Stack Ranking Continued

More on the Microsoft ranking system:

This was my problem. I had three reports, A, B, and C, and they neatly fit into three categories: C was good, B was great, and A was fantastic. They were all nice and retiring sorts—they weren’t self-promoters, which put them at a disadvantage at Microsoft—and I did want to do well by them. Based on their position in the stack rank, I thought that this would have been a fair assessment of them relative to the company in general:

My Ideal Distribution

A: Above Average
B: Above Average
C: Average

Above Average would get A and B nice bonuses and raises, while C might get a small raise and a decent bonus with an Average. That didn’t happen. My manager told me baldly that this was how it would go:

The Actual Distribution

A: Above average
B: Average
C: Below average

My desired rankings were out of the question, since my manager would then have had to steal that extra Above Average from some other manager. I thought that B could live with Average (we were all well-compensated, after all), but rating C as Below Average hurt.

So I argued for C, and my manager said there was exactly one alternative:

The Alternative Distribution

A: Average
B: Average
C: Average

But A had been at the very top of the stack! How could A do worse than people we’d all agreed were weaker programmers? I gave up and let C take the Below Average. This is the zero-sum game at work.

I still feel bad about this.

This very much shows how the ranking ended up being all about politics and balance between different managers.  You can immediately see how taking a weak person could be a great idea to protect the rankings of the people actually doing the work.  And how good teams would be the absolute worst place to possibly join. 

I was mistaken about Mark P being a proponent of the system in a previous work situation (it is the only way to make IT workers productive was the gist but I don't recall the details and the other obvious person from that era has drifted out of touch).  But it keeps getting clearer and clearer that this kind of ranking system can lead to perverse incentives.  The actual example however shows something else -- the managers are imposing the distribution of ability on a three person team.  That the whole organization should have a wide distribution of talent is likely (the law of large numbers and all) but that any three person team will happen to follow an ordered distribution balanced around the grand mean of the company is a rather heroic statistical assumption

Now consider education reform and imagine what would happen if you tried the same thing with teachers.  All of a sudden there are new and interesting incentives to keep "poor teachers" because the distribution is fixed by design. 

Chait versus Delong

Brad Delong has a very nice reply to Jon Chait's latest column.  I think that any reasonable analysis of tuition versus professorial salary in real terms is going to make it clear that the link between salaries and tuition is . . . weak.  After all, we live in the age of the adjunct professor/lecturer -- if just slashing salaries was the answer then adjuncts would have solved the problem.  Just ask anyone who has taught at those salaries. 

It is also the case that private schools (i.e. Harvard) give tenure and pay high salaries.  It cannot just be that the private sector has no ability to assess value.  Not have I missed the fact that summer camp seems to be increasing in price, making it also less accessible.  Nor is anybody suggesting that replacing summer camp with a television set is the way to improve educational outcomes. 

Yet we have had VHS tapes since the 1980's.  If taping and replaying lectures was so superior, why did it take the internet to make this a viable approach? 

The one place that I think Jon Chait is correct is when he draws the analogy with Health Care.  Some parts of health care have been real improvements and were worth the cost.  Conspiracy theories aside, comparing cardiovascular disease treatment between 1960 and today is sobering; expensive technologies and drugs really have helped.  What is challenging is the fine line between what is a real improvement in quality and what is an unnecessary expense.  Some degree of pressure on higher education may elucidate some of the fault lines and that could be quite useful to all of us. 

Reasons we value a college degree (aside from the obvious)

One of the things I find concerning about the MOOC debate is how simplistic many of the views are, both of college classes in particular and of college education in general. (Here is another one of my concerns.)

Over at Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris Dillow does a good job helping with the latter, discussing the less obvious ways that degrees can pay dividends (not sure about the last one though).

Nevertheless,we should ask: what function would universities serve in an economy where demand for higher cognitive skills is declining? There are many possibilities:

- A signaling device. A degree tells prospective employers that its holder is intelligent, hard-working and moderately conventional - all attractive qualities.

- Network effects. University teaches you to associate with the sort of people who might have good jobs in future, and might give you the contacts to get such jobs later.

- A lottery ticket.A degree doesn't guarantee getting a good job. But without one, you have no chance.

- Flexibility. A graduate can stack shelves, and might be more attractive as a shelf-stacker than a non-graduate. Beaudry and colleagues decribe how the falling demand for graduates has caused graduates to displace non-graduates in less skilled jobs.

- Maturation & hidden unemployment. 21-year-olds are more employable than 18-year-olds, simply because they are three years less foolish. In this sense, university lets people pass time without showing up in the unemployment data.

- Consumption benefits. University is a less unpleasant way of spending three years than work. And it can provide a stock of consumption capital which improves the quality of our future leisure. By far the most important thing I learnt at Oxford was a love of Hank Williams and Leonard Cohen.

I suspect that signaling is the main reason why increasingly many jobs require college degrees though they don't seem to involve any skills we would normally associate with college. HR departments spend a great deal of their time and energy narrowing applicant pools down to a manageable size. Degree requirements are a simple and easy to implement filter.

75 years of progress

While pulling together some material for a MOOC thread, I came across these two passages that illustrated how old much of today's cutting edge educational thinking really is.

First from a 1938 book on education*:

" Experts in given fields broadcast lessons for pupils within the many schoolrooms of the public school system, asking questions, suggesting readings, making assignments, and conducting test. This mechanize is education and leaves the local teacher only the tasks of preparing for the broadcast and keeping order in the classroom."

And this recent entry from Thomas Friedman.

For relatively little money, the U.S. could rent space in an Egyptian village, install two dozen computers and high-speed satellite Internet access, hire a local teacher as a facilitator, and invite in any Egyptian who wanted to take online courses with the best professors in the world, subtitled in Arabic.

I know I've made this point before, but there are a lot of relevant precedents to the MOOCs, and we would have a more productive discussion (and be better protected against false starts and hucksters) if people like Friedman would take some time to study up on the history of the subject before writing their next column.



* If you have any interest in the MOOC debate, you really ought to read this Wikipedia article on Distance Learning.

Extremes in student feedback

After I'd been teaching at a school in Watts for a while, I learned that my predecessor had once been overpowered and left tied to his chair by an angry class. This struck me as notable because

A. Despite its location, this was not a rough school

B. My predecessor had been tied to a chair.

When I pressed other faculty members for more details, they explained (rather nonchalantly for my taste), "he was a really bad teacher."

Obviously, most jobs are easier and more pleasant if you're good at them, but this is particularly true in education. Teachers face constant, immediate and often intense feedback from students, something that is greatly intensified when you go to disadvantaged schools in the inner-city or poor rural areas like the Mississippi Delta (where I also taught).

Students get angry at bad instruction and they take advantage of bad classroom management. When you add the amplification that comes with the complex social dynamics of kids and adolescents, teaching can be a truly miserable job if you can't get the hang of doing it right.

This is a large part of the reason why so many new teachers leave the profession. Even after having invested years of study and tens of thousands of dollars, they walk away with a degree that's good for little else because, for them, the job actually is that terrible. By contrast, for those who are good at it, who can explain ideas clearly and establish a rapport with kids and keep a class focused and on task, teaching can be a most enjoyable and satisfying job.

You don't have to be a statistician to see the potential selection effect here. It should certainly be addressed when discussing the impact of bad teachers or proposing incentive pay/dismissal plans for improving education.

It should be addressed but it usually isn't.

Like judging an archery contest after they took down the target...

This is a really small part part of a bigger story (and probably the subject of more posts) but having been on both sides of video evaluations I had a personal problem with this statement from Thomas Kane (which comes to us via Andrew Gelman),

While the mean score was higher on the days that the teachers chose to submit, once you corrected for measurement error, a teacher’s score on their chosen videos and on their unchosen videos were correlated at 1.

Just to be clear, I don't have any problem with this kind of evaluation and I really like Kane's point about using 360s for teachers, but the claim of perfect correlation has raised a red flag for almost every statistically literate person who saw it. You can see an excellent discussion of this at Gelman's site, both in the original post and in the comments. All the points made there are valid but based on my experience I have one more stick for the fire.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the extraordinary idea that rank is preserved, that the nth teacher on his or her best day is still worse than the (n+1)th teacher on his or her worst day, is true. For anything more than a trivially small n that would suggest an amazing lack of variability in the quality of lessons from teachers across the spectrum (particularly strange since we would expect weaker and less experienced teachers to be more variable).

But there's a source of noise no one's mentioned and in this case it's actually a good thing.

Except for special cases, teachers walk through the door with a great deal of information about their classes; they've graded tests and homework papers; they've seen the reaction to previous lessons, they've talked with students one-on-one. You would expect (and hope) that these teachers would use that information to adjust their approach on a day to day basis.

The trouble is that if you're evaluating teachers based on an observation (particularly a video observation), you don't have any of that information. You can't say how appropriate a given pace or level of explanation is for that class that day. You can only rely on general guidelines.

Which is not to say that good evaluators can't form a valuable assessment based on a video of a lesson. I'm a big believer in these tools both for staff development and (within reason) evaluation, but it's a inexact and often subjective process. You can get a good picture and diagnose big problems but you will never get the resolution that Kane claimed.

There are other problems with this interview, but the correlation of one should have been an easy catch for the reporter. You should never let an interview subject go unchallenged when claiming perfect results.

Education Research

A strong opinion:

I don’t have an informed opinion on the standard of observational research in education, but if the standard is high, there can’t still be lots of low-hanging fruit in the form of cost-neutral interventions whose benefit is obvious without comparative evaluation.

I think that this position is on the strong side given the long lags between exposure (i.e. education) and outcomes (i.e. adult competencies).  But it does point out that easy and cheap interventions that are massively easy to measure are unlikely if there has been any sort of careful research.  So perhaps the randomization idea isn't all bad?

More reflections on a study (EDITED)

Okay, before I get to the meat of this post, this quote by Andrew Gelman is dynamite:

. . . I’m generally suspicious of arguments in which the rebound is bigger than the main effect.
 

How many "counter-intuitive" studies would survive this kind of skepticism.  Not that a rebound effect can't be larger, but like many unlikely things it requires a higher level of proof.

The context is an education study which suggests that the more parents pay for education the lower the grades of the student will be.   The authors apparently tried to control for a lot of possible confounders (like SAT scores) but the whole process ends up looking like "what not to do in regression analysis". 

There is an intermediate variable (problem), a restriction of range problem (extrapolating parental support out to values that exceed annual income), and an issue with differential drop-out that does not seem to be addressed.  All of these points are present in Andrew's nice write up. 

What I want to focus on is the sharp counter-factual.  I am not always a fan of counter-factual reasoning, but I think that it would provide a ton of clarity in this case.  The real claim is that if you decreased exposure X (parental support) then you would increase outcome Y (GPA).  The direct causal model would suggest that the fastest way to improve student grades would be to make your contributions zero.  But, the last time I looked, Pell grants require a non-zero parental contribution in most cases (it is a little hard to tell precisely what the thresholds are but they definitely are not zero for most students).  So clearly this is a floor on parental contributions (and if it was the only source of contributions the effect would become the richer the parents the worse the grades of the student). 

So maybe, to have a realistic counter-factual, the exposure should be dollars of support above the minimum expected contribution? 

So, really what we have to be talking about the the effect of a marginal dollar separate from the (non-linear) scale of what the parents are required to pay.  But, even there, the direction is unclear.  Imagine that your not especially inspired child gets admission to Stanford but they are struggling with the material.  Do you insist, on principle, that they get a job or do you pay more so that they have a better chance to be a "C average" Stanford graduate (which is much better than a Stanford drop-out). So the causal direction is actually unclear. 

But if the idea is that giving more resources to students decreases performance then there are a lot of experiments we could try.  For example, we could decrease wages (for everyone including upper managment) and see if performance goes up.  Or we could randomize students to improved levels of support.  Better yet, we could look at experiments that have already been done:

 

We examine the impacts of a private need-based college financial aid program distributing grants at random among first-year Pell Grant recipients at thirteen public Wisconsin universities. The Wisconsin Scholars Grant of $3,500 per year required full-time attendance. Estimates based on four cohorts of students suggest that offering the grant increased completion of a full-time credit load and rates of re-enrollment for a second year of college. An increase of $1,000 in total financial aid received during a student’s first year of college was associated with a 2.8 to 4.1 percentage point increase in rates of enrollment for the second year.
 

 So not only is the main effect in the opposite direction (at least in terms of retention) but it has precisely the impact on a GPA analysis that Andrew expects: students are more likely to leave with lower levels of support.  Do we think that leaving school is completely independent of performance (that there is no GPA difference between the drop-outs and those who persist)?  Or is parental support different, in some magic way, than government grant support?  People are more careful stewards of government money than they are of money from their close community (and think about what this would mean for charity versus government welfare programs, if true)?

I agree that the current form of this study is impossible to interpret. 

[EDIT: Talking with Mark, it is clear that I was unclear on one point above.  The experiments show money from a specific source (i.e. government funding) go in a specific direction but don't at all address whether money from parents has a similar causal effect (Mark is promising to talk about this in a post himself).  The issues of selection, intermediate variables, and experimental evidence from other sources are all important, but without re-analyzing the data it is impossible to prove the directionality of the bias.  As an epidemiologist I am trained to speculate on bias direction/strength but I recognize that is all I am doing.  ]

Back to education for a moment

This comment from Dana Goldstein is directly on point:

I'm often asked what one education reform I think would make the biggest impact on American students' achievement. I don't like this question. The real answer--vastly decrease poverty--isn't going to happen anytime soon
 

 It may not be in the cards, but poverty and the knock-on effects of poverty are hard to ignore in the context of United States education policy.  It simply connects to too many different pieces.  Neighborhood funding models for schools mean poor neighborhoods end up with under-resourced schools.  High rates of incarceration increase issues like single parent families and foster care families.  Lack of trust in social institutions makes short term planning much more rational. 

All of these things end up impacting the overall quality of education.  Any inefficiencies due to a teacher's union preventing teacher recruitment are likely to be a rounding error compared to the main effects that we are estimating here. After all, when there are enough problems with home life (stress, food insufficency, lack of child care, etc . . .) there is only so much that a teacher can do for the 30 students in his/her class. 

Following Mark's link on education

As a follow-up to Mark I wanted to specically call out some of the pieces of Felix Salmon's piece on test scores and education. 

Instead, reformers are rushing to use this data as a quantitative performance-review tool, something which can get you a raise or which can even get you fired. And by so doing, they’re turning it from something potentially extremely useful, into a bone of contention between teachers and managers, and a metric to be gamed and maximized.
 

When all decisions on based on a single score, you incent behavior which maximizes the score and minimize additional focus.  Felix makes an interesting point that if you used this data to provide coaching and feedback then it could actually be really useful.  Teachers would still want students to do well on the test (it is much, much nicer to talk to your principal about how generally well your students are doing than to get coaching on how to try and shore up a weak point). 

I also think that this point was really sharp:

School reformers in general, it seems to me, tend to be obsessed with the idea of Good Teachers and Bad Teachers, as though the quality of the education a kid gets in any given classroom is somehow both predictable and innate to the teacher. And yes, at the extremes, there are a few great inspirational teachers who we all remember decades later, and a few dreadful ones who had no idea what they were talking about and who had no control of their classes. But frankly, you don’t need student surveys to identify those outliers. And the fact is that schools are much more than just the sum of their parts: that’s one of the reasons that reformers love to talk about excellent principals who can turn schools around.

He is very cleverly and accurately pointing out a form of equivocation that is being used here.  There are extreme examples, but they were never the problem in terms of identification.  There are some odd employment rules in some places that made acting on this knowledge awkward, but very few people saw these as being good policy.  The real use of these tests to to try and break apart the middle of the distribution.  But, by definition, the gain in the middle of the distribution is much less than the difference between exceptional and abysmal.  You are not taking Jaime Escalante versus an incompetent as your contrast.  You are taking pretty good versus very good as your contrast, and thus setting things up for a life event to move people back and forth in the distribution.  Your child gets ill, you are more tired and work so you lsoe your job because you slip below the median.  No wonder teachers are suspicious of such metrics. 

Data is good but one of the lessons of the MBA approach to management is that not everything can be broken down into numbers on a spreadsheet to be maximized.  I fear we'll figure that out, sooner or later. 

Education: Chicago edition

The teacher work action in Chicago is bringing up some strong feelings across many different bloggers.  I think there is a lot to say about this issue (in general) but I want to focus on one angle for the moment.  Here is a comment from Matt Yglesias:

If CTU members get what they want, that's not coming out of the pocket of "the bosses" it's coming out of the pocket of the people who work at charter schools or the people who pay taxes in Chicago.
 

Now, to be fair, Matt has some follow up posts that reflect a more nuanced view of this dispute.  But this point was seized on by Eric Loomis:

It’s these experiences that make me absolutely furious when Dylan Matthews and Matt Yglesias and Jacob Weisberg and other so-called liberals attack Chicago teachers by openly rooting from Rahm Emanuel to crush them or undermine them by warning readers about the effect of paying teachers on taxpayers. I don’t really know any of them personally. But I doubt any of them went to a public school, nor has much of the liberal punditry. And if they have, it’s almost certainly not one serving working-class communities like areas of Chicago or even Springfield. They can sit in their nice New York or Washington offices and attend retreats in baronial mansions like Slate held earlier this week and fret about the taxpayers and shame the teachers into thinking about the children all they want. They would never send their own children to the schools about which they pontificate. They have no idea what they are talking about.
 

No I don't want to discuss whether teacher pay in Chicago is sensible or not (Matt Yglesias defends the current levels here).  What I find a lot more interesting is the whole question of mixed system (with public and private options co-existing).  As a younger person, I often asked the question of why Canada generally made private medical services illegal (they have definitely relaxed the rules since then).  After all, why should be ban a person who wants to spend money on non-evidence based procedure or get faster service from spending cash to do so?  We do not ban pet rocks or other products of limited use. 

The answer was always that if there was a parallel "pay system" then the elite would attack the public option (as they would use the higher end options almost exclusively).  The net result would not just be a two tier system, but a two tier system that was actually worse than a designed one (as the lower tier would be formed by a series of constant cuts and the result would be worse than a planned low service level).  At the time, I did not see this as a likely outcome. 

But linking Chicago teacher pay increases to less resources for charter schools (even implicitly) makes this a much more credible concern. 

The other (non-Shakespearean) thing I learned in my college Shakespeare class.

I've already mentioned that the tests in this class were unusual; the way I studied for them was a bit odd as well and though it wasn't a method that I'd recommend for wide usage, in this context it worked well.

I was, in my younger days, something of a procrastinator (a trait I've outgrown, of course, -- ask anybody). Papers were generally started at the last minute but I did, at least, make an effort to keep up with my reading (I was earning a BFA in creative writing so writing and keeping up with my reading was pretty much all that was asked of me).

Shakespeare was the exception with reading assignments being pushed back to marathon sessions the weekends before the tests. I wasn't that I didn't enjoy the material -- I did -- but the plays required a commitment and a focus that made them easy to put off.

I would therefore find myself with three or four plays that I had to know in considerable detail forty-eight hours after I cracked open my copy of the Riverside Shakespeare (which I still have, by the way). It's difficult to imagine a worse approach to studying but in this case it worked out surprisingly well.

I would spend the first couple of hours cursing myself for being an irresponsible moron and calculating how much sleep I'd be able to get if I continued reading at that glacial pace. After that, though, something changed: the rate at which I was reading increased; it became easier to focus; the characters became more vivid and the stories more coherent.

It wasn't until after the second test that I realized what was going on. Shakespeare is one of the most and least accessible writers most of us will ever read. He wrote in language that hasn't been used for centuries but if you can get past those centuries of linguistic drift, you find someone who could hold the interest of intellectuals like Ben Jonson while keeping what we would now call the cheap seats cheering and stomping instead of throwing rotten eggs.

If I would have shown some discipline and diligently put aside an hour a night to study for that course I would have devoted more time to it but I strongly suspect I would have done worse and gotten less out of it. I doubt that an hour, even an hour every night would have been enough time to acclimate myself to the language; I would have spent my time translating instead of reading. It took two or three hours to forget the plays weren't in the everyday vernacular.

It's important to note that waiting till the weekend before a test then doing a marathon study session would have been, in almost every other context, a horrible idea. Even in cases where language is a barrier (which includes math), you'd generally be better off working your way through in bite-sized chunks, but the plays were written to be experienced in a single sitting (or standing) and that's probably still how they work best.

So my experiences in that one class shouldn't suggest a general approach to studying but it is another reminder of the often made point that the "best" pedagogical methods are context sensitive, varying from student to student, teacher to teacher and subject to subject to subject. Beware of blanket solutions.

"Of course, Shakespeare was much newer at the time"

Back when I was an undergrad I took a class in Shakespeare. I'm mentioning this because a couple of aspects came back to me recently while thinking about education. The first was the format of the tests the teacher used. They consisted of a list of quotes from the four plays we had covered since the last test. Each quote had a pronoun underlined which came with a two part question: who was the speaker and who was the antecedent?

I've never seen that format used in another class (even by the same teacher) and I always thought it was an interesting approach. I wouldn't necessarily recommend using it widely but I'm glad I had it in at least one course. It was a method that encouraged attentive reading (particularly useful with Shakespeare).

Experiencing different styles of teaching and evaluation are part of a well-rounded education. I've seen a wide range approaches. Some were successful. Some were not. Some successful as one-shots but weren't models I'd suggest routinely following, like the number theory class I took that didn't allow mathematical notation (all proofs had to be written out in grammatical sentences without abbreviations or symbols -- more or less the way Fermat would have done it). That pedagogical diversity has been of immense value.

A book on quality control I read a few years ago said that quality in a QC sense was equivalent to a lack of variation; quality meant all parts came out the same. Sometimes I'm afraid that the some in the education reform movement are starting to think of uniformity as an end to itself.

Back on the higher ed beat

Paul Krugman weighs in on recent comments from GOP candidates on the subject of higher education:

About that hostility: Mr. Santorum made headlines by declaring that President Obama wants to expand college enrollment because colleges are “indoctrination mills” that destroy religious faith. But Mr. Romney’s response to a high school senior worried about college costs is arguably even more significant, because what he said points the way to actual policy choices that will further undermine American education.

Here’s what the candidate told the student: “Don’t just go to one that has the highest price. Go to one that has a little lower price where you can get a good education. And, hopefully, you’ll find that. And don’t expect the government to forgive the debt that you take on.”

Wow. So much for America’s tradition of providing student aid. And Mr. Romney’s remarks were even more callous and destructive than you may be aware, given what’s been happening lately to American higher education.

For the past couple of generations, choosing a less expensive school has generally meant going to a public university rather than a private university. But these days, public higher education is very much under siege, facing even harsher budget cuts than the rest of the public sector. Adjusted for inflation, state support for higher education has fallen 12 percent over the past five years, even as the number of students has continued to rise; in California, support is down by 20 percent.

The choice of California is sadly apt. The state's three-tiered UC/CS/community college system is, even after these devastating cuts, a remarkable achievement. Residents have access to an impressive spectrum of educational options, ranging from inexpensive schools designed to be friendly to disadvantaged and non-traditional students to some of the world's best public universities (with surprisingly reasonable tuition).

In case you think I'm exaggerating, check out this post from Joseph:

From the Academic rankings of world universities:

1. Harvard University (private)

2. Stanford University (private)

3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (private)

4. University of California, Berkeley (public)

5. University of Cambridge (British)

6. California Institute of Technology (private)

7. Princeton University (private)

8. Columbia University (private)

9. University of Chicago (private)

10. University of Oxford (British)

11. Yale University (private)

12. University of California, Los Angeles (public)

13. Cornell University (private)

14. University of Pennsylvania (private)

15. University of California, San Diego (public)

16. University of Washington (public)

17. University of California, San Francisco (public)

18. The Johns Hopkins University (private)

19. University of Wisconsin - Madison (public)

20. University College London (British)

Some interesting patterns immediately jump out. Of the top 20 schools, 17 are American, which is pretty impressive given the share of the world population held by the United States. Of the 17 American schools, six of them are public (which is amazing given how many resources the private schools have). Of the public schools, 4 of them are in California.

If you check out the rest of the list you'll find all of the UC schools have respectable rankings. Given their caliber, they are also quite affordable. I took a grad course in Bayesian networks a couple of years ago at UC Riverside. It cost me eight hundred dollars and was an extraordinary bargain.

It should be noted that some pundits don't think much of California's commitment to great universities. Here's Kevin Carey:

If Berkeley’s star professors are lured away to Stanford, it’s bad for the university but not necessarily bad for America, particularly if (as is frequently the case) those professors teach few if any undergraduates. They’ll be the same people doing the same thing at another university an hour away.

Of course, Carey also believes Rick Perry Is a Higher-Education Visionary.

California has good universities!

From the Academic rankings of world universities:

1. Harvard University (private)

2. Stanford University (private)

3. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (private)

4. University of California, Berkeley (public)

5. University of Cambridge (British)

6. California Institute of Technology (private)

7. Princeton University (private)

8. Columbia University (private)

9. University of Chicago (private)

10. University of Oxford (British)

11. Yale University (private)

12. University of California, Los Angeles (public)

13. Cornell University (private)

14. University of Pennsylvania (private)

15. University of California, San Diego (public)

16. University of Washington (public)

17. University of California, San Francisco (public)

18. The Johns Hopkins University (private)

19. University of Wisconsin - Madison (public)

20. University College London (British)

Some interesting patterns immediately jump out.  Of the top 20 schools,  17 are American, which is pretty impressive given the share of the world population held by the United States.  Of the 17 American schools, six of them are public (which is amazing given how many resources the private schools have).  Of the public schools, 4 of them are in California.

So why are we discussing the need to privatize California higher education, which combines extremely high quality with relatively low tuition?  I mean seriously, is there no other public university system in the nation that we can focus on?  Or is it merely that reformers want to destroy the example of well done public education?

The whole argument strikes me as insane.

Another post on Unions

Erik Loomis is distressed by a piece in the Atlantic asking about the plastic surgery benefit for teachers in Buffalo, New York. Erik focuses on the fact that the teachers union is willing to give up the benefit if a new contract settlement can be reached and that there are many legitimate reasons to have reconstructive surgery available (e.g. a child who had serious facial damage after a car accident).

Jordan Weissmann, the author of the Atlantic article, focuses on the salaries of the teachers (mean of $52K) and the deadlock on contract negotiations. In some ways, I think everyone is missing the big picture. Teachers are professionals who work for a contract. We do not micromanage the compensation packages of hedge fund managers, either. It is true that teachers are paid directly by the government. But the carried interest exemption (which sets tax rates at 15%) is just as much of a decision to spend money.

After all, selectively taxing one group less is the same as a subsidy.

Put this another way, we could pay teachers less if we made their salaries exempt from income tax. Now this does not mean that specific benefits can't be renegotiated. Nor do I want to deny the reality of increasing health care costs (which are a problem everywhere in the United States right now) which can make benefits that were once reasonable seem excessive. But is it really constructive to focus on whether the teacher's health care plan is correctly designed as a matter of public policy. Or should be be looking at the long term drivers of malaise in our society.

Of course, looking at the long term drivers of malaise means facing up to our low tax rates (guarenteed to be a painful discussion) and dealing with the rate of growth in medical costs.

Cross sectional reasoning

I want to follow up on a post by Bad Astronomy that has been discussed by both Mark and Noah Smith. The post comments on the results of the 2010 census on employment rates:

I highlighted one in particular: Astronomy and Astrophysics. Note that it has a 0% unemployment rate; in other words, last year everyone who majored in these fields got a job! Now, I find myself being a tad skeptical about this, but if there’s some weird thing going on with this survey, I can at least make the broad assumption that the relative job numbers are probably OK. Majoring in astronomy is still a good idea, and will strengthen your chances of getting a job after college.

I want to take this in a different direction. What this metric shows is that, if you were lucky enough to have majored in Astronomy in 2005 then you were very likely to be employed in 2010. It says nothing about what will happen to somebody who enters the program in 2011 and whether they will be employed in 2015.

See, I was actually a physics major in the mid 1990's, in a school with a large astrophysics group. I knew a lot of these students and even took classes with them. Do you know what they mostly ended up as: High School Teachers. Plus a few academics. At the time there was a terrible job placement rate in physics and we were all depressed by the poor employment outcomes. Using the tool, I see a 4.5% unemployment rate for physics, which does make me wonder how many astrophysicists are counted in this group.

But, in general, past performance is no guarantee of future employment. A depressed job market could easily have led to full employment years later, long after only the most dedicated students remained. I've seen this phenomenon in a lot of fields -- people go where the markets signal but, in education, the signals are lagging indicators.

So maybe we are seeing the unemployment ghettos of the future?

What is up with Arkansas?

Looking at the student loan defaults rates by state, one is struck by how much the defaults are concentrated in the South East. Why would this be so?

But nothing is as shocking as how badly the for-profit institutions do. I think some sober looks at these numbers make sense before we conclude that for profit is automatically better, especially given that student debt is large and can no longer be discharged by bankruptcy.

Credentialing versus teaching

I think that there is a distinction missing here:

Learning is cheaper and easier than ever. And yet getting a degree is more expensive. How’s that? Something’s off, in a big way. Now of course you can push this too far: “Does Yglesias think we don’t need colleges because people can just look things up on Wikipedia instead?” No, I don’t. But I do remember hearing a lot of bluster from old-line media outlets once upon a time that proved to be completely wrong.

I think that the argument about ease of information transfer is right on. That is why a lot of the argument about higher education have settled into "credentialing" and "signaling". Neither of these functions is easier in the internet age and, to some extent, they may be harder (due to more noise and less signal). That makes it very valuable for universities to be able to do these functions.

The problem, as I see it, is that both tasks can be separated from objective outcomes. If you take a program to learn something then that is a concrete and testable outcome. If you take a program to get a credential, then it is quite possible to divorces this from skills or learning (see mail order college degrees).

That is the function that it gets easy to dilute and that could be a very big deal at some point.

Student Debt

This is obviously a case of very poor incentives:

The schools sometimes push these students into high-cost private loans that they can never hope to repay, even when they are eligible for affordable federal loans. Because the private loans have fewer consumer accommodations like hardship deferments, the borrowers often have little choice but to default.

Worse yet, these loans and the bad credit history follow the debtors for the rest of their lives. Even filing for bankruptcy doesn’t clean the slate.

I think the experiment with undischargeable debt has been tried many times over history and it never really ends well. Financing higher education is always going to be tricky (due to the large sums involved and the fact that students do not have a credit history). It also doesn't help that students lack assets so it can be an economically rational decision to accept an early career bankruptcy to discharge a six figure debt.

But the opposite extreme is looking increasingly like a bad idea.