Quotulatiousness

August 27, 2011

The value of education may actually just be a signalling mechanism

Filed under: Economics, Education — Tags: — Nicholas @ 11:38

Bryan Caplan looks briefly at the micro (to the person) and macro (to the society) benefits of higher education, but comes up with a more interesting view of the real value of education:

All this is well and good. But there’s an even deeper level of education to examine: What students actually study, learn and retain. I think of this as the “picoeconomic approach”* because it focuses on details too small for the “microeconomic approach” to see. The microeconomic approach tells us how much the market rewards education. But in the end, it doesn’t tell us why. To discover why education matters, we must descend to the picoeconomic level.

Key example: the main reason I’m think signaling is big deal has nothing to do with either Micro-Mincerian or Macro-Mincerian estimates of the return to education. The main reason I think signaling is a big deal is that (a) students study a ton of material that almost no job uses; (b) the Transfer of Learning literature shows that learning is highly specific — you don’t build general purpose mental muscles by learning Latin; (c) students quickly — and happily — forget most of what they learn, anyway. And yet employers amply reward education! The signaling model instantly looks like the best way to explain all the key facts.

[. . .]

* I know that the term “picoeconomics” is already used to describe the study of self-control problems, motivation, and so on. But why not think of self-control problems as one picoeconomic topic, and mine as another? We can treat picoeconomics as a blanket term that covers everything too small for microeconomists to notice.

June 26, 2011

Anti-semitism at the University of Toronto

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:54

Post-graduate students at the U of T may have gotten a bit too honest and outspoken in class:

Picture the following: A discussion in a post-graduate university class on the topic of Jews turns ugly. The professor is uncritical when one student says he doesn’t want to be around Jews. Another student complains about “rich Jews,” implying their excessive power. In a subsequent class, the same professor, as if to validate those points, says half her department faculty are Jews and with her approbation, students conduct a ‘Jew count’.

While this sounds like an episode in Germany leading up to the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, it occurred more recently and much closer to home, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Social Work. Now, more details are emerging under the exceptional circumstance of two U of T professors publicly criticizing a colleague for facilitating classroom anti-Semitism and the university administration’s inadequate response.

The controversy began when some visible minority students in a Social Work Master’s program at the University of Toronto expressed discomfort about being around “rich Jews,” in Professor Rupaleem Bhuyan’s class, regarding a proposed outing in 2009 to the Baycrest Centre, an internationally renowned Jewish geriatric and research facility. They were undoubtedly confident of a sympathetic ear from her. The previous year, Bhuyan denounced Israel as a satellite of the United States, unworthy of distinction as a separate country.

The few Jewish students in Bhuyan’s Master’s Program class were intimidated into silence for much of the discussion by a classroom culture slanted against them. Finally, one young woman spoke up, protesting her grandparents had come to Canada with virtually nothing and she was proud her family could now afford the fees for them to reside at Baycrest.

That must have rung an alarm bell for Professor Bhuyan, because startlingly, she then admonished her students not to divulge what transpired in class to outsiders.

H/T to Ilkka for the link.

June 13, 2011

AC Grayling’s “embryo London humanities university … has induced apoplexy in the old left”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:35

Simon Jenkins marvels at the over-the-top response to the announcement of a new private university in London:

This has been a purple week for red rage. The hirsute philosopher, AC Grayling, may call himself a “pinko” but his embryo London humanities university in Bedford Square has induced apoplexy in the old left. He and 13 high-octane scholars are having their lectures “targeted”. The Guardian is in ideological meltdown. Foyles has been hit by a smoke bomb. The Kropotkin of our age, Terry Eagleton, claims to be fit to vomit. Bloomsbury has not been so excited since semen was spotted on Vanessa Bell’s dress.

Britain’s professors, lecturers and student trade unionists appear to be united in arms against what they most hate and fear: academic celebrity, student fees, profit and loss, one-to-one tutorials and America. Grayling’s New College of the Humanities may be no more than an egotists’ lecture agency, better located at Heathrow Terminal 5, but the rage it has evoked is fascinating.

