Plagiarism

As the time for classes to restart approaches, some helpful thoughts from the Angry Professor on plagiarism.

Academic freedom

I don't often feel inspired to praise Harvard - a chip on your shoulder about Harvard comes free with graduate degrees at Chicago - but today I will, for apparently talking the talk and, more surprisingly, walking the walk on academic freedom.

The cynic in me, of course, thinks that they merely wanted to avoid detailed scrutiny of the published views of other members of their faculty who lie in different parts of the political topology.

Via Marginal Revolution

College Board follies

The College Board has trouble writing, and trouble admitting when it makes mistakes.

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

The problems of prestigious universities

A really excellent essay from the American Scholar, the publication of Phi Beta Kappa, that lays out the problems with elite higher education in the US as it presently operates.

The essay is more negative than I would be. I don't think any reorganization of the system would produce all that many more of the sort of intellectual seekers that the author really wants to have as students, but maybe we could reduce the number of self-inflated jerks that the system produces. And the bonus slam at George W. Bush, itself an example of the sort of behavior the author is complaining about, sounds an off note in an essay otherwise well above partisan politics.

In reading the essay, as in my academic life more generally, I find myself with mixed feelings. At times I am very grateful to have gone to deeply mediocre public primary and secondary schools and to Big State U precisely because they kept me in contact with people very different from myself. At other times I regret all the learning that didn't happen because I did not press my parents to send me to a private high school, which they probably would have done if I had pushed a bit, and because I did not press myself to go to a more elite college, though I might well have gotten into one. People who wear their Harvard pedigrees on their sleeves annoy me, but so do anti-intellectuals who denigrate the value of scholarship. Mixed, mixed, mixed.

Recommended for students, professors and parents.

John Stossel doesn't like college

I usually like John Stossel, but this poorly researched piece denouncing college is embarrassingly bad. Some reasons:

1. The piece confuses two different points: (1) it is not optimal for some students to go to a four-year college, including some of those who presently do and (2) it is not optimal for anyone to go to college. The first point is clearly correct and worth highlighting. The second is clearly, given the large literature on the effects of higher education on life outcomes, incorrect.

2. The optimal number of students who start but do not finish four-year college is not zero. College, particularly four-year college, is what economists call an experience good, which means that you cannot fully evaluate it without actually consuming some of it. I would agree that current dropout rates are probably too high, but that implies a call for research on how better identify students unlikely to finish based on their applications, something that colleges would actually like to do better. Those high dropout rates are not good publicity; for colleges that depend on the goodwill of the local state legislature, good publicity is very important.

3. Contra Richard Vedder, the literature that estimates the impact of college actually does take account of ability differences between those who do and do not attend college. Even an hour of research by Stossel's underlings would have made that quite clear. And Vedder surely knows better and should be spanked. The correct criticism to make is that estimates of the average impact of college on those who attend are often naively generalized to those who do not presently attend.

4. The problem with Hilary Clinton's "extra million dollars" argument or, more precisely, with similar numbers actually based on the literature, is its failure to discount, not its failure to take account of ability differences. Again, a bit of research, or perhaps talking to someone less ideological than Vedder and Riley, would have given Stossel a good criticism to use in place of all the stupid stuff.

5. There is plenty of scientific evidence that going to a higher quality university increases later earnings. You don't just have to take Harvard's word for it, as the Stossel piece suggests.

6. The research that pays tends to be research that matters. Most people who write pieces on "obscure topics for journals that nobody reads" are not getting grants to do it.

Shame on Stossel for putting this rubbish out and on my friends at reason for putting it on their website.

Unexpected effects of college quality

A NY Post story of a woman who declared herself too well-educated to be kicked off the NY subway.

Sadly, the corresponding video has been taken down by the person who originally posted it. I blame the lawyers.

The internet, education and bubbles

This piece on education and the internet has something to it, despite being a bit overly triumphal, even after taking account of the caveats at the end.

