Questions with easy answers: Higher Ed Edition

Salon asks the following: Why does the GOP hate college? and blathers on and on without ever once touching on the very simple answer:

Because "College" hates the GOP!

People, this is just basic, basic politics. An overwhelming majority of college professors are liberals. They vote for and contribute to the Democratic Party almost exclusively. It is widely perceived that professors spend much of their time inculcating liberal ideas into their students' unformed brains.

The reason the GOP hates college is the same reason why they hate Unions. Both are bastions of support for the Democratic Party.

It's amazing to me that liberals can't or won't see this. College professors and administrators backed the wrong side (at least for now). They didn't play it down the middle. They put all their eggs in one political basket and now, hey, payback's a bitch.

Of course, this is a shame because a college degree has perhaps never been more valuable. It is truly amazing that, even as the share of young people attending college rose steadily, so did the college wage premium.

Things are getting better, not worse: Higher Ed Edition

Yesterday I read what could be the worst op-ed ever.

People, you know it was in the NYT!

Allow me to summarize the creepy, illogical, smug, moralizing of one, Mark Baeurlein

In the old days students idolized and hung out with professors, and the wise professors counseled them to live well.

Now students have little contact with professors, so they have reverted to their baser instincts and only care about money, while the professoriat simply pats them on their greedy heads and gives them undeserved good grades.


But there are just a few holes in the argument (hard to believe, given that the author is a english prof at Emory).

First off while he gives statistics about "low" (25% of seniors never talk to a prof outside of class) professor contact in the current era, he only uses anecdotes from himself and his buddy Todd to argue that, in the good old days, things were very different. Not exactly a convincing argument.

Then he goes back to the data, showing that in the late 60's many more students said they cared about “developing a meaningful philosophy of life,” than they did about  “being very well off financially.”

Today the numbers are reversed.

So far so good, but then Baeurlein implies that the sea change has come from the "fact" that students no longer hang out with profs after class!

Really!

Never mind that he hasn't proven that case, what about the simple fact that many more people and different types of people go to college now than in 1968?

In other words, perhaps we should consider that the change in the volume and composition of college students caused both phenomena that Bauerlein decries (to the extent that they even exist at all).

In 1972, 25% of people between the ages of 18-24 were enrolled in degree granting institutions. In 2012 the percentage was 41%. Colleges moved from a preserve of the elite to embrace a much wider economic and social demographic. Hispanic enrollment rates went from 13% to 37%, while rates for African-Americans went from 18% to 36%.

Bauerlein's good old days were elitist and kinda racist. But hey, at least the profs had disciples and were revered and the students didn't care about money. Because that's what really matters.

A Petition against the Young

Man, Mungowitz knows me so well and trolls me so hard!

He pointed me to this Onionesque piece from the mighty Chronicle of Higher Education, requesting that journals please refrain from publishing papers written by grad students for (wait for it), THE GOOD OF THE GRAD STUDENTS!

I am not making this up. You gotta go read this piece.

Here's how I responded to Mungo when he befouled my Facebook feed with this drivel:

"LOL, sure let's ban the one thing grad students can do to empower themselves and keep them dependent on our recommendations and the rank of the school they attend. It has the side benefit of reducing competition in the publishing market too. Genius!!!!"

The argument, if you can call it that, is that students spend too much time trying to publish and not enough on their dissertation so they end up staying in grad school "too long".

And the only solution that occurs to the petitioner is to ban student publications.

I expect my students to publish AND finish their dissertations in 5 years. Many do. I work with them to make journal articles and the dissertation be complements, not substitutes. This is a common practice in economics and a fairly obvious solution to the alleged problem haunting the author of the Chronicle piece.

I've had some late blooming students who could benefit from a 6th year in terms of bettering their job placement, but since they will get some type of job anyway, I leave that decision up to them. It's a pretty tough call and I try to respect their decisions whatever my own personal take may be.

The simple economics of adjunct abuse

Let me start out by saying I can't imagine how much it would suck to work your butt off, go through grad school, get an advanced degree, and then end up teaching as an adjunct for $2000 / class with no benefits, no job security, and if the situation persists for more than a couple of years, little hope of getting a tenure track position.

But basic economics gives us a reason why the pay is so low and the benefits so miserly:

THE SUPPLY OF ADJUNCTS IS LARGE RELATIVE TO THE DEMAND FOR ADJUNCTS

The real culprits here are indeed universities. Not the ones that hire adjuncts at low pay, rather the ones who continue to recruit students and turn out MAs and PhDs into a market with little demand for them.

