Sure $172,200 sounds high but you do get room and board

I wish I had time to give this the treatment it deserves:

For all the hand-wringing over the cost of a full-time MBA, it turns out that the most expensive graduate business degrees in the world are not the highly publicized two-year, full-time experiences at places like Harvard and Stanford. Instead, the bulging price tags are on elite part-time programs designed for mid-career executives.

The most costly Executive MBA in the world? It's Wharton's 24-month MBA for executives at its West Coast campus in downtown San Francisco. At a cost of $172,200, students are effectively paying nearly $250 an hour for the pleasure of sitting in a class with 50 other people. That's nearly $100 more per contact hour with faculty than the regular full-time MBAs at Wharton pay. For every one of the roughly 700 hours a Wharton professor teaches Executive MBAs, the school is collecting a tidy $12,300.

Wharton Rakes It In

The second most expensive? It's also Wharton's Executive MBA program, this time on the East Coast, where the tuition and fees now come to $162,300. Those considerable sums compare with the $108,000 in total tuition and fees forked over by the full-time students back on the main Philadelphia campus. Wharton's Executive MBA business alone now brings in more than $35 million in annual revenues, with little more than 400 total students.

Why the Difference In Cost

Why is there such a big difference in the cost of these top-ranked EMBA programs over those at other schools? "It's like anything else, whether you're talking about buying Pepsi or Sam's brand of cola," says Michael Desiderio, executive director of the Executive MBA Council, the trade group representing EMBA programs. "There is a value inherently tied to a brand."

In fact, the average cost of an EMBA program, says Desiderio, is only $65,655. "So it's a huge continuum, ranging from a low of $30,000 to a high of $170,000."

Anjani Jain, Wharton's vice dean, MBA Program for Executives, obviously thinks Wharton programs are worth the premium. "The cost of the program, when normalized with respect to the number of contact hours and the inclusion of room and board during program weekends, is actually comparable to that of peer institutions," Jain insists. "Many other EMBA programs have substantially fewer contact hours, or don't include room and board in the base tuition."

Of course, at the high end, as Jain points out, Wharton's program is a premium experience that includes meals, accommodations, and professors who are among the best business faculty in the world. In Philadelphia, execs stay on alternating Friday nights in Wharton's fairly plush executive education residence facility, while in San Francisco, they're put up in at the upscale Hotel Le Meridian in the financial district within walking distance of Wharton's West Coast campus. For another, many business schools believe there is less price sensitivity in a market catering to already successful executives in their mid-to-late 30s who don't have to quit their jobs to get the executive version of the MBA degree.

Executive MBA Programs Tend to Be Costly

No wonder there are now nearly two dozen Executive MBA programs around the world that cost six figures. Increasingly, the most expensive programs feature international excursions for which meals and accommodations are covered (though airfare is not). Duke University's Global Executive MBA program, for example, boasts five residential sessions, with 60% of the classroom time in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. It carries a $146,600 price tag that includes lodging and meals. Or there is Trium, a three-way collaborative program among New York University, the London School of Economics, and HEC Paris. That program costs $140,000.

Noah Smith leaves out an important distinction

There's a good post at Noahpinion wondering where the opposition to high-skilled immigration is coming from. I suspect Smith is too quick to dismiss the role of xenophobes who see any increase in immigration as the first step down the slippery slope toward an open border, but it was this paragraph that really bothered me.

What about high-skilled native-born Americans? Are American-born computer programmers, engineers, and entrepreneurs afraid that high-skilled immigrants will take their jobs? I guess this is conceivable. I've heard some low-level grumbling from American-born engineers about the low wages and long hours that immigrant engineers are willing to accept, but I know of nothing even slightly resembling an organized movement or lobbying effort. And my guess is that smart Americans are smart enough to know that it's a positive-sum game - that the positive impact of the businesses started by smart immigrants vastly outweighs the effects of wage competition.

I may be opening myself up to an obvious insult here but having worked as a statistician in companies that used highly skilled immigrant labor, I'm not sure that this is automatically a positive-sum game.

At least not without one important caveat.

When we talk about naturalized citizens, students and green card holders,* it really does tend to be a net gain when we bring smart, highly-educated people into this country. Putting aside students (whose contribution is a topic for a different post), the positive impact of these highly skilled immigrants is due in large part to a labor market that does a reasonably good job matching employer and employee and setting compensation levels that reflect skills and productivity.

For H-1B visas, however, the labor market is severely distorted. Though the situation seems to have improved somewhat,** employees still face significant hurdles when changing jobs and limitations on what sort of jobs they can take, a situation sharply satirized by John Oliver in the clip below.

Having said all that, there's still a strong case to be made for increasing our H-1B quotas and this country could certainly use a good, healthy debate on the subject, but the specifics make a difference. You could argue that every time we bring someone smart and creative into the U.S.A it's a win for us, but the win is bigger when that person is allowed to participate in a more efficient labor market.

The Daily Show - Olivers on the Strike
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

* Green cards are a bit more restricted than many people realize, but probably not to the extent that it affects this conversation.

** See the American Competitiveness in the Twenty-First Century Act of 2000

Again with the comic books

And again from Mippyville.

Admittedly, it's the three cents figure in this ad from a 1950 comic book that grabs the attention of the Twenty-first Century reader, but when you actually get into the text you may be surprised at how little things have changed.

I guess we were just collateral damage

Brad DeLong explains what really happened to Blogspot.

Taxes and Growth via Yglesias

This entire piece is worth reading. In particular:

The other mechanism that seems to be on offer is labor supply. This makes a lot of sense to me as applied to low-income people. If you work at McDonald’s or drive a taxi then you face a real choice about whether or not to increase your hours worked at the margin in exchange for more money. Driving a cab at 2AM is obviously a huge pain in the ass and not especially lucrative. To the extent that cab drivers face higher income taxes, they have even more reason not to work so late since it becomes even less lucrative. And the availability or non-availability of late night cabs has a variety of downstream impacts on bars & restaurants, drunk driving, etc.

But it’s a lot harder to see this at the high end. A very large share of high-income professionals basically have a marginal wage of $0. The CEO of WalMart can’t cut back his hours by 5 percent in exchange for a 5 percent pay cut. What’s more, a lot of high-end work is characterized by zero-sum competition. It’s plausible to imagine higher income tax rates making veteran NBA players more likely at the margin to retire rather than play one more season at the minimum. But what are the downstream economic implications of Mike Bibby retiring? There overall quantity of NBA players is fixed and there are plenty of other people willing to step up and do that job. The average quality of NBA talent might decline, but so what? The players just play against each other. And it’s not just athletes. Fancy lawyers and high-frequency traders are playing against each other. Marginal changes in average quality don’t matter. If anything, reducing the average quality of America’s lawyers and finance guys would be beneficial if it inspired more people to do something else with their time.

Last, of course, one of the main reasons for taxing the rich is precisely that the utility of a rich person’s marginal dollar is so low. Giving the dollar to someone else will increase overall well-being.

I think that this is a very strong argument and one that we really need to give more thought to. The empirical data for the effects on growth for taxing high incomes is mixed (at best) and the consequences for accelerating our current recession are non-trivial. After all, we are firing people from government jobs at the same time as there is tepid growth in private sector employment. The stated reason is to try and prevent our budget deficit from growing out of control.

However, if restoring the Clinton-era tax rates did not have a direct mechanism to retard economic growth then perhaps we could fire fewer public sector workers? That would help with the large unemployment rate that we have in the United States and the culture focus of self-worth via paid employment.

I think that the question of higher marginal tax rates on very high income earners does bear some thought.

Lending an air of authority to any argument

From Cvltvre Made Stvpid via Krugman:

Weekend Gaming -- the greatest board game series ever?

I was never entirely clear on why 3M decided to get into the board game business, but for more than a dozen years they put out 3M's Bookshelf Games (so called because the boxes were designed to look like large hardcover books when placed in their slip covers). The line-up was a mixture of traditional games like chess and go and new games designed by freelancers like the incomparable Sid Sackson (Sackson's classic Acquire was a 3M game). The weakest of the series were still pretty good while the best have become, as mentioned before, classics.

Software developer Dennis Matheson has a detailed and affectionate website devoted to the series, Wikipedia has a good write-up as well, and, if your bookshelf has more space than mine, you can buy most of the games on EBay.

"It wasn't our fault... Honest"

But we'll apologize anyway.

We're sorry about the lack of posts. Google's Blogger was down all day yesterday and managed to lose the posts from the day before (perhaps they objected to the Oedipus joke).

To add injury to injury, yesterday featured both the most blatant how-to-lie-with-statistics graph and the most embarrassing education-reformer-hypocrisy story of the year.

We'll be back up to speed soon.

Thanks for your patience.

Update: the missing posts are back but I'm afraid the comments may be gone for good. Once again, sorry.

Yes, they actually do have a "Best Illusion of the Year contest"

First watch the video, making sure to stare at the white spot in the center.



It probably looked like the dots stopped changing color when the image rotated. Now watch it again but keep you eye on one of the colored dots. See the difference?

I'll let Scientific American's James Matson provide the details:

The illusion, titled "Silencing awareness of change by background motion," won top honors May 9 at the 2011 Best Illusion of the Year contest in Naples, Fla. The event, which is in its seventh year, is an offshoot of the annual Vision Sciences Society meeting, also in Naples. Jordan Suchow, a Harvard University graduate student, and George Alvarez, an assistant professor in Harvard's psychology department, created the winning entry.

The contest draws all manner of illusory entries. The 2011 first and second runners-up were also animations, one an illusion of contrast and one an illusion of visual aftereffects induced by motion, respectively. (See all 10 finalists here.) Last year's winner, on the other hand, was a video of an actual physical object that seemed to defy gravity—balls rolled right up inclined ramps as if pulled by magnets.

For a more in-depth take on the science behind this year's winning illusion, check out a study (pdf) Suchow and Alvarez wrote in the January 25 issue of Current Biology.

A defense of Star Wars

This parody was amusing but it has one key problem. Obi-wan Kenobi was a reluctant fighter who constantly tried to avoid killing people. Notice how a helpless Darth Vader survived their duel when Kenobi could easily have killed the helpless Vader. Or the way that Kenobi earned the nickname the negotiator for trying to minimize casualties in the clone wars.

I think that this makes the parody much less effective given the likely reference (who was clearly a callous mass murderer).

Another argument for Social Security

From Felix Salmon:

A lot of people have signed up for Wikinvest and handed over access to their brokerage accounts. I spoke briefly to SigFig founder Parker Conrad, who explained that it’s incredibly easy to flick through those accounts and come up with examples like the one he pulled up, of a man with $2.3 million in his Merrill Lynch account.

This guy probably knows that he’s paying his Merrill broker an annual management fee of 1.75%, which alone is more than $40,000 a year. But he doesn’t know that other Merrill clients in his position are paying far less — that Merrill brokers basically charge as much as they can, and the average Merrill client on Wikinvest pays less than half that, just 85 basis points.

And there are other things this guy doesn’t know, as well, because they’re buried in his statements — things like the fact that Merrill charged him $5,763 to make 24 trades last year, over and above that $40,000 management fee. That’s about $240 per trade.

Other fees are even higher. The Merrill broker bought something called the Fidelity Advisor International Capital Appreciation Fund, which charges 1.45% per year on top of a 5.75% fee payable when you buy the thing in the first place. The fund is substantially identical to the Fidelity International Capital Appreciation Fund, which has a 1% management fee and no front-loading at all. Why would any advisor with his client’s best interests at heart put that client into FCPAX rather than FIVFX? He wouldn’t — FCPAX is simply a vehicle invented by Fidelity for advisors which allows them to skim off hefty commissions.

Given these tricks, one can easily imagine how older adults (as they get less sharp over time) falling victim to all sorts of tricks of this sort. In that sense, the Federal Government can act as a disinterested party and act as a responsible agent in terms of managing pension savings. Given the risk of an older adult being rendered impoverished by these kinds of practices, I am unsure of why a program like social security is not universally popular. There may be some funding issues that require tweaks, but the basic idea is genius.

Three education stories -- two interesting and one important

Matt Yglesias and Brad DeLong have an interesting exchange about competition in higher education. I'm not sure either nails it but both make some good points.

Another qualified recommendation for this Salon piece. There's not much here that hasn't occurred to almost everyone who ever taught high school English or freshman comp. For everyone else, though, it's a useful glimpse into the reality of these classes.

And a recommendation without qualifiers for Dana Goldstein's 'The History of "LIFO."' Goldstein shows how a term that was up until recently an obscure piece of accounting jargon has become a powerful rhetorical tool in the reform movement.

It's okay to call Oedipus a...

As I suspect everyone has noticed by now, mainstream media journalists love pox-on-both-their-houses stories, stories where they can point to both parties committing the same offense, thus allowing the journalists to appear both impartial and morally superior.

Journalists love pox stories so much that they often equate very different offenses. Here Jonathan Chait finds an excellent example at the Washington Post:

After a recapitulation of some basic facts, the editorial arrives at the only other portion that can be called an actual argument:

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius told a House panel that seniors would “die sooner.” The Democratic National Committee proclaimed in an ad: “Their leaders have called for cutting Medicare, and now for killing it.”

This is false, inflammatory and, as we said, useful — for winning elections, that is. When it comes to solving the government’s most pressing problem, it threatens to set things back.

Are these claims false? No, they aren't. Let's take the democratic claims in reverse order. The current Medicare system is a commitment to cover health acre expenses for the elderly. The Republican plan would end that commitment and replace it with a limited and rapidly shrinking subsidy toward that end. It's somewhat tantamount to replacing public education with a system of limited vouchers for well below the average cost of public school tuition. Would you describe that as "killing" public education? I would -- the design of the program would be so altered as to no longer constitute the same thing.

It is true that both sides of the debates have accused the other of attacking Medicare, but only on one side were those accusations accurate.

"This is an egregious example of a public university being willing to sell itself for next to nothing."

Yeah, 'egregious' is what I'd go for (from the St. Petersburg Times via Chait):

A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free enterprise."

Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they've funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.

Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it's not happy with the faculty's choice or if the hires don't meet "objectives" set by Koch during annual evaluations.

David W. Rasmussen, dean of the College of Social Sciences, defended the deal, initiated by an FSU graduate working for Koch. During the first round of hiring in 2009, Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty's suggestions but ultimately agreed on two candidates. Although the deal was signed in 2008 with little public controversy, the issue revived last week when two FSU professors — one retired, one active — criticized the contract in the Tallahassee Democrat as an affront to academic freedom.

Rasmussen said hiring the two new assistant professors allows him to offer eight additional courses a year. "I'm sure some faculty will say this is not exactly consistent with their view of academic freedom,'' he said. "But it seems to me it would have been irresponsible not to do it."

The Koch foundation, based in Arlington, Va., did not return a call seeking comment.

Most universities, including the University of Florida, have policies that strictly limit donors' influence over the use of their gifts. Yale University once returned $20 million when the donor demanded veto power over appointments, saying such control was "unheard of."

Jennifer Washburn, who has reviewed dozens of contracts between universities and donors, called the Koch agreement with FSU "truly shocking."

Said Washburn, author of University Inc., a book on industry's ties to academia: "This is an egregious example of a public university being willing to sell itself for next to nothing."

Over the past few years we have seen the undermining (often deliberate) of the independence and credibility of a number of important institutions -- universities, research labs, government agencies, think tanks. It has been done through funding with increasingly less subtle strings attached, through attacks on academic freedom and independence (anyone for tenure reform?), and through a full court press on a media that has been all too willing to play the toady and the fool.

It's easy to see the short-term benefits of this erosion for people who, say, are trying to ignore evidence of climate change or the relationship between tax rates and budgets over the past twenty years, but in the long-term, when we lose our sources for reliable information and analysis, there are no winners.

p.s. I'm opening the floor for nominations. Can anyone suggest a more weaselly phrase than "I'm sure some faculty will say this is not exactly consistent with their view of academic freedom''?

Pop culture resources -- you may never leave the couch

Another advantage of studying old pop culture is that it has never been so accessible. When you think about how difficult it was to find some of these works just ten or twenty years ago, the abundance is truly amazing.


Project Gutenberg

National Jukebox

Internet Archive

Digital Comic Museum