First, the overstatement. The internet is, in relation to this topic, not all that different from a library. Before, you could get books in the library, now you can get them on the internet. I include lectures here, because a lecture without interaction is really not very different from a book. Some people prefer to listen rather than read, so having both is good for them, but I do not see the great big leap forward here. Both are unidirectional means for transferring information.

Second, the good bits. What I think is worth thinking about is what aspects of the university experience (and I am going to focus on that here) are and are not easily duplicated over the internet. Lecturing is easily duplicated and I think that we will come to see some faculty lectures, particularly for introductory courses that are heavily textbook based and have fairly standardized material - think of introductory economics - replaced with recorded lectures given by the textbook author. This would mean that students would hear from Greg Mankiw himself rather than a live faculty member. Given the wide variation in the quality of lecturers, I think it makes good sense to have more specialization than we do, so that everyone benefits from the best lecturers. This would not mean the end of local faculty, but they would then devote all of their time to the aspects of the course other than unidirectional information transfer. This means, for example, interactive sessions in which students can ask questions and discuss issues raised in the text and the recorded lecture. In some contexts, it may also mean grading, though for many introductory courses multiple choice questions with automated grading are already used.

Many aspects of a university education besides just problem sessions cannot easily be put on the internet. First, universities select peers for the students. Student learn a lot from their peers, not only in group projects but in informal study sessions and in the broader social project of "finding oneself" that takes place during the university years. Universities also, essentially, act as dating services via their selection procedures, and having a highly selected pool of potential partners to choose from is a non-trivial part of the value of attending a top school.

Second, universities can afford to purchase the physical capital required to effectively learn many disciplines such as chemistry or medicine, in part because they can spread the cost over many students and via the joint production of teaching, research and health care. There is no substitute for actually participating in research if one wants to learn how to do research.

Third, universities can provide direct interaction with faculty. Students, particularly undergraduates, make too little use of this aspect of university. For gradual students it is absolutely critical. In learning to give seminars, you need to give seminars to audiences that understand the data and methods being used and the background literature. Similarly, to learn how to write papers you need not just readers, but expert readers who, ideally, have produced their own papers and can give informed feedback.

So, no revolution yet, but I think still some internet-based change is coming down the pike in the teaching part of academia.

Addendum: Peter Thiel simply does not know what he is talking about in terms of the numbers. Perhaps he should read the literature. It's on the internet. The issue with the numbers is more the thoughtless extrapolation of positive (and broadly compelling) estimates of the impact of "treatment on the treated" to the presently untreated. Also, the numbers are about averages, and there are surely individuals for whom higher education does not have a big financial payoff (and maybe even not a big utility payoff, which is the relevant metric for decision-making). There is likely progress to be made in figuring out more effective ways to identify such individuals ex ante.

More on SAT scores and race

UM gradual student Isaac Sorkin sends along a link to this blog post from a couple of years ago that is also relevant to the discussion of David Leonhardt's column on elite colleges from last week.

My earlier post about it is here.

Todd, Greg and Dave ...

... discuss the reduced form relationship between test scores on college entrance exams (i.e. the SAT or ACT) and performance at university.

Lesson 1: Dave needs better research assistants, who will read the literature before his column is printed in the NYT.

Lesson 2: As they so often are, one's priors are confirmed in the data.

Purple and Proud

Western Ontario is the only Canadian university to make Playboy's list of the top ten party schools.

Addendum: I should have included more context for this post. Western Ontario was my first academic job.

Compelling evidence on college dropout

I happened to read this paper over the past few days:

Learning about academic ability and the college drop-out decision

Todd Stinebrickner

The University of Western Ontario

Ralph Stinebrickner

Berea College

Abstract: We use unique data to examine how college students from low income families form expectations about grade performance/academic ability and to examine the role that learning about these factors plays in the college drop-out decision. With respect to beliefs, at college entrance students are considerably overoptimistic. Subsequent updates depend on both initial beliefs and new information arriving in the form of grades, with individual heterogeneity in the weights assigned to initial beliefs and grades depending on individual-specific views about the underlying reasons for grade performance that are suggested to be of importance by a Bayesian model. While students with the worst grade performance update dramatically, they tend to remain overoptimistic because they understate the importance of permanent factors in determining their performance. With respect to drop-out, we find that learning about grade performance/ability plays a very prominent role; our predictions suggest that drop-out would be reduced by 41% if no learning occurred about these factors. Finally, the paper contributes directly to a recent literature examining gender differences in educational attainment and gender differences in other behavior. We find that the substantial gender difference in drop-out in our sample is predicted almost entirely by academic differences (1st year grades and beliefs about future grades), and we find direct evidence of gender differences in effort and gender differences in the non-pecuniary cost of effort. As to why poorly performing males decided to enter college, we find that, at entrance, males are substantially more overoptimistic than females.

The paper relies on the unique data from the Berea Panel Survey that the two Stinebrickner's designed and continue to field. This work, and a string of other papers using the same data, really illustrate the value of thoughtful data collection that is well-informed by the recent literature on measurement - particularly expectations measurement in this case, by the relevant theoretical literature, and by specific questions of academic and policy interest.

The results of the study suggest that many students enter college with remarkably misguided ideas about their own ability and about the workload required to succeed in college. It seems to me that high schools ought to be able to provide this information relatively cheaply and that doing so would be of great social benefit. While some learning at college is both inevitable and optimal, four year colleges in particular are very expensive for society to provide and having large numbers of students attend for only one or two years in order to learn that they are poorly suited for college-level work is a serious waste of resources.

Full disclosure: Todd is a friend and former colleague.

Starting at community college

The New York Times has a useful article that provides advice to students who want to save money by doing the first two years of a four-year undergraduate degree at a community college.

I would add that students thinking of pursuing this path should be aware that the fraction of students who say they want a BA or BS, start at a two year college, and actually obtain a BA or BS is really low. This is true even if you condition on lots and lots of observed characteristics, as in this paper by my student Lock Reynolds. The NYT story provides a handful of success stories. They could have found many more stories of failure.

In thinking about why this might be, I would highlight three factors: peer quality, instructor quality and living at home / hanging out with friends from high school. Peer quality may be more important indirectly, through its effect on the level and pace at which courses are taught than any direct effect via personal interactions. I teach a harder and faster econometrics course at Michigan than I did at Maryland because the students are, on average, stronger here. I am sure that the course at Washtenaw Community College is easier and slower than the one I taught at Maryland.

While that college in Massachusetts noted in the article may have people who used to teach at Harvard (as teaching assistants?), I suspect most community college faculty have very different observed characteristics than faculty at four year schools. This is likely a mixed blessing for students. In some cases, community college faculty may have more time and enthusiasm for teaching than the research-and-tenure distracted faculty at four-year schools. In other cases, they will be teaching part-time to supplement whatever else they are doing.

My sense is that part of what makes four-year schools different from two-year schools is that students usually, though not always, do not live at home when they attend them. This adds to the cost, of course, but it also helps marginal students break away from their high school peer group and mindset and to form a new network more heavily weighted with the academically talented and ambitious. I suspect that this has positive effects on outcomes, though of course exogenous variation in living at home to use in teasing out causal effects is hard to come by. I would be interested in pointers to the literature - surely there must be some - on this point.

Finally, some of the advice, such as paying very close attention to the sequences of courses required to attain one's educational goals within four years, carry over to students who start at four-year schools. Bound, Lovenheim and Turner convinced me that institutional barriers due to limited capacity have real effects on time-to-degree.

Hat tip: Nora Dillon

Ron Ehrenberg on elite colleges

The Ithaca Times summarizes Ron's views on higher education research and policy. Ron is a very distinguished labor economist who has written and edited an astounding number of books, and is co-author on one of the leading undergraduate labor economics texts.

I think the room in the picture in the article is the same one I gave my seminar in last week.

Ratios matter in search markets

Dollars and Sex summarizes recent research on the effects of student body sex composition on college student social behavior.

Of course, this analysis assumes that students do not heavily weight the student body sex composition when deciding where to attend. That's likely not a bad approximation, but worth studying. More broadly, publicizing results like this might be the most effective policy tool for pushing the sex composition back toward equality.