What Grayling has done is caricature the British university. He has cartooned it as no longer an academic community but a high-end luxury consumable for the middle classes, operating roughly half a year, with dons coming and going at will, handing down wisdom in between television and book tours. Just when state universities have been freed by the coalition to triple their income per student (initially at public expense) to £9,000, Grayling has mischievously doubled that to £18,000.

June 7, 2011

Intolerance of educational experimentation

Filed under: Britain, Education, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Brendan O’Neill surveys the range of responses to the proposed establishment of a new private for-profit university in London:

It is ‘odious’, ‘repugnant’, ‘parasitic’, ‘hypocritical’, a ‘travesty’, a ‘money-grubbing’ scheme, and ‘it would be better all-round if its doors never opened’. Wow. What is it? A whorehouse? A Satanic church? A junk-food chain that specialises in feeding fat straight into children’s veins via a drip? In fact it’s a proposed new London-based university, called the New College of the Humanities, which says it will teach students the best of literature, culture and history for a fee of £18,000 a year. And yet judging from the unhinged coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking that someone had proposed opening a Ratko Mladic fanclub in Islington.

The response to Professor AC Grayling’s educational experiment, for which he has recruited other ‘star’ professors such as Richard Dawkins and Niall Ferguson, has been extraordinarily intolerant. No sooner had the press release about the new university been emailed than Grayling and Co. were being accused of selling out working-class students and the ideal of ‘education for all’ by opening an institution that only the wealthy (and those lucky enough to secure a scholarship) will be able to afford. As one journalist summarised, the initiative has met with ‘universal scorn from commentators in the national press’. Journalists have described the university as a ‘disgrace’, ‘nauseous’ and ‘disgustingly elitist’. The Twittersphere, always keen to ape the pronouncements of its heroes on the op-ed pages, heaped 140-character fury upon Grayling’s vain/pathetic/evil/doomed initiative.

Not to be outdone, members of the University of London Union and other radical student groups called an ‘emergency meeting’ last night. Not an emergency meeting to discuss the corrosion of liberty and free speech in the West or the future of the Arab uprisings — as radical students might have done in the past — but an emergency meeting to discuss how to crush this new uni. ULU’s vice president called for it to be blacklisted, insisting that the University of London refuse to recognise or work with this ‘repugnant’ institution. There was a serious debate about how to shut it down before it had even opened. One left-wing group said we must ‘stop Grayling’s sham university’ because it’s the ‘thin end of the wedge [of privatisation]’. Without so much as a whiff of self-awareness or irony, it went on to describe New College as ‘an attack on free education’. Yes, that’s right — this educational institution must be smashed in order to defend ‘free education’. Perhaps we should also burn its books in the name of defending book-reading.

Of course, if the quality of teaching at the New College of the Humanities is not up to an acceptable standard, it will fail and the university will close. That does not appear to be any part of the motivation for all the screaming and wailing. It rather implies that they’re actually afraid it will succeed, which might start raising questions about the existing university system.

May 29, 2011

QotD: The Yale fraternity prank and the feminist response

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:55

That wise precept, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” has obviously long disappeared among the sisterhood, however. So, too, has the idea of keeping things in perspective. The DKE brothers’ tasteless pledge prank was just that: a tasteless pledge prank. What is the most provocative thing you could say on a college campus today, the thing most likely to outrage the largest and most influential power bloc? “No means yes.” To inflate this incident into a symbol of anything beyond an unfunny effort at transgression on the part of a trivially small (and marginalized) number of individuals requires a willful blindness to the reality of Yale. (The administration doesn’t even recognize fraternities.) The university constantly sends the message that “no means no,” whether through such formal bodies as its Sexual Harassment and Assault Resources and Education Center, its Sexual Harassment Grievance Board, and a 24-hour sexual-assault hotline or through informal channels such as freshman orientation and public pronouncements. Yale president Rick Levin and Yale College dean Mary Miller condemned what they called the pledges’ “appalling language.” “We will confront hateful speech,” they stated in a press release, “in no uncertain terms: No member of our community should engage in such demeaning behavior.” Last week, Yale banned DKE from conducting any activities on campus, including use of campus e-mail, for five years on the ground that it had engaged in “harassment, coercion or intimidation.” Yale also announced that individual frat members had been disciplined for their speech. If the pledge chant represented official thinking on campus, or was in any way sanctioned by the authorities, obviously there would be cause for concern. Clearly, that is not the case.