Even though universities are seemingly hiring more adjuncts than ever, adjunct wages are not rising because the supply is expanding just as much.

If schools couldn't fill their teaching schedules at these low prices, then they would have to raise the offered wage.

The problem of adjunct abuse will only be resolved by reducing the excess supply of advanced degree holders.

People, if you expect to get an academic job out of grad school, investigate the job placement records of the programs you are considering. When you pick an advisor, investigate the job placement record of that faculty member.

Don't settle for anecdotes. Get the real, full, data. And be realistic. If they "always place their top students" realize that it might not be you (and that the definition of "top student" may simply be the one who got a job).

When you think about how to spend your time during your graduate program, think about what activities will make you more attractive to academic employers (hint, it's probably not your transcript).

In my field of economics, that means get some teaching experience and try to get at least one publication before you hit the job market. The less prestigious your school, the more important this self-certification of quality becomes.

The college degree premium and the Lucas critique

Bob Lucas showed us that relying on reduced form historical correlations to predict the effects of a new policy regime is likely to end in tears.

Yet this seems like exactly where we are going with government policy toward higher ed.

Historically, college degree holders earn more money and have lower unemployment rates than to non-degree holders.

So, in an attempt to increase earnings and employment, we are pushing for "everyone" to get a college degree.

Here's David Leonhardt from "The Upshot", after showing that the wage premium for a bachelor's degree has never been higher:

"Those returns underscore the importance of efforts to reduce the college dropout rate"

and,

"At some point, 15 years or 17 years of education will make more sense as a universal goal. That point, in fact, has already arrived."

People, I know this sounds bad, but maybe it's because so many people drop out that the degree premium is so high.

Maybe if twice as many people got a bachelor's degree, the wage premium would fall dramatically.

Degree attainment and wages are outcomes of a complex, simultaneous structural socio-economic model. Making policy recommendations based on one reduced form relationship from that model without an understanding of the deep parameters is very bad science and the recommended policy is extremely unlikely to have the desired results.

It may seem strange for a college professor to be arguing that not everyone should be getting a college degree. But I have seen kids drift along for years, racking up debt and not human capital only to drop out and struggle. I have also seen thousands of kids make an economically unwise choice of major, get their degree and then struggle mightily.

Not all "colleges" produce that big premium and more importantly, not all majors produce a big premium, as I discussed in an earlier post.

It has a strange allure

Wow. Thomas Frank namechecks Mission of Burma AND totally goes off on American Higher Ed. I don't agree with it all, but I agree with a lot of it and it's an essential read.

Here's one slice to get you started:

Paying $250 for a textbook is more like it nowadays; according to one economist, textbook prices have increased 812 percent over the past thirty-five years, outstripping not only inflation (by a mile) but every other commodity—home prices, health care—that we usually consider to be spiraling out of control.

The explanation is simple. The textbook publishers use every trick known to the marketing mind to obsolete their products year after year, thus closing off the possibility of second-hand sales. What’s more, textbook publishing is a highly concentrated industry—an oligopoly—which means they can drive prices pretty much as high as they feel like driving them. Meanwhile, the professors who assign the textbooks and who might do something about the problem don’t have to pay for them.

The charmingly naive American student is in fact a cash cow, and everyone has got a scheme for slicing off a porterhouse or two.

Why are Texas college professors so damn happy this year?

This is amazing. I recently saw 2 different rankings from surveys about best colleges / universities to work for.

 One was in the Chronicle, and it had 11 Texas schools,  including 3 of the top 4!*

The other was in Forbes, and of 25 schools, 6 were from Texas including 2 OF THE TOP 3!

The first list had Abilene Christian, Angelo State and Baylor at the top, the second had Texas Tech and Texas.

Did the State of Texas give out huge across the board raises this year? Is Texas just a happy happy state? Have higher ed employees in Texas fallen victim to the Stockholm Syndrome?

OU made the Forbes list at number 16.

I have to say of all the universities I've worked at or visited, the best was CALTECH (which is number 18 in the Forbes survey), and OU is tied for second with CIDE in Mexico City.

The CALTECH experience was awesome. They paid me more than I asked for. They leased a car for me (I made the payments, but they handled all the details). They would give you money to go to a conference IN ADVANCE (I mean meal money and such). I was only a visitor but got to pick my classes and teaching times. They were tremendously generous with entertaining speakers and picking up the tab for large parties to go to dinner. There were seminars all the time, interesting people visiting, or in residence, always someone around to argue / discuss ideas with. I got a ton of work done, learned a lot, and just generally had an amazing year.

Robin and I also had a fun and productive time during our year visiting at Duke (thanks again, super-Mungo!) But CALTECH was Shangri-la.

What was your favorite workplace and why? And please also share any thoughts about what could be in the water in Texas!


*thanks to loyal KPC reader Gerardo for pointing out that the first list is alphabetical!

In case you ever wondered why Mungo is in Political Science and Angus in Economics....

Here is the explanation in one convenient chart (clic the pic for an even more enlightening image):

That's right folks, Mungo was just TOO HOT for economics (and conversely, I not hot enough for political science).

At least I'm hotter than a math professor!

Hat tips to cblatts and jwolfers.

Entropy is Everywhere

"O Lord, help me not to despise or oppose what I do not understand."


"Truth often suffers more by the heat of its defenders than the arguments of its opposers."

William Penn circa 1700


"They are cheap. They don't want to pay taxes because they have already raped this country and gotten everything out of it they possibly could," 

 "I'm a college professor. If I find out you're a closet racist, I'm coming after you. OK. This country still is full of closet racists."  

"I absolutely don't mean to offend you.  Even if you are a Republican, I don't mean to offend you in this class." 

William Penn circa 2013

Bangs, Bucks, & Higher Ed

Look. If you can go to Harvard, do. OK? Let's get that out of the way right up front.

If you can't, here's a list of 12 places that are good value for money.

I have a lot of connections to schools on this list. I almost went to the University of Cincinnati. I had students who taught at Ohio University. I taught at George Mason. I currently work at the University of Oklahoma. I received job offers from West Virginia University and the University of Texas. I guess I am just a big bang for the buck kind of guy.

Oh and by the way, the average wage premium for a college degree over no college at all was right at $21,000 PER YEAR in 2011.

Hey Teacher! Leave those kids alone

Check this WAPO piece about the terrible distraction of laptops in the classroom.

So much fail here.

First off, the subjects were given a 45 minute lecture, "meant to simulate the sort of experience they would have in a college classroom".

So let's start with an environment that begs for distractions.

Then, the test group was given a list of 12 specific tasks to perform during the lecture!

With the following results:

It turns out that people sitting next to the "multitaskers" also did worse.

Most students with laptops are not trying to please an experimenter by completing a series of tasks on their machines.

Even the non-multitasker did fairly bad on the test.

In my undergrad classes students are required to bring a laptop or tablet or smartphone (if they don't have one, one will be provided) to class, and I give them something to do on it.

They receive questions on the course material. Some multiple choice, some graphical, some numerical, some essay, some opinion. They can send me individual messages about things they don't understand or needed clarifications.  They answer the questions, debate with their peers when answers differ, and often come to a much better understanding in the process.

Their web-enabled device becomes a core part of the class.

To put it bluntly people, the problem is not the laptop, the problem is the lecture.

Yowser! Michael Lind sure took a lousy Econ 101 class.

Lind has a piece in Salon called Econ 101 is killing America (not making this up). Well, I just got done teaching Econ 101 this summer. Let's see how I did.

Here are some of Lind's claims of the country-killing myths that are taught in Econ 101:

1. All profitable activities are good for the economy.

Not guilty.

We spent a lot of time on externalities and how private and social incentives do not always coincide. We also talked about rent-seeking, lobbying, and the mess our financial sector had become by the 2007 crisis.

2. Monopolies & Oligopolies are always bad because they distort prices.

Not guilty.

We discussed how economies of scale can make monopolies more efficient than a bunch of smaller firms. We had a chapter about Network goods and how the competition is for the market rather than in the market. We talked about how monopolies are often transient and about contestable markets.

3. Low wages are good for the economy.

Not guilty.

We discussed cross-country wage differentials pointing out how productivity differences (from differing amounts of physical and human capital) cause wage differentials on similar-seeming jobs. I pointed out how Mexico should be humiliated instead of bragging about how their wages were becoming lower than China's.

4. Trade is always win-win.

Not guilty.

We talked about the shortcomings of simple models which assume workers are homogeneous, have no preference over job type or location, and don't suffer unemployment or relocation costs when production patterns change.

5. Economics is a science.

Not guilty. Never discussed it one way or the other. Don't see any reason to in principles class.

There are 5 others, but I'ma call it quits for now.

All I can say is Mr. Lind should ask for his money back. Any econ 101 class which argued for the points discussed above is a misleading class that does not well-serve the students.

The Cowen and Tabarrok micro text  I used is really good overall and excellent at dispelling myths 1-3 above, but I must confess a tinge of disappointment on its coverage of trade.

Further adventures in Summer School

My summer class is winding down, and I'm still enjoying it (except for the ungodly starting time). We had another class today where the Learning Catalytics software really came through. Students were clearly having issues on public goods and common resource problems, but were not very forthcoming, so we went into the questions I'd prepared on the topic.

These questions go to their phones, tablets, or computers, where they answer and then  I see on my laptop either the individual answers if I've asked for a graph or a short answer, or the distribution of answers if the question was multiple choice.

On the first three questions, the splits were almost even between correct and incorrect, so without revealing the correct answer, I had the students discuss their answers with someone who had a different answer. In each case this "peer-instruction" (I never call it that in class), got us to around 75-80% correct, at which point I showed the distributions to the class and we talked through the incorrect answers.

On the last couple questions, we were getting 85-90% correct on the first round, and the mood in the room had brightened visibly.

It doesn't happen like this every class, but several times this process has really gotten the class to a place we might not have reached without this tool.

You can call me Al

There's an old joke, what do you call someone who graduated last in his class at Med School?.....Doctor!

Now we can add, what do you call someone who graduated in the middle of his PhD. class in Econ at Harvard 6 years ago?.......I don't know, but it's not Associate Professor.

Interesting short paper from Vanderbilt on class ranking and publishing productivity at top grad schools.

Here's the abstract:

We study the research productivity of top Ph.D. programs in economics. We find that class rank is as important as departmental rank as predictors of future research productivity. For example, the best graduate from UIUC or Toronto in a given year will have roughly the same number of American Economic Review (AER) equivalent publications at year six after graduation as the number three graduate from Berkeley, U. Penn or Yale. We also find that research productivity of graduates drops off very quickly with class rank at all departments. For example, even at Harvard, the median graduate has only 0.04 AER paper at year six, an untenurable record at almost any department. These results provide guidance on how much weight to give to place of graduation relative to class standing when hiring new assistant professors. They also suggest that even the top departments are not doing a very good job of training students to be successful research economists for any not in the top of their class.

That's right, the median Harvard Grad has 0.04 AER equivalent papers at tenure time! Ouch.

Do departments concentrate all their resources on the top few students?

Is the talent pool in economics very shallow and schools are taking students who shouldn't be there just to fill up their TA slots?

My summer class (thoroughly modern Angus edition)

I'm teaching principles of micro this summer. 8:00 - 10:00 am daily. I know.

My text is Cowen & Tabarrok, which I like a lot, but I'm using a lot of other stuff as well.

The day before a topic, students watch a couple videos from the excellent Khan Academy series on microeconomics. I try to keep the total amount of video time here at 20 minutes or less. Then they take an online quiz over the material.

In class, I start with a mini-presentation introducing the topic and dealing with comprehension issues that the quiz may have revealed.

During the class period, we take breaks in the presentation for the class to answer, multiple choice, short answer, graphing, or essay questions that I deliver to them via their phones or tablets or laptops. The software I'm using here is called Learning Catalytics.

This way, students get instant feedback on what they are understanding and not understanding, and I get a chance to see right away how to shape the class time towards what is causing them trouble.

I really love this approach.

The Cowen & Tabarrok book comes with extensive online resources that I use a lot. Plus they get right to the point and don't mess around with a lot of extraneous stuff that principles students don't need or that isn't quite right.

The students like the Khan Academy videos, and they free me up from having to do a lot of numerical examples of where demand and supply and cost curves come from in class.

But the star I think is the Learning Catalytics software. When I have the right question prepared, it can really crack open the problem students are having and lead to a greatly improved level of understanding of the material.

This has happened both yesterday on the topic of externalities and today on the topic of economic vs. accounting profit. It just lets me see what they are thinking and how to better re-address the issue. I've also found students are more willing to speak up after we've done a question, displayed the results and discussed the answers.

Even with the 8:00 am start, I am having a blast and feel good about what we are learning.

Okie ego trippin'

1.  Can't resist the opportunity to brag that my JME article with Gordon Tullock has hit 1000 citations on Google Scholar.

2. On the either end of my citation list, one of the funnest and least cited papers I've ever written (and the best-titled paper I've ever written), "Arbitrage in a Basketball Economy", was featured in the WAPO Wonkblog this past week. Co-authored with the estimable Bob Tollison.

3. My paper with Aaron Smallwood on exchange rate volatility and trade was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of International Money and Finance.

4. Finally, my student and co-author, Norman Maynard, has accepted a tenure track job at the College of Charleston!

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

higher ed indeed

The online revolution is hitting a few bumps.

Dick McKenzie walks away from his micro economics MOOC in mid mooc, citing the abysmal performance of a large majority of the 37,000 students.

The NYT even managed to produce an anti online class editorial.  They claim that online students generally do worse than brick and mortar students, especially in community college settings.

I don't mean to suggest that traditional higher ed is the bizzle though. Consider the case of Sharon Sweet, an associate professor of mathematics, who is about to be fired from her job in Florida for pressuring students to vote for Obama (and a straight Democratic ticket).

If this is truly found to be a generally fireable offense, I believe that there will be an incredible number of new job openings in higher ed in the coming years.

This semester, I've been working on "flipping" one of my classes. Before each class, the students are assigned videos to watch or a reading assignment to complete and they take an online quiz over the material. The last question on the quiz solicits their feedback about what is causing them problems.

Then in class, we try to deal with the problems, work some examples, and fine tune their understanding. I still probably lecture more than I should, but it's a start and the students seem to be either enjoying or at least be OK with the format, though I'll have to wait for course evaluations to see what they really think about it.

Logorrhea

Many words being spilt in UC's logo-gate. Here's an example:

The newly designed monogram of the University of California, while attempting to be modern, loses the prestige and elegance of the current seal.

Have a gander;

Let's give this kerfuffle the KPC breakdown:

(1)  there is nothing elegant about the original seal. A star, a book, and a plagiarized quote that makes no sense in this context.

(2) The second seal (sounds like we're discussing a Bergman movie) isn't "attempting" to be modern. It is modern and pretty cool at that.

(3) Most importantly, the seal doesn't give prestige to the institution, the quality of the institution gives prestige (or recognition) to the seal! Harvard isn't Harvard because of the prestige of their seal. It's the other way around.

Linkulus maximus

1. Great long-read about the mystery monkey of Tampa and how (s)he stirred up the inner anarchist of the locals.

2. Calming the student debt crisis hype.

3. College grads face hard times.... IN CHINA!

4. Romney is as an alpha male chick magnet (funniest thing I've read this week).

HIgher Ed blues

Here's the redoubtable Josh Barro on the costs of higher education:

Structurally, the higher education sector looks a lot like the health care sector. It hasn’t seen the productivity gains enjoyed by sectors like manufacturing and retail, which have benefited extensively from automation and technological advances. Colleges still need to employ a lot of highly skilled workers, and college costs are tied to their wages, which rise faster than inflation. It’s no surprise, then, that the higher education inflation trend looks a lot like the alarming one we see in health care. 


 But colleges and universities have failed to mitigate this phenomenon. For example, over the last few decades, the typical public four-year college has seen a sharp expansion of its support and managerial staff — from 5.5 per 100 students in 1987 to 7.5 per 100 in 2007. Colleges have also been reducing student-to-faculty ratios, and increasing spending on fringe offerings like gyms and student centers. As a result, expenditures per student by public institutions of higher education rose 48 percent from 1985 to 2009, after adjusting for inflation. Can we really say that higher education has gotten anywhere close to 48 percent better over that period?


While I agree with Josh that college administrators capture and waste a larger portion of the rents and that the withdrawal of state support dramatically increased the economic load of higher ed for non-wealthy families, I cannot come anywhere close to agreeing with the last couple sentences of the quoted portion.

Let's break it down:

First consider expenditure growth. People, 1985 - 2009 is 25 years. 48% growth over 25 years is, at a first approximation, something like a 2% annual growth rate. That just doesn't seem so bad a rate of spending increase. It's clearly below the rate of growth of real GDP. Is that really the same as the health care case?

Second, it's pretty much of a no-brainer that higher education is "anywhere close to 48% better" in 2009 than it was in 1985, though "better" is not easily made precise in this context:

Think of all the new majors. Think of all the innovative uses of technology. As Josh himself notes, dorms are way nicer, food is way way better, and athletic and leisure facilities are way way way better.

But maybe we shouldn't define "better" as "cooler" or "more enjoyable".

Well, how about if we define "better" as "more valuable"?

According to Goldin & Katz, the college graduate wage premium was around 40% in 1980 and rose to about 65% in 2005 (and was climbing at that point where their data stop). That's a lot more than 48% (62.5% to be exact).


Final point: A much higher percent of new high school grads attend college now than they did in 1985. The enrollment rate of new high school grads into college was 51% in 1975, and it rose to 70% in 2009.

I don't think that's because the product has gotten worse!