Links for 10/21/10

Brian Tamanaha on “The Irresponsibility of Law Schools”


Toby N. Carlson

The failure rate for proposals submitted by academic scientists has reached such high levels that many professors must spend virtually all their time writing proposals, leaving the creative thinking to graduate students and postdoctoral associates. The result is science by proxy…

under such pressure, must neglect their teaching (and most everything else) in their frantic search for research funds. Not surprisingly, the exponentially increasing numbers of proposals are of declining quality…

Often, an agency's request for proposal, or RFP, reads like a legal document, constricting the applicant to stay within very narrow and conventional bounds, with no profound scientific questions posed at all. Many RFP's are so overly specific that they amount to little more than work for hire…


a lack of funds is not the problem…

Robert B. Archibald and David H. Feldman

most of those who write on higher education start from the proposition that the causes of rising college cost are to be found by examining higher education with a fine-toothed comb. What they find isn’t pretty. They see dysfunctional universities in an increasingly dysfunctional higher education system…


the most important drivers of college cost are the technological forces that have reshaped the entire American economy…


We take the dysfunction narrative seriously. Some of its arguments hold together as coherent stories, while others fall apart when probed more deeply. Yet taken together, the dysfunction arguments fail to explain the data on college cost and price nearly as well as simpler and more general arguments that flow from our aerial view…

Arnold Kling

There is a chicken-and-egg problem with cost-disease stories. That is, do we subsidize health care and education because their costs are rising relative to other good? Or are their costs rising because we subsidize them?


As you know, I think that credentials bottlenecks are at the root of much evil here. What if it were easier for a non-accredited university to compete? What if it were easier for an accredited university to fail? Why are some careers (I'll use my favorite example, physical therapy) only available via a classroom path rather than an apprenticeship path?


I think that if the problem were just that college education uses a highly-educated labor force that is in limited supply, we would see different economic behavior. When you have a scarce resource, you try not to waste it. But it seems to me that professors waste most of their time engaged in status competition, meaning the attempt to publish.