To the civil rights complainants, however, the DKE incident and Yale’s allegedly inadequate response to it “precludes women from having the same equal opportunity to the Yale education as their male counterparts,” in the words of signatory Hannah Zeavin. (The signatories also want to gut further Yale’s already ludicrously inadequate due-process protections for those accused of sexual assault or harassment.) Yale has one of the greatest library systems in the world; it showers on students top-notch instruction in almost every intellectual discipline; it lavishes students with healthy food, luxurious athletic facilities, and rich venues for artistic expression. All of these educational resources are available on a scrupulously equal basis to both sexes. But according to the Yale 16 and their supporters, female students simply cannot take full advantage of the peerless collection of early twentieth-century German periodicals at Sterling Library, say, or the DNA sequencing labs on Science Hill, because a few frat boys acted tastelessly. Thus the need to go crying to the feds to protect you from the big, bad Yale patriarchy. Time to bring on the smelling salts and the society doctors peddling cures for vapors and neurasthenia.

Heather Mac Donald, “Sisterhood and the SEALs: How can women join special forces when they can’t even handle frat-boy pranks?”, City Journal, 2011-05-26

May 18, 2011

Wendy Kaminer: University students are “unlearning liberty”

Filed under: Education, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:18

Wendy Kaminer looks at the disturbing trend in universities that shows female students seeing themselves as helpless and in desperate need of protection from (and active suppression of) the free speech rights of others.

I don’t know the ages of Obama’s OCR appointees, but they seem to be operating under the influence of the repressive disregard for civil liberty that began taking over American campuses nearly 20 years ago. As FIRE president Greg Lukianoff remarks, students have been ‘unlearning liberty’. Concern about social equality and the unexamined belief that it requires legal protections for the feelings of presumptively vulnerable or disadvantaged students who are considered incapable of protecting themselves has generated not just obliviousness to liberty but a palpable hostility to it.

Sad to say, but feminism helped lead the assault on civil liberty and now seems practically subsumed by it. Decades ago, when Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin and their followers began equating pornography with rape (literally) and calling it a civil-rights violation, groups of free-speech feminists fought back, in print, at conferences, and in state legislatures, with some success. We won some battles (and free-speech advocates in general can take solace in the Supreme Court’s recent decision upholding the right to engage in offensive speech on public property and public affairs). But all things considered (notably the generations of students unlearning liberty), we seem to be losing the war, especially among progressives.

This is not simply a loss for liberty on campus and the right to indulge in what’s condemned as verbal harassment or bullying, broadly defined. It’s a loss of political freedom: the theories of censoring offensive or hurtful speech that are used to prosecute alleged student harassers are used to foment opposition to the right to burn a flag or a copy of the Koran or build a Muslim community centre near Ground Zero. The disregard for liberty that the Obama administration displays in its approach to sexual harassment and bullying is consistent with its disregard for liberty, and the presumption of innocence, in the Bush/Obama war on terror. Of course, the restriction of puerile, sexist speech on campus is an inconvenience compared to the indefinite detention or showtrials of people suspected of terrorism, sometimes on the basis of unreviewed or unreviewable evidence. But underlying trivial and tragic deprivations of liberty, the authoritarian impulse is the same.

April 17, 2011

Academic short cuts: group projects

Filed under: Education, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:27

I always hated group project when I was in school, especially the couple of times where I had to depend on the expertise of other students to help me get through. Professors, however, still seem very fond of assigning group work in certain academic areas:

Group work is largely an academic joke, a process where the weaker members of the group rely almost exclusively on the stronger, more conscientious students to carry them all to the grade they want. (Of course, the same “weak rely on the strong” dynamic prevails in real-world group work as well.) Group work serves lazy students and professors quite well — the low-performing students can relax while their peers complete the task, and the professors have fewer papers or projects to grade.

While easy classes and group assignments may do little to further the students’ actual education, that’s not the point, is it? After all, the real purpose of many second-tier (and even some first-tier) public- and private-university business degrees is to provide the mandatory credential required by employers, who then do the actual, on-the-job training the position requires. Recent marketing, accounting, or management grads enter the workplace (with rare exceptions) as essentially glorified interns, and they’ll sink or swim based on their performance in a job they learn as they go. While’s there nothing inherently wrong with starting low and working your way up through determination, creativity, and discipline, why must these new employees spend four years and tens of thousands of dollars before they can start their real training?

July 9, 2010

A Terry Pratchett short story

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:00

Lois McMaster Bujold happened upon this Pratchett short story and sent the link to the Bujold mailing list. The academics of the Unseen University confront the recommendations of the University Inspector:

“I have to tell you, sir, that Mr Pessimal is suggesting that we accept an intake of 40 per cent non-traditional students,” said Ponder Stibbons.

“What does that mean?” said the Senior Wrangler.

“Well, er…” Stibbons began, but the council had already resorted to definition-by-hubbub.

“We take in all sorts as it is,” said the Dean.

“Does he mean people who are not traditionally good at magic?” said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.

“Ridiculous!” said the Dean. “Forty per cent duffers?”

“Exactly!” said the Archchancellor. “That means we’d have to find enough clever people to make up over half the student intake! We’d never manage it. If they were clever already, they wouldn’t need to go to university! No, we’ll stick to an intake of 100 per cent young fools, thank you. Bring ’em in stupid, send them away clever, that’s the UU way!”

“Some of them arrive thinkin’ they’re clever, of course,” said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.

“Yes, but we soon disabuse them of that,” said the Dean happily. “What is a university for if it isn’t to tell you that everything you think you know is wrong?”

“Well put, that man!” said Ridcully. “Ignorance is the key! That’s how the Dean got where he is today!”

“Thank you, Archchancellor,” said the Dean, in a chilly voice. “I shall take that as a compliment. Carefully directed ignorance is the key to all knowledge.”

June 10, 2010

OTF threatens to punish students for ‘sins’ of the university

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:03

Spite and malice are the only reasons for this kind of blatant blackmail attempt by the Ontario Teachers’ Federation:

Nipissing University and the Ontario Teachers’ Federation may be headed for a full-blown confrontation over the institution’s decision to confer an honorary degree on former Ontario premier Mike Harris, a polarizing politician largely abhorred by the teaching community for his education reforms.

The federation warned the university in a May 12 letter that it “cannot predict how teachers may demonstrate their displeasure” if the ceremony goes ahead, but university president Leslie Lovett-Doust said on Wednesday Mr. Harris will, indeed, receive the honorary Doctor of Letters on Thursday afternoon.

[. . .]

The teachers’ organization has already hinted some of its members may choose not to place Nipissing students in highly coveted student-teacher positions, and the federation may add teeth to that veiled threat.

“The OTF executive could, as an option, inform Nipissing that we are going to recommend to our members that they not take teachers for practicum placement from Nipissing University,” said Sam Hammond, president of the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario, one of four affiliate organizations under the OTF.

Mike Harris has been out of politics for (effectively) the entire time the Nipissing students were in high school and university, yet their future careers are now being explicitly threatened by the OTF. What possible way can these young adults be held responsible for the actions of a long-retired politician? Clearly, even the idiots at the OTF don’t think this is reasonable . . . but they do think it’s worth ruining their public image to prevent Mike Harris from being given an honorary degree.

Update: Matt Gurney scrawls his illegible “x” on the dotted line of the protest petition:

Former premier Mike Harris personally and single-handedly destroyed my childhood. Just ask the Ontario Teacher’s Federation and its other, affiliated unions. They will happily confirm that Mr. Harris did indeed, knowingly and willfully, set out to ruin everything in this province that was pure and good. And they will not let that go unpunished.

The article, which must have been dictated and then painstakingly transcribed, is finished with this bio note: “Matt Gurney is a member of the National Post editorial board, even though, having been educated during the Harris years, he is, of course, illiterate.”

May 17, 2010

He comes not to praise Canadian universities, but to bury them

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 18:37

The Guardian summarizes an article by Robert Martin:

A mighty steam organ of an article, adorned with the title University Legal Education in Canada is Corrupt Beyond Repair, blasts forth in the October 2009 issue of the scholarly journal Interchange. It’s the handiwork of Robert Martin, professