Links for 1/20/11

Paul Basken

Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles.

"It's a Ponzi scheme," said Kenneth G. Mann, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Vermont, whose concerns were described by Nature. "Eventually you'll have a situation where you're not even producing the feedstock into the system."…

"Nobody has ever asked me how good my papers were, and I think you would find that universally true," he said, "They basically say, Well, how many research dollars are you bringing in?"…

Anthony Carnevale

Those who make the “skip college” argument often bolster their arguments with official state and national Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data suggesting that the U.S. higher education system has been turning out far more college grads than current or future job openings require…

The most persuasive evidence that the BLS numbers are wrong are earnings data, which show that employers across the country pay a "wage premium" to college graduates, even in occupations that BLS does not consider "college" jobs…

To dismiss the significance of wage data requires a belief that employers across the country have systematically hired overqualified workers for their job openings and then grossly overpaid them for the past three decades…

Paul E. Harrington and Andrew M. Sum

Unlike virtually any other analyst of labor market activity, the Georgetown authors define the size of the college labor market as equal to the total number of college graduates that are employed. BLS and most other college labor market analysts define the college labor market as essentially a set of occupations that most often require persons to earn a college degree in order to be fully qualified for employment in that occupations…

for the Georgetown analysts, all the college graduates working as bartenders are part of the college labor market…

BLS analysts disagree. They would not assign any bartender employment to the college labor market because, although one in four bartenders are college graduates, these jobs do not typically utilize the knowledge, skills and abilities acquired in college…

If malemployment among college graduates simply does not exist, as the Georgetown forecasters argue, then there should be little difference in the earnings among college graduates regardless of whether they were employed in college labor market occupations or not... Not surprisingly we found very large and statistically significant difference in the annual earnings of college graduates based on their malemployment status…

Jason Delisle

the recovery rate for a student loan in default is 122 percent. That is, for every $100 in loans that default, the government ultimately collects $122…

These budget numbers have misled reporters, student-loan borrower advocates and industry lobbyists alike…

the default recovery rates are not what they appear. That is, the figures don’t represent the real cost of a default because they don’t factor in how much the government spends to collect a delinquent loan or when the funds are actually collected. Both OMB and the Department of Education will admit that once those costs are included, the recovery rate falls well below 100 percent…

a 2007 Congressional Budget Office study that examined student loan collection information in the National Student Loan Data System found that after accounting for collection costs and the time it takes to collect on a loan, recovery rates are actually only about 50 percent…