, although they resulted in the closing of many career schools and reduced the sector's share of federal aid, only temporarily interrupted the growth of the sector. Click here to download and read a pdf of the article (kudos to the CCC team for their usual excellent graphics work). You can also access and read the entire magazine here.
Quote of the Day
Frank Donoghue
But isn’t the student-loan industry, as it currently exists in the U.S. and will soon exist in England, neatly anticipated by the subprime mortgage industry? The consequences, though they could be years off, are potentially just as ominous.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
CCAP in the News
Since CCAP released its report last week on college graduate underemployment, titled From Wall Street to Wal-Mart, a number of writers have provided their reaction and critique of our study, especially over at Minding the Campus, where they had an extended forum on the subject. Here's what a number of them had to say.
George Leef:
George Leef:
I suspect that this report, if anything, understates the “underemployment” problem. That is because there are now quite a few jobs that generally exclude high-school graduates not because they couldn’t possibly do the work, but because there are so many college graduates in the labor force that employers can afford to screen out non-graduates. This is the “credential inflation” problem... If it were possible to do an analysis of the labor force that looked only at jobs that require post-secondary education in a knowledge sense (rather than a credential sense), the underemployment percentage would increase greatly.Charles Murray:
What Richard Vedder's stunning statistics about the jobs of college graduates tell us is an indictment of a system that has held up a false god, the BA, as something that is required for social respectability. It is a system that doesn't even think about helping all young people find something they love to do and teaching them how to do it well.Jackson Toby:
If we keep in mind the difference between "jobs" and "careers," the fact that college graduates take low-level jobs in the years immediately following graduation is not necessarily a failure of college education or of the graduates themselves.Patrick Deneen
What disturbs me about arguments such as those found in the Vedder report is the implication that education should be fitted to the narrow vocational needs of airline attendants and cashiers, that an appropriate education will prepare them as efficiently as possible for a life of menial labor. I lament that a major thrust is afoot to dismantle whatever remnant of our older liberal arts tradition persists and to replace it with measurable forms of study that produce narrowly-trained careerists.Carson Jerema
Bob AdelmannOf course, people can pursue an education for reasons other than employment or economic gain, but that is not how education is marketed either in the United States or in Canada, and creeping credentialism has long been flagged as a problem on both sides of the border.
The obvious beneficiaries of ever increasing enrolment in college and universities are, of course, the institutions themselves, who gain tuition and funding for each student they admit, but also businesses who can use the holding of a degree as a signal device without having to invest resources into properly vetting job candidates. And, as Vedder notes, the trend points to growing inefficiencies in the education system. Whereas not that long ago, it took the system 12 or 13 years to prepare most people for adulthood, it now takes 17 or 18 years.
Vedder holds that many of these students have bought the line promoted by the College Board and the education establishment: namely, more education translates into higher lifetime wages. This is promoted by those heavily involved in higher education, starting with the Obama administration...
CCAP Contributions to Forbes.com
As we mentioned a few days ago, CCAP is now regularly blogging for Forbes.com. Our two most recent posts directly relate to our most recent study where we take a look at BLS data suggesting that over one-third of college graduates in 2008 were employed in below-college jobs. Here are some snippets from the two posts.
Is America Saturated with College Grads?
Is America Saturated with College Grads?
In the United States (using 2008 data), we have estimated that there were approximately 17.4 million college graduates working in occupations requiring less than a bachelor’s degree (our favorite example: the 317,000 college educated waiters)...Should Government Support Higher Education?
In light of our research, we find it difficult to justify public policy aimed at increasing the nation’s stock of college graduates as the cure for its economic ills.
The ability and desire of taxpayers to heavily subsidize higher education with all of its inefficiencies diminishes daily. We are moving towards de facto privatization of some state universities, for example. As we increasingly recognize that higher education is largely a private good primarily conferring benefits on its users, we will back off our huge governmental financial commitment to colleges and universities, most of which are organized on a costly medieval model primarily using instructional methods dating back to when Socrates taught the youth of Athens. I think this public disinvestment is a good move, and higher education will be forced to adjust to it.You can read all of our contributions to Forbes.com here.
Links for 12/21/10
C. Kirabo Jackson
Peer quality can account for about one tenth of school value-added on average, but over one-third among the top quartile of schools…Eric A. Hanushek
A teacher one standard deviation above the mean effectiveness annually generates marginal gains of over $400,000 in present value of student future earnings with a class size of 20 and proportionately higher with larger class sizes. Alternatively, replacing the bottom 5-8 percent of teachers with average teachers could move the U.S. near the top of international math and science rankings with a present value of $100 trillion.Cameron Neylon via Paul Jump
Once you start looking at how the scholarly communication system works with any degree of outside perspective, it looks utterly insane."The Economist
Although a doctorate is designed as training for a job in academia, the number of PhD positions is unrelated to the number of job openings…
Indeed, the production of PhDs has far outstripped demand for university lecturers. In a recent book, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, an academic and a journalist, report that America produced more than 100,000 doctoral degrees between 2005 and 2009. In the same period there were just 16,000 new professorships…
In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment… Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam…
Academics tend to regard asking whether a PhD is worthwhile as analogous to wondering whether there is too much art or culture in the world…
Monday, December 20, 2010
Links for 12/20/10
Bob Samuels
failure to grasp basic math and accounting…Mark J. Perry
the university simply refuses to admit that undergraduates are now subsidizing everything else in the UC system, and the only solution the university finds to any problem is to increase student tuition and to cheapen the quality of undergraduate education by turning to online classes, reduced requirements, summer courses, and fast degrees…
the regents will not be able to maintain the fiscal health and educational quality of the university if they cannot do simple math, and if they spend the majority of the time blaming the state for all of the UC’s problems, nothing will ever change…
Living the Good Life Working A 9-Month "Year": 14,000 Illinois High School Teachers Make +$100kKent Jenkins
The value of the education provided by private-sector colleges such as Corinthian cannot, and should not, be determined solely on the basis of loan-repayment data…Steve Kolowich
The value of the education obtained in a career college should rightfully be assessed based on job placement in the field for which the student was trained…
repayment and default rates are not closely related to the type of school a student attends, but rather to certain socioeconomic factors…
Bollen is principal investigator for MESUR (Metrics for Scholarly Usage of Resources), a project founded in 2006 on a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, that is trying to shift how scholarly impact is measured away from citations — which he describes as inherently “backwards-looking … kind of like astronomers looking at a galaxy whose light reaches us 50 million years after the events that cause that light to happen” — and toward the sort of real-time usage metrics that Web-based consumption enables…
the availability of “usage data” — information on how many times a digital article has been downloaded, and in what context — means that people like Bollen can track the spread of an idea in a scholarly community using the same principles that epidemiologists use to track the spread of a virus in a village…
Eigenfactor, a project based at the University of Washington, measures the influence of scholarly journals using the old-fashioned method of counting citations, but adds an algorithmic wrinkle… takes into account how many times that journal is cited by other journals that are themselves frequently cited…
Burck Smith (and Salman Khan) = Plato
by Andrew Gillen
One of the professors in Serena Golden’s story on online courses from StraighterLine declared
As Brad DeLong reminds us, Socrates didn’t think books could do as good of a job of providing an education as “discussion and apprenticeship to an excellent thinker.” He was right of course. But that was beside the point. There are simply not enough great thinkers for that model to provide education to enough people.
In contrast, Plato acknowledged the superiority of the discussion and apprenticeship model, but saw the potential of the written word to spread ideas to a much greater audience and across much greater stretches of time then a single mentor ever could. He too was right.
Many professors take the Socratic stance with regard to online courses (though notably not for books). But this is the wrong way to look at the issue. To use a beautiful quote from Michael Hammer and James Champy out of context
One of the professors in Serena Golden’s story on online courses from StraighterLine declared
“I don’t think online is really teaching, to be quite honest with you”I think this sentiment more than anything else gets to the heart of the controversy concerning higher education’s future. Until recently, I thought that online education was a new development with new controversies, but I was wrong.
As Brad DeLong reminds us, Socrates didn’t think books could do as good of a job of providing an education as “discussion and apprenticeship to an excellent thinker.” He was right of course. But that was beside the point. There are simply not enough great thinkers for that model to provide education to enough people.
In contrast, Plato acknowledged the superiority of the discussion and apprenticeship model, but saw the potential of the written word to spread ideas to a much greater audience and across much greater stretches of time then a single mentor ever could. He too was right.
Many professors take the Socratic stance with regard to online courses (though notably not for books). But this is the wrong way to look at the issue. To use a beautiful quote from Michael Hammer and James Champy out of context
“The fundamental error that most [professors] commit when they look at technology is to view it through the lens of their [existing] processes… the real power of technology is not that it can make the old processes work better, but that it enables organizations to break old rules and create new ways of working.”What Plato did with books, Burck Smith and others like Salmon Khan are doing with the internet. The book revolutionized the provision of education. The internet will too.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Kudos to Inside Higher Ed
by Andrew Gillen
Serena Golden has a loooong piece in IHE about her experience taking an online course through StraighterLine. StraighterLine comes off as neither a miracle cure nor as a diploma mill. While I would have liked to see a few things done differently, overall, the approach was just right - focusing on her direct experience while asking the obvious follow-up questions to the obvious players involved.
If you can’t read the whole piece, here is the 21 word version, courtesy of the founder of StraighterLine, Burck Smith:
Serena Golden has a loooong piece in IHE about her experience taking an online course through StraighterLine. StraighterLine comes off as neither a miracle cure nor as a diploma mill. While I would have liked to see a few things done differently, overall, the approach was just right - focusing on her direct experience while asking the obvious follow-up questions to the obvious players involved.
If you can’t read the whole piece, here is the 21 word version, courtesy of the founder of StraighterLine, Burck Smith:
“We’re not in the business of making the best courses. We are in the business of making the best value courses.”
Thursday, December 16, 2010
We Have Oversold College in America
This afternoon CCAP has released its latest study, titled From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: Why College Graduates Are Not Getting Good Jobs, in which we take a deeper look at employment data for college graduates over the past half century. Shockingly, the data reveal that, as of 2008, more than one-third of all employed college graduates were in non-college level jobs and fully 60% of the incremental increase in college graduates since 1992 have wound up in occupations requiring less than a college degree. While there were 5.1 million under-employed college graduates in 1992 (a year in which the unemployment rate of college graduates was above-average), there were over 17 million under-employed graduates by 2008 (a year with below-average college graduate unemployment for the first half of the year).
Here's how lead author Richard Vedder summarized the report's findings in an essay for Minding the Campus:
We have created a Potemkin Village -a few truly good universities that come close to meeting the former academic standards, but a vaster melange of institutions that are often neither "higher" nor even "education" in the classical sense, particularly since the typical student spends less than 30 hours a week on academics. Bottom line: too many people go to college.
This study presents more detailed analysis of the data we have discussed previously, here as well as over at the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Innovations blog (here and here).
The full version of the study is available for free download from our website (in pdf format). In the future we look to do even more detailed and sophisticated analyses of these data.
Partially Correct Diagnosis, Wrong Prescription
by Daniel L. Bennett
The NY Times published an editorial yesterday discussing how college graduates find it increasingly difficult to find good paying jobs. According to the Times:
There are also some issues with The Times data. As Education Sector points out, the
As a nation, it is time that we begin to question the "conventional wisdom" that extending the number of years that young people spend in the education system will solve all of our problems, especially our economic ones. As such, we also need to abandon age-old vodoo prescriptions to our ailments, such as the NY Times suggestion to:
Education is a great tool to advance society, but like all goods and services, there are diminishing returns on investment. CCAP believes that the U.S. has surpassed the optimal point of higher educational investment. Continuing to funnel more students and resources to college campuses is proving to be a bad investment for our nation and those who take on huge debt loads for a promise that for many, cannot be fulfilled.
The NY Times published an editorial yesterday discussing how college graduates find it increasingly difficult to find good paying jobs. According to the Times:
A college education is better than no college education and correlates with higher pay. But as a cure for unemployment or as a way to narrow the chasm between the rich and everyone else, “more college” is a too-easy answer. Over the past year, for example, the unemployment rate for college grads under age 25 has averaged 9.2 percent, up from 8.8 percent a year earlier and 5.8 percent in the first year of the recession that began in December 2007. That means recent grads have about the same level of unemployment as the general population. It also suggests that many employed recent grads may be doing work that doesn’t require a college degree.The Times is right: there is a positive correlation between pay and college education. But that in no way implies a causal relationship. It is highly possible that, on average, individuals with the most ability and highest IQ levels are those who chose to go to college. This suggests that it is innate ability, rather than college attendance, that results in greater earnings in the labor market, although studying certain disciplines such as accounting, computer science, or engineering, for example, likely has a greater positive impact on earning potential.
There are also some issues with The Times data. As Education Sector points out, the
...unemployment rate for Americans under the age of 25 with only a high school diploma is 23 percent, compared to only 7 percent for those with a college degree. So college is even better for recent grads than it is for the overall population. Bad evidence leads to bad conclusionsThe Times is correct in suggesting that many recent grads are working at jobs that don't require a college education. However, the tale of the underemployed college grad is not merely a product of the current recession, but part of a longer term trend that has been growing over time. My colleagues at CCAP have been working tirelessly to amass a data-set that indicates, as Richard Vedder recently wrote in a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education:
approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation’s stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor’s degree or more.Vedder suggests that the mindless effort to expand college enrollments and the number of graduates is the primary factor in this developing trend. The economics of this are simple - As a nation, we've grown the pool (in both relative and absolute terms) of college-educated workers in the labor force quicker than we've created jobs that require college education. This has resulted in employers being able to be more selective about who they hire, including requiring degrees for jobs that historically haven't required them. This has resulted in a form of credential inflation - people seek increasingly higher levels of education and certifications in order to make them more attractive in the labor market, when inflated credentials likely have little impact on how well a worker performs his or her job. The teaching profession is a great example. Many school systems base promotions on whether or not a teacher has earned a graduate degree in education, although there is little to no evidence that earning such a degree leads to better job performance. There is some evidence that there may in fact be in a negative correlation.
this shows that the current problem of college student employability is not a new, and merely temporary, problem.
As a nation, it is time that we begin to question the "conventional wisdom" that extending the number of years that young people spend in the education system will solve all of our problems, especially our economic ones. As such, we also need to abandon age-old vodoo prescriptions to our ailments, such as the NY Times suggestion to:
preserve and improve the policies, programs and institutions that have fostered shared prosperity and broad opportunity — Social Security, Medicare, public schools, progressive taxation, unions, affirmative action, regulation of financial markets and enforcement of labor laws.Such institutions and policies, although they surely make some feel good about themselves, are of exactly the type that have resulted in our country becoming increasingly dependent on big brother, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, and have made it increasingly difficult for private businesses to earn a profit in this country and hence, driven many jobs to countries that are more hospitable to business and thankful for the jobs that they create.
Education is a great tool to advance society, but like all goods and services, there are diminishing returns on investment. CCAP believes that the U.S. has surpassed the optimal point of higher educational investment. Continuing to funnel more students and resources to college campuses is proving to be a bad investment for our nation and those who take on huge debt loads for a promise that for many, cannot be fulfilled.
Links for 12/16/10 Human Capital Edition
John Whalley and Xiliang Zhao
human capital plays a much more important role in China’s economic growth than available literature suggests… In addition, because human capital formation accelerated following the major educational expansion increases after 1999 (college enrollment in China increased nearly fivefold between 1997 and 2007) while growth rates of GDP are little changed over the period after 1999, total factor productivity increases fall if human capital is used in growth accounting as we suggest… this contribution is -7.03% between 1999 and 2008. Negative TFP growth along with the high contribution of physical and human capital to economic growth seem to suggest that there have been decreased in the efficiency of inputs usage in China or worsened misallocation of physical and human capital in recent years…Raphael Auer
trade with richer nations tends to decrease the relative wage of skilled workers in poorer nations, which reduces the incentives to invest in human capital. So, does trade with rich nations "de-skill" emerging economies?...Mike Mandel
proximity to skilled labour is associated with a 15% reduction of higher education, but only a 10% reduction in primary education…
The build-up of debt was a symptom of the real underlying problem: A massive write-down of U.S. knowledge capital over the past 10-15 years, combined with anti-innovation policies on the part of the government…Tyler Cowen on Mike Mandel
The value of knowledge capital depends, in part, on how rare it is…
Over the past 10-15 years, the strengthening of information flows into developing countries meant that knowledge capital was being distributed much more quickly around the world. As a result, the normal process of knowledge capital depreciation greatly accelerated in the U.S. and Europe–beneath the radar screen, because no statistical agency constructs a set of knowledge capital accounts.
What we should have been doing is boosting our investment in knowledge capital creation–education, R&D, business innovation. Instead, we borrowed to support consumption…
I agree with the conclusion but I am not sure that globalization was the mechanism…
The more that your economy "looks like" the music sector, the more rapid the rate of depreciation for production capital and knowledge capital. This means we may be overestimating our national wealth…
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Links for 12/15/10
DANIEL HAMERMESH
what a pathetically lazy bunch of faculty!...Arthur Levine
More often tenure provides a lifetime of job security not to professors whose work requires protection, but to a significant minority of "deadwood" — individuals who are unproductive, out of date, or poor in their research, teaching or institutional commitment…Megan McArdle
it is better that the majority who may not need the protections of tenure receive them than that the minority who do need protections be denied them…
Since mandatory retirement is not possible, the length of tenure could be limited to a significant but finite number of years. A term of 30 years, for example, would ensure essential academic freedom and at the same time allow for the turnover that universities require to remain intellectually strong…
So the Supreme Court will not hear the eminent domain case involving Columbia University, which finagled the state into seizing local land and transferring it to the school…Kevin Carey
I am not against eminent domain for public uses like hospitals or railroads. But by no stretch of the imagination could Columbia University be called a public accommodation. One's gut and one's social conscience rebel at the seizure of private property which is taken precisely because it serves, or is owned by, poorer people. One's gut and one's social conscience positively riot at the thought of taking this seized land and handing it over to wealthy private institution that almost exclusively serves the affluent class…
the prevailing attitude toward information about learning still ranges from infinite caution to outright hostility… "The perfect is the enemy of the good" has become a rhetorical strategy to be deployed, rather than a problem to be avoided, when outsiders ask uncomfortable questions about teaching and learning…
there are upward of 170,000 people working in colleges today who have been rigorously trained to find meaning in chaos. They explore the furthest theoretical reaches of time and space; ponder the nature of justice, beauty, and truth; develop new ways of understanding the human condition; and contribute countless innovations that make the world a more vibrant, humane place to be. Are we to understand that it is beyond their intellectual means to produce a reasonably accurate estimate of how much chemistry majors learn at Institution A compared with Institution B? That a student's relative capacity to think analytically and write clearly is a mystery that no mortal can hope to reveal?
Nonsense. Comparable learning information doesn't exist because many groups have a strong interest in its not existing. Institutions that thrive on centuries-old reputations, despite their present-day failure to challenge students in the classroom. Companies looking to exploit the federal financial-aid system. Faculty who hate teaching and love research…
we need a measuring stick for higher education… If higher education has the courage to take responsibility for honestly assessing student learning and for publishing the results, the measuring stick will be a tool. If it doesn't, the stick could easily become a weapon. The time for making that choice is drawing to a close.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
The Department of (Arbitrary) Education
by Jonathan Robe
A former Department of Education official once remarked that the Secretary of Education possesses essentially unlimited power to make and enforce rules with which colleges receiving federal funds must comply. I was reminded of this comment while perusing the Code of Federal Regulations (I've got to do something entertaining when I'm having difficulty falling to skeep at night). Anyway, I came across this gem in Title 34, Chapter VI of the Code (my emphasis):
A former Department of Education official once remarked that the Secretary of Education possesses essentially unlimited power to make and enforce rules with which colleges receiving federal funds must comply. I was reminded of this comment while perusing the Code of Federal Regulations (I've got to do something entertaining when I'm having difficulty falling to skeep at night). Anyway, I came across this gem in Title 34, Chapter VI of the Code (my emphasis):
§ 668.14 Program participation agreement.Now if my reading of this section is correct (and based on the comment I mentioned above, I think that it is), it seems to be unduly granting overly broad and arbitrary power to the Secretary of Education such that, potentially, the Secretary can legally treat individual institutions quite differently in terms of the conditions to which each one must adhere. As we're seeing in the context of new or recently proposed rules such as gainful employment, that appears to be what is, and has been, happening.
(a)(1) An institution may participate in any Title IV, HEA program, other than the LEAP and NEISP programs, only if the institution enters into a written program participation agreement with the Secretary, on a form approved by the Secretary. A program participation agreement conditions the initial and continued participation of
an eligible institution in any Title IV, HEA program upon compliance with the provisions of this part, the individual program regulations, and any additional conditions specified in the program participation agreement that the Secretary requires the institution to meet.
The Great College-Degree Scam
By Richard Vedder*
With the help of a small army of researchers and associates (most importantly, Chris Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe, and Chris Denhart) and starting with help from Douglas Himes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) has unearthed what I think is the single most scandalous statistic in higher education. It reveals many current problems and ones that will grow enormously as policymakers mindlessly push enrollment expansion amidst what must become greater public-sector resource limits.
Here it is: approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation’s stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor’s degree or more. (We are working to integrate some earlier Edwin Rubenstein data on this topic to give us a more complete picture of this trend).
How did my crew of Whiz Kids arrive at this statistic? We found some obscure but highly useful BLS data for 1992 that provides occupational/educational attainment data for the entire labor force, and similar data for 2008 (reported, to much commentary, in this space and by CCAP earlier). We then took the ratio of the change in college graduates filling these less skilled jobs to the total increase in the number of college graduates. Note I use the word “increase.” Enrollment expansion/increased access policy relates to the margin—to changes in enrollments/college graduates over time.
To be sure, there are some issues of measurement, judgment, and data comparability. With this in mind, I had my associates calculate the incremental unskilled job to college graduate ratio using different assumptions about the data. Even with alternative assumptions, a majority of the increased college graduate population is doing jobs that historically have been filled by persons with lesser education.
The exact numbers in the initial calculation are broken down as follows: In 1992 the BLS reports that total college graduate employment was 28.9 million, of whom 5.1 million were in occupations which the BLS classified as “noncollege level jobs” while in 2008 the BLS data indicate that total college graduate employment was 49.35 million, with 17.4 million in occupations classified as requiring less than a bachelor’s degree.
An example or two from specific occupations is useful. In 1992 119,000 waiters and waitresses were college degree holders. By 2008, this number had more than doubled to 318,000. While the total number of waiters and waitresses grew by about 1 million during this period, 20% of all new jobs in this occupation were filled by college graduates. Take cashiers as well. While 132,000 cashiers possessed college degrees in 1992, by 2008, 365,000 cashiers were college graduates. As with waiters and waitresses, 20% of new cashiers since 1992 are college graduates. (The sources for all of these data are Table 1 of the Summer 1994 Occupational Outlook Quarterly and the Employment Projection Program “Occupations” tables on the BLS Web site)
Six quick observations on these numbers:
First, the push to increase the number of college graduates seems horribly misguided from a strict economic/vocational perspective. It is precisely that perspective that is emphasized by those, starting with President Obama, who insist that we need to have more college graduates.
Second, the data suggest a horrible decline in the productivity of American education in that the “inputs” used to achieve any given human capital (occupational) outcome have expanded enormously. More simply, it takes 18 years of schooling (including kindergarten and the typical fifth year of college to get a bachelor’s degree) for persons to get an education to do jobs that a generation or two ago people did with 12-13 years of education (graduating more often from college in four years and sometimes skipping kindergarten).
Third, a sharp rise in the dependency ratio—those too old or too young to work relative to the work age population is coming because of the aging of the American population. This means we need to increase employment participation in younger ages (e.g., 18 to 23) where participation is low today because of the rising college participation rate. The falling productivity of American education is aggravating a serious problem—a shortage of workers to sustain a growing population of those unable to care for themselves.
Fourth, all of this supports the notion that credential inflation arises from a perceived need by individuals to demonstrate potential employment competence through a piece of paper, i.e. a college diploma. Employers are using education as a screening and signaling device, at a low cost directly to them (although not costless because of the taxes they pay to sustain much of this), but at a high cost to the prospective employees and to society as a whole.
Fifth, this shows that the current problem of college student employability is not a new, and merely temporary, problem.
Lastly, I am saddened that this is happening. Many of those advocating more access are well meaning and have pure motives, but they are ignorant of the evidence. But higher education is all about facts, knowledge—learning how the world works and disseminating that information to others. Some in higher education KNOW about all of this and are keeping quiet about it because of their own self-interest. We are deceiving our young population to mindlessly pursue college degrees when very often that is advice that is increasingly questionable.
This post originally appeared on the "Innovations" blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education on December 9, 2010.
Links for 12/14/10
Andrew J. Rotherham
In 1970 America spent about $228 billion in today's dollars on public schools. In 2007 that figure was $583 billion… much of the increase is just a lot of spending without a lot to show for it…Goldie Blumenstyk
The more general problem with school funding is the lack of attention to productivity, i.e., thinking about outputs (student learning) in relation to inputs (spending). In education circles, productivity is a four-letter word. Cost and benefits? Never heard of 'em!...
The University of Phoenix has released its third “Academic Annual Report,” a document that continues to be notable not so much for the depth of information it provides on its students’ academic progress but for its existence at all. Few colleges, for-profit or otherwise, publish such reports…Carlos J. Alonso
The current crisis of the university is a crisis of social legitimation…Ed Whelan via Jennifer Rubin
I would argue that its underlying assumptions make the project of accountability a questionable strategy for the specific crisis of social legitimation…
the crisis of legitimation we are confronting today is related more to the product that we are selling than to our inability to make that product worth buying. Accountability presumes that if we are able to show the effective transmission of knowledge and skills to our students, we will satisfy the market's requirement for verifiable results. But what if the market has already devalued from the start the knowledge on which the entire operation of outcomes and accountability is based, as well as the institution where it is produced?...
many employers insist on a college degree for jobs that plainly don't require college-level skills and that many young people who would be far happier and more productive in the working world waste lots of time and lots and lots of money chasing after a paper diploma. The even bigger losers in this system are the young men and women, disproportionately minority, who went to crummy high schools that didn't prepare them for college and who can't get decent entry-level jobs. The big winners in this system are the colleges, which end up with a massively inflated demand for their services.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Links for 12/13/10
Troy Camplin
The reason I am staying home with my children has nothing to do with ideology or worry about their education—rather, it has to do with the financial realities of being a Ph.D. in the humanities without a tenure-track position…Antonio Villaraigosa
I was working three jobs just to get by. And none of them required a Ph.D.—my M.A. in English was sufficient for the community college classes…
I hate to use such a Marxist term as “exploitation,” but for someone with as much education as I and many others who work as adjuncts in community colleges have, how else can one describe the pay? The community colleges take advantage of the overproduction of English and humanities Ph.D.s by paying extremely low salaries…
there has been one, unwavering roadblock to reform: teacher union leadership…Russell K. Nieli
It's not easy for me to say this. I started out as an organizer for UTLA (United Teachers Los Angeles), and I don't have an anti-union bone in my body. The teachers unions aren't the biggest or the only problem facing our schools, but for many years now, they have been the most consistent, most powerful defenders of the unacceptable status quo…
at Caltech, there are no dumb jocks, dumb legacies, or dumb affirmative action students… this beacon of pure meritocracy…Joseph G. Altonji, Ching-I Huang, Christopher R. Taber
We develop a framework that may be used to determine the degree to which a school choice program may harm public school stayers by luring the best students to other schools. This framework results in a simple formula showing that the “cream-skimming” effect… We find that the cream skimming effect is negative but small…
Friday, December 10, 2010
CCAP Releases "Better/Cheaper College"
CCAP is pleased to announce its publication of "Better/Cheaper College: An Entrepreneur's Guide to Rescuing the Higher Education Industry." The book was written by Vance H. Fried, a CCAP Senior Fellow and Riata Professor of Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University.
This book is unique in that in takes an entrepreneurial perspective on higher education. Where other books see an industry with huge problems, this book sees an industry with huge opportunities. Where other books propose ways to tweak the existing higher education business model, this book proposes innovative business models to revolutionize the industry. Where other books look to the education establishment to lead change, this book looks to the entrepreneur to drive change. Where other books are aimed at slowing the rate of growth in tuition, this book advocates a radical reduction.
Below are some provocative excerpts from Better/Cheaper College:
Academic research may provide some benefits to society as a whole, but it provides little, if any, direct benefits to students, particularly undergraduates. Academic research is a public good.
Expensive instruction isn’t the same as good instruction. This is a myth the industry has aggressively promoted, but it simply isn’t true.
Excessive endowments are an inefficient use of resources, but they can have far worse consequences. They can become destructive.
The entire book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
This book is unique in that in takes an entrepreneurial perspective on higher education. Where other books see an industry with huge problems, this book sees an industry with huge opportunities. Where other books propose ways to tweak the existing higher education business model, this book proposes innovative business models to revolutionize the industry. Where other books look to the education establishment to lead change, this book looks to the entrepreneur to drive change. Where other books are aimed at slowing the rate of growth in tuition, this book advocates a radical reduction.
Below are some provocative excerpts from Better/Cheaper College:
Academic research may provide some benefits to society as a whole, but it provides little, if any, direct benefits to students, particularly undergraduates. Academic research is a public good.
Expensive instruction isn’t the same as good instruction. This is a myth the industry has aggressively promoted, but it simply isn’t true.
Excessive endowments are an inefficient use of resources, but they can have far worse consequences. They can become destructive.
The entire book is available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Links for 12/10/10
Headlines you don’t see everyday:
Loyal readers might remember this pic of the day from a while back
Well the folks over at Calamities of Nature have discovered a time machine, and traveled 20 years into the future. Here's what they found.
Nun Is Arrested for Allegedly Stealing $1.2-Million From Iona CollegeWhat you should have taken away from your economics 101 course.
Loyal readers might remember this pic of the day from a while back
Well the folks over at Calamities of Nature have discovered a time machine, and traveled 20 years into the future. Here's what they found.
Thursday, December 09, 2010
More on the "Underemployed College Graduate"
CCAP has unearthed more data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that suggest that many college graduates are filling jobs that do not require college-level skills. We originally reported on this issue here, and expanded upon it here.
Richard Vedder has a just-released article in the "Innovations" section of the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "The Great College Degree Scam." The article presents data from the BLS that suggest:
Richard Vedder has a just-released article in the "Innovations" section of the Chronicle of Higher Education titled "The Great College Degree Scam." The article presents data from the BLS that suggest:
approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation’s stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor’s degree or more.Check out the entire article over at the Chronicle for more.
CCAP Now Blogging for Forbes
CCAP now is a regular blogging contributor for Forbes, our partner in the annual college rankings. You can read our Forbes blogs here. As always, we welcome your comments and thoughts.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
by Jonathan Robe
Now I'm wondering: When someone will conduct an undercover investigation of the practices of the Government Accountability Office? May I suggest that some students at a for-profit school form the investigation? The Washington Post reports that the GAO has had to make some "significant edits" to the results of their investigations of the for-profits. As far as I can tell, there isn't exactly a smoking gun here (the GAO is standing by its larger criticism of the sector) but it does more than make one wonder about the credibility of the GAO's reporting when there were some (misleading?) misrepresentations of the results in its own report.
From the Post (which, as we all know, is intimately tied to Kaplan University):
really stupid careless.
Now I'm wondering: When someone will conduct an undercover investigation of the practices of the Government Accountability Office? May I suggest that some students at a for-profit school form the investigation? The Washington Post reports that the GAO has had to make some "significant edits" to the results of their investigations of the for-profits. As far as I can tell, there isn't exactly a smoking gun here (the GAO is standing by its larger criticism of the sector) but it does more than make one wonder about the credibility of the GAO's reporting when there were some (misleading?) misrepresentations of the results in its own report.
From the Post (which, as we all know, is intimately tied to Kaplan University):
Now I know that nobody is perfect and therefore the need for revision doesn't necessarily imply malfeasance on the part of the GAO, but when you're doing an investigation purporting to show misleading advertising and even fraud, the first rule of thumb is that you do all that you can to avoid committing the same error you accuse others of committing. You're in a pretty bad spot when you ignore that principle and are left with the nicest interpretation being that you'reThe revised report, posted Nov. 30 on the GAO Web site, changed some key passages. In one anecdote cited as an example of deceptive marketing, the GAO originally reported: "Undercover applicant was told that he could earn up to $100 an hour as a massage therapist. While this may be possible, according to the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] 90 percent of all massage therapists in California make less than $34 per hour."
The revised version states: "While one school representative indicated to the undercover applicant that he could earn up to $30 an hour as a massage therapist, another representative told the applicant that the school's massage instructors and directors can earn $150-$200 an hour. While this may be possible, according to the BLS, 90 percent of all massage therapists in California make less than $34 per hour."
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Is South Korea Over Invested in Higher Education?
By Chris Denhart
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Miracle Is Over. Now What?” investigates the rise and plateau of South Korea’s economy in recent years. The interaction between educational factors and the economic boom and recess is of particular interest.
The economic boom that propelled South Korea into the list of world economic powers appears to be quickly coming to an end. Within the past 50 years South Korea has gone from steep poverty and hunger to the 15th largest economy in the world and is the home to such world recognized technological companies as Samsung and Hyundai. Its rapid growth is attributed in large part to its change from a rurally based society to an industrious one with a very large amount of economic output--43%--coming from exported goods.
However, the growth rate is declining. Average growth has decreased from 6.2% per year in the 90s to 4.3% during the past decade. Beyond that, the potential for growth has dropped further in the past 15 years than any other developed nation. So, the question one might ask is what factors are contributing to this plateau and decline?
The WSJ article points to two factors in particular that caught my attention. Their argument is: “Fewer People, More Skills.”
First, the "fewer people" issue. The Korean birth rate has dropped from 1.6 in 1990 to 1.2 children per woman in 2009. This will only continue to hurt an already dwindling labor force as fewer workers are being brought up. A second contributor to the hurting labor force is that Korean law deters women and immigrants from becoming well integrated into the work force. Only 53% of women work, below the developed world average of 57%, and those that do work are typically paid salaries around half that of their male counterparts, and are strongly encouraged to quit their jobs when becoming pregnant. South Korea has 557,000 foreign workers, which make up only 2% of the labor force, compared to 10% in the United States. Korean law forbids an immigrant from working more than 5 years with the same company.
These are all reasons that the labor force is lacking, but the thing that interests us most is that South Korea has become an over-educated society accounting for the “more skills” half of the argument. The article states:
I think we can agree that there is a problem with this situation. As industries are scrambling for workers to fill lower-end positions, there is a large number of able bodied people ages 20-30 that are on standby until a high position opens up. While I am not arguing that South Korea should stop educating its citizens, I think the argument can be made that it may currently be over-invested in higher education. An economy does not require all its workers to have highly advanced skills. Indeed, many jobs that are still very important to society do not require a college degree.
Of course it does not necessarily hurt to have a college degree. However, going to college is costly, both in terms of tuition/fees and one's time. When an economy does not have enough high skilled jobs to offer all its college graduates, it makes deciding to invest in a college degree more tenuous. Just as the U.S. may be over invested in higher education, it appears South Korea may be suffering in part from the same problem.
Chris Denhart is a research assistant at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and a freshman at Ohio University.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “The Miracle Is Over. Now What?” investigates the rise and plateau of South Korea’s economy in recent years. The interaction between educational factors and the economic boom and recess is of particular interest.
The economic boom that propelled South Korea into the list of world economic powers appears to be quickly coming to an end. Within the past 50 years South Korea has gone from steep poverty and hunger to the 15th largest economy in the world and is the home to such world recognized technological companies as Samsung and Hyundai. Its rapid growth is attributed in large part to its change from a rurally based society to an industrious one with a very large amount of economic output--43%--coming from exported goods.
However, the growth rate is declining. Average growth has decreased from 6.2% per year in the 90s to 4.3% during the past decade. Beyond that, the potential for growth has dropped further in the past 15 years than any other developed nation. So, the question one might ask is what factors are contributing to this plateau and decline?
The WSJ article points to two factors in particular that caught my attention. Their argument is: “Fewer People, More Skills.”
First, the "fewer people" issue. The Korean birth rate has dropped from 1.6 in 1990 to 1.2 children per woman in 2009. This will only continue to hurt an already dwindling labor force as fewer workers are being brought up. A second contributor to the hurting labor force is that Korean law deters women and immigrants from becoming well integrated into the work force. Only 53% of women work, below the developed world average of 57%, and those that do work are typically paid salaries around half that of their male counterparts, and are strongly encouraged to quit their jobs when becoming pregnant. South Korea has 557,000 foreign workers, which make up only 2% of the labor force, compared to 10% in the United States. Korean law forbids an immigrant from working more than 5 years with the same company.
These are all reasons that the labor force is lacking, but the thing that interests us most is that South Korea has become an over-educated society accounting for the “more skills” half of the argument. The article states:
So many people have become educated that fewer apply for lower-paid, lower-skilled jobs. That's left the nation's farms and manufacturers scrambling for labor, at the same time many college graduates spend their 20s waiting for opportunities in large companies and the government.There are two cases presented in the article of students that have encountered a tough job market. The first will delay graduation in order that she may have a better chance at being hired. She stated, “These days, no one graduates as scheduled.” The second student was not invited to interview at any of the 15 companies to which she applied. She will earn her degree in management next year and “if she still can't get a job, will study foreign languages and take certification tests to build up her credentials.”So essentially, she will continue to stay in school until a position opens up.
I think we can agree that there is a problem with this situation. As industries are scrambling for workers to fill lower-end positions, there is a large number of able bodied people ages 20-30 that are on standby until a high position opens up. While I am not arguing that South Korea should stop educating its citizens, I think the argument can be made that it may currently be over-invested in higher education. An economy does not require all its workers to have highly advanced skills. Indeed, many jobs that are still very important to society do not require a college degree.
Of course it does not necessarily hurt to have a college degree. However, going to college is costly, both in terms of tuition/fees and one's time. When an economy does not have enough high skilled jobs to offer all its college graduates, it makes deciding to invest in a college degree more tenuous. Just as the U.S. may be over invested in higher education, it appears South Korea may be suffering in part from the same problem.
Chris Denhart is a research assistant at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and a freshman at Ohio University.
Rent Seeking Presidents
by Jonathan Robe
Awhile back, Andrea Fuller reported in a Chronicle piece that for calendar year 2008, there were 30 chief executives at private colleges and universities who received total compensation packages in excess of $1 million, up from 23 for fiscal year 2008 (the IRS recently changed the reporting requirements from the fiscal to the calendar year). While I'm not, as a matter of principle, necessarily opposed to high college executive pay, I do think that it's reasonable to say that high pay should not be awarded unless it is first found to be justifiable. That any actual economic justification is mostly absent from this story provides us, I think, with an excellent reminder of the odd economic structure pervasive within American higher education today.
What are the most important factors for setting college executive pay? Within the broader labor market, it's generally understood that wages reflect productivity, that is, a worker is paid commensurate with the output she provides. In most industries, output is readily observable and measurable, though in the service industries this is a rather difficult task. Within higher education this difficulty is even more pronounced because there isn't any agreed upon measure of performance within the industry (this is one reason, by the way, why college rankings have played a critical role in some university planning decisions). It’s difficult, therefore, to know with reasonable certainty whether a particular university president in a particular year performed well or not. We can't say that the president of such and such a school did a great job running the school because X number of students this year were able to learn Y% more than they did last year. We simply don’t have that kind of information. Sure, the president might appear to be successful in bringing $3 million of donations or in raising the school’s rank by 10% but that doesn't necessarily translate into success regarding the institution's educational mission. In fact, the very opposite could be the case.
Unfortunately, some within higher education try to side-step the difficulty of providing a robust economic justification for these examples of high executive pay. For example, Raymond D. Cotton, a lawyer specializing in executive pay and who was quoted in the Chronicle story, said that large increases in executive pay, especially in cases involving large retirement payouts, can be troublesome because of the role favoritism plays between boards of trustees and presidents. Yet he defends the general high compensation of college executives because it is, as he puts it, the price set by rapidly rising demand and limited supply.
There are, however, several problems with Cotton’s analysis. While I agree that favoritism occurs in some circumstances and is a problem when it does happen, it’s merely the symptom of a much larger problem. In other words, it’s the distorted economics of higher ed which allows favoritism to occur. Thus, even though it might appear that supply and demand set college presidents’ salaries, it’s really distorted supply and distorted demand which are at work to set those high salaries. Colleges don’t necessarily hire executives who will do a good job in improving the educational output of the students; they tend to hire those individuals who would further the institution’s reputation, whether or not that means the students wind up receiving a better education as a result.
But even given these market distortions, there are some instances in which high executive pay is just bizarre. Take the example given in the Chronicle story of the late Bernard Lander, the founder and president of Touro College (it’s not my intention to pick on the late Mr. Lander; I’m just using this as an example for how the distorted market works in practice). The College trustees decided in 2008 that they had underpaid Mr. Lander over the years, so they awarded him a compensation package in excess of $4 million. And how did they know he had been underpaid? The trustees decided “that Mr. Lander had been undercompensated compared with presidents at similar institutions.”
Is that the real standard by which college executive pay is to be judged? No wonder why college cost continue to rise faster than family incomes, inflation, etc. And no wonder administrative costs at colleges are skyrocketing. Calling this the “academic arms race” seems to be very much appropriate. Colleges spend money, look around at their neighbors and see them spending more, so they turn around and increase spending just to keep up with Joneses. And the vicious cycle repeats. Of course, it doesn’t matter that the Joneses might have spent some or all of their money irresponsibly; all that matters in the “arms race” is that they were spending more, so everybody needs to spend more to avoid being left behind. I know the higher ed market is peculiar but this is normally called “economic rent-seeking.” When is it all going to end, or is it just going to spin out of control?
Awhile back, Andrea Fuller reported in a Chronicle piece that for calendar year 2008, there were 30 chief executives at private colleges and universities who received total compensation packages in excess of $1 million, up from 23 for fiscal year 2008 (the IRS recently changed the reporting requirements from the fiscal to the calendar year). While I'm not, as a matter of principle, necessarily opposed to high college executive pay, I do think that it's reasonable to say that high pay should not be awarded unless it is first found to be justifiable. That any actual economic justification is mostly absent from this story provides us, I think, with an excellent reminder of the odd economic structure pervasive within American higher education today.
What are the most important factors for setting college executive pay? Within the broader labor market, it's generally understood that wages reflect productivity, that is, a worker is paid commensurate with the output she provides. In most industries, output is readily observable and measurable, though in the service industries this is a rather difficult task. Within higher education this difficulty is even more pronounced because there isn't any agreed upon measure of performance within the industry (this is one reason, by the way, why college rankings have played a critical role in some university planning decisions). It’s difficult, therefore, to know with reasonable certainty whether a particular university president in a particular year performed well or not. We can't say that the president of such and such a school did a great job running the school because X number of students this year were able to learn Y% more than they did last year. We simply don’t have that kind of information. Sure, the president might appear to be successful in bringing $3 million of donations or in raising the school’s rank by 10% but that doesn't necessarily translate into success regarding the institution's educational mission. In fact, the very opposite could be the case.
Unfortunately, some within higher education try to side-step the difficulty of providing a robust economic justification for these examples of high executive pay. For example, Raymond D. Cotton, a lawyer specializing in executive pay and who was quoted in the Chronicle story, said that large increases in executive pay, especially in cases involving large retirement payouts, can be troublesome because of the role favoritism plays between boards of trustees and presidents. Yet he defends the general high compensation of college executives because it is, as he puts it, the price set by rapidly rising demand and limited supply.
There are, however, several problems with Cotton’s analysis. While I agree that favoritism occurs in some circumstances and is a problem when it does happen, it’s merely the symptom of a much larger problem. In other words, it’s the distorted economics of higher ed which allows favoritism to occur. Thus, even though it might appear that supply and demand set college presidents’ salaries, it’s really distorted supply and distorted demand which are at work to set those high salaries. Colleges don’t necessarily hire executives who will do a good job in improving the educational output of the students; they tend to hire those individuals who would further the institution’s reputation, whether or not that means the students wind up receiving a better education as a result.
But even given these market distortions, there are some instances in which high executive pay is just bizarre. Take the example given in the Chronicle story of the late Bernard Lander, the founder and president of Touro College (it’s not my intention to pick on the late Mr. Lander; I’m just using this as an example for how the distorted market works in practice). The College trustees decided in 2008 that they had underpaid Mr. Lander over the years, so they awarded him a compensation package in excess of $4 million. And how did they know he had been underpaid? The trustees decided “that Mr. Lander had been undercompensated compared with presidents at similar institutions.”
Is that the real standard by which college executive pay is to be judged? No wonder why college cost continue to rise faster than family incomes, inflation, etc. And no wonder administrative costs at colleges are skyrocketing. Calling this the “academic arms race” seems to be very much appropriate. Colleges spend money, look around at their neighbors and see them spending more, so they turn around and increase spending just to keep up with Joneses. And the vicious cycle repeats. Of course, it doesn’t matter that the Joneses might have spent some or all of their money irresponsibly; all that matters in the “arms race” is that they were spending more, so everybody needs to spend more to avoid being left behind. I know the higher ed market is peculiar but this is normally called “economic rent-seeking.” When is it all going to end, or is it just going to spin out of control?
Links for 12/8/10
Peter F. Lake
corporate law permits most private, nonprofit institutions of higher education to operate without any significant external legal accountability…Kevin Carey
the general public—or the student body—has no standing to challenge perceived wrongs…
One might hope that faculty members would provide some oversight. However, they, like students, lack the legal standing…
We can either remedy this crack in corporate-governance law or wait for an earthquake. Accountability may be the best way to preserve our colleges and help them grow. Accountability is not the end of self-governance. It is the necessary response to corporate behavior that can cause lack of innovation from within…
The only way we know how to rate college quality in this country is by wealth, fame, and exclusivity. But most students -- about four out of five -- attend colleges that have modest resources, are easy to get into, and are relatively obscure. Lacking any other way to distinguish among these choices, these students usually attend whichever college is cheapest and closest to home.Ben Miller
That's unfortunate. While there's little difference among elite colleges in the grand scheme of things - Princeton, Brown, tomato, tomahto - it's a real problem when students enroll in colleges that do a poor job of teaching them and helping them graduate, as many do...
extends the American Opportunity Tax Credit (AOTC)…Edububble
In short, the tax compromise keeps in place a benefit that costs about $17.4 billion over two years, more than half of which will go to students who probably aren’t even Pell Grant eligible. At the same time, the Pell Grant program, which is the best targeted federal benefit to the lowest income students, would need about $11.4 billion over the next two years…
The university could have approached this entirely differently. It could have put the professors back in the classroom– something that Mark Yudof doesn’t want to do to his precious number one rated English professors. They might fly the coop and head for another school that pays them not to teach…
25 Ways to Reduce the Cost of College: Part 5
Today, with generous support from Lumina Foundation, CCAP is releasing the fifth and final installment of our book-length report 25 Ways to Reduce the Cost of College. Section 5 is titled "Improve Competition" and includes the following five chapters:
For voracious readers who wish for more after reading all 234 pages of our "25 Ways" report, here's a link to Title 34 of the Code of Federal Regulations!
21. Ease the Credit Transfer Process Among Public Institutions: Americans are a nation of movers, and inter-institutional academic migration is commonplace. However, colleges historically have often made transferring credits difficult. Easing this process through bilateral or state-wide articulation agreements can cut costs and improve student completion rates.Each of these chapters can be downloaded individually for free from our website. Alternatively, interested readers can access each individual chapter here or download a summary of the report here or a copy of the entire report here.
22. Reform Financial Aid: The current financial aid system of loan programs, grants, tax free savings plans and tuition tax credits is overly complex and confusing. Furthermore, it fails to direct aid to the neediest students and encourages students and colleges to spend more money. Reform should involve a vast reduction in the multiplicity of federal programs, the simplification of the FAFSA form, a reintroduction of private competitive servicing of student loans, and moving to vouchering student assistance instead of institutional subsidies.
23. Reform Accreditation to Reduce Barriers to Entry: Despite failing to assure educational quality, accreditation is a costly certification process that serves as a significant barrier to entry to new and smaller institutions. A good accreditation system would be output-based, provide vastly more information to the public and would require accrediting organizations to be governed by those without any vested interest in the results.
24. Subsidize Students, not Schools: Currently higher education institutions serve as a middle-man passing aid dollars from the government along to students. Reconfiguring this system to fund students directly would introduce much needed competition between institutions forcing them to be primarily student-centered. This voucher system could also target aid to the neediest and deserving students.
25. Promote Competition Based on Value, Not Reputation: Colleges largely compete on reputation, quintessentially measured by the annual US News and World Report college rankings which encourage schools to spend more money to obtain a higher rank. However, reputation is not a good indicator of the actual quality of the education a college provides. The most critical element in any solution is developing value-added measures of what students gain from college attendance.
For voracious readers who wish for more after reading all 234 pages of our "25 Ways" report, here's a link to Title 34 of the Code of Federal Regulations!
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
Quote of the Day
Lynn O'Shaughnessy
It’s infuriating that the periodic federal reports on graduation outcomes don’t include four-year graduation rates. I have never met any parents who want their children to linger in college for five or six years or longer.This is the report she references.
Links for 12/7/10
Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith
Quality-blind layoffs are just one vestige of seniority rules introduced decades ago to promote fairness and protect teachers from capricious administrators…Garrison Walters
The Times sought to measure the impact of about 2,700 seniority-based layoffs in the Los Angeles Unified School District in the last two years…
Because seniority is largely unrelated to performance, the district has laid off hundreds of its most promising math and English teachers…
Far fewer teachers would be laid off if the district were to base the cuts on performance rather than seniority. The least experienced teachers also are the lowest-paid, so more must be laid off to meet budgetary targets. An estimated 25% more teachers would have kept their jobs if L.A. Unified had based its cuts on teachers' records in improving test scores…
The problem with performance funding isn’t in the formulas; it’s in the unreasonably exaggerated expectations for results…Yong Zhao
The promoters of performance funding — let’s call them the resultari…
the resultari appear to be busy preparing to do battle with the universities of the 1970s and ‘80s. Unfortunately, once we’ve constructed the computer-derived version of the Maginot Line, with its walls of data and turrets of formulas, we’ll peek over the top and see there’s no one there…
I certainly agree that colleges and universities have been terribly deficient in assessment. We’ve operated on the “infectious disease” principle — the faculty are critical thinkers, the students are in contact with them, so…
No matter how you view the issue, higher education’s “take our word for it” approach as an answer to questions about student learning is unconscionable…
China invented the keju system, which used tests to select government officials…Chester E. Finn, Jr.
Keju is dead now but its spirit is very alive in China today, in the form of gaokao, or the College Entrance Exam. It's the only exam that matters since it determines whether students can attend college and what kind of colleges they can attend…
The result is that Chinese college graduates often have high scores but low ability. Those who are good at taking tests go to college, which also emphasizes book knowledge. But when they graduate, they find out that employers actually want much more than test scores…
The weak and generally stagnant academic performance of most American school kids, our scandalous achievement gaps, the country’s sagging performance vis-à-vis other countries, the skimpy preparation of many teachers and principals, the shoddy curricula, the fat and junky textbooks, the innovation-shackling union contracts, the large expenditures with meager returns—these are not the result of an overweening federal government. They are, in fact, almost entirely the product of state and local control of public education… They are the product of failed governance, bureaucratic mismanagement, and the capture of the K-12 system by powerful organizations of adults who assign lower priority to kids’ needs than to their own interests…
Monday, December 06, 2010
Links for 12/6/10
Martin West and Ludger Woessmann
Although there is considerable international variation in the share of students attending private schools, existing evidence on the effects of private competition on student achievement across countries is limited…Dan Berrett
Our recent work (West and Woessmann 2010) addresses this challenge by taking advantage of the historical fact that the size of the private education sector varies from one country to another for reasons that have little to do with national income, commitment to education, or contemporary school quality. In particular, the extent of private schooling stems largely from the Catholic Church’s decision in the 19th century to build an alternative system of education wherever they were unable to control schools operated by the state…
10-percentage-point increase in the percentage of Catholics in 1900 is associated with a 4.7-percentage-point increase in the share of students enrolled in privately operated schools in 2003…
Our results indicate that the share of schools that are privately operated has an economically and statistically significant positive effect on student achievement in mathematics, science, and reading…
Importantly, much of the positive effect of private school shares accrues to students in public schools, suggesting that the overall effect is not simply due to privately operated schools being more effective, but rather it reflects benefits of competition…
Finally, we also find that private competition reduces educational expenditure per student in the system, so that better educational outcomes are obtained at lower cost…
Bridget Terry Long … “Giving students and their families better information would enable them to avoid unworthy college investments that would leave them with substantial debt and little in the form of skills,” Long writes in her paper, "Grading Higher Education: Giving Consumers the Information They Need."...Gary A. Olson
[Terry W. Hartle ] “The history of these efforts is that what starts off as a desire for a simple dashboard ends up looking like something from the Apollo manned moon mission,”…
At a council meeting a few months ago, we were discussing a new Ph.D. program proposed by one of the state's universities, when a state board member said, with obvious frustration, "You provosts keep asking us to approve new programs, but where are the program closures? How can we as a state afford unchecked expansion of academic programs without a commensurate reduction of unproductive programs from our books?"Edububble
It was a valid point. That savvy board member understood that curricular glut—as it is called in academic circles nationwide—is threatening to make our institutions inefficient and sluggish. We have become so overcommitted in course requirements and programs that it is threatening our ability to provide adequate support of our healthy academic programs…
The Hollywood visionaries [producers of Iron Man 3] seem to like the idea of using the EMPAC as the impossibly futuristic office space for said impossibly rich man. In other words, they think the place looks impossibly expensive and overdone. That’s a good sign that Rensselaer has spent too much money on the place…
Friday, December 03, 2010
Uh Oh. I’ve been in Washington Too Long
by Andrew Gillen
As a relative newcomer to Washington, I’ve always been baffled by the oozing contempt of different camps to each other. I once remarked that I should
As a relative newcomer to Washington, I’ve always been baffled by the oozing contempt of different camps to each other. I once remarked that I should
make sure to move out of the DC policy world before I succumb to the apparently irresistible urge to cast those I disagree with as evilBut in a clear sign that I have lived in a toxic environment for too long, I too now find the other side a complete mystery, with their illogical mumblings most likely attributable to their evil nature. And just who are these reprehensible degenerates and nefarious miscreants of which I speak? People who want longer commutes.
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