Advancing the debate, or scoring points?

I am not quite sure what the point of these email FOIAs is other than to score points in the day-to-day mudslinging of the red and blue teams. The Mackinac Center's time would be better spent on making the substantive case against public sector labor unions.

At the same time, the ultimate responsibility here, which seems to be missed in all the outrage, lies with the legislators who drafted FOIA laws that can be abused for fishing expeditions like this one.

Hat tip: Sue Dynarski on Facebook

Flagships sailing away

A piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education and one from orgtheory.net on flagship state universities weakening the ties between themselves and their states.

My sense is that, conditional on funding level, looser connections are best. Michigan gets one check from the state legislature; at Maryland, everyone's salary was a line item on the state budget. Michigan is better off, and not just in the sense of fewer resources wasted on administrivia. Michigan plays a game each year in which it tries to raise tuition (so that it can better price discriminate between well-off and less well-off students) and to raise the fraction of out-of-state students, who pay Ivy League tuitions to come here while the state legislature tries to prevent us from doing either of those things by making threats about the university's budget allocation.

Full privatization would be amazing though the transition would be bumpy and there are tough issues regarding all the property and buildings associated with the university to be sorted out. Probably best to think about privatization in good times when a special "If you love them, set them free" fund-raising campaign could be undertaken.

The dark side of for-profit higher education

Felix Salmon on Bridgeport education.

Not good stuff, but shouldn't most of the blame for stupid incentives land on those who design them, rather than those who optimize relative to them?

Put differently, the solution here is not to hope for a world of better people to be achieved by mocking those who misbehave; rather, it is to design a system that minimizes the incentives for regular people to engage in bad behavior.

Hat tip: Oscar Mitnik

Improving teaching ratings at Northwestern

An NU psychology professor tries something I had not thought of to create student interest. I bet attendance was way up for the next few classes.

More seriously, I am rather disappointed by the censorious tone of the Newsweek piece. Why not seriously engage with this? Both the display itself and the various reactions are social phenomena worthy of study as is human sexuality more broadly.

Hat tip: Ed Vytlacil on FB

Addendum: A quote from a student in the MSNBC coverage:

"It is probably something I will remember the rest of my life," Smith, a 21-year-old senior, told the Tribune. "I can't say that about my Econ 202 class and the material that I learned there."

Hat tip: Charlie Brown

Judith Scott-Clayton at NYT

Congrats to new NYT economics blogger Judith Scott-Clayton, who starts off with a very wise piece on private higher education.

Hat tip: Sue Dynarski (Judith's dissertation advisor) on Facebook.

College costs

An interview with economists Robert Archibald and David Feldman related to their book on college costs.

I think they are generally correct about the diagnosis, I am less pleased with their suggested treatments. Three points:

1. I agree with them that the federal student aid institutions are designed remarkably poorly. They are too complex and the results often get revealed after students have to make their enrollment decisions. These things are "easy" to fix and my understanding is that they are to some extent being fixed, partly as a result of research by my Michigan colleague Sue Dynarski.

2. I think they are too kind to Georgia's HOPE scholarship program. It has led to all sorts of strategic behavior around grading and course-taking, both in high school and in college. David Mustard at the University of Georgia has written some nice papers on this. One could argue about HOPE is better or worse than subsidizing tuition, but it is not any sort of general solution as it still represents a huge transfer to upper-middle-class people from those below them in the distribution of income.

3. I think they understate the possibilities of additional competition. There is no reason, for example, for there to be differences in tuition between in-state and out-of-state students at state universities. Canada doesn't have provincial differentials of this sort. The feds could end these instantly by making their grants and loans useable only at schools without such differentials. This would enhance competition, especially for students from small states.

4. Not unrelated to the preceding comment, I would like to see all the funding go through the student rather than the school. Schools would charge what they want to charge, students would have a voucher incorporating their need-based and merit-based subsidy from the taxpayers, and things would sort out in an open market. I expect that a side result of such a system is that states would get out of the day to day business of operating universities, which I think would be a salutary development, as states have no obvious comparative advantage in this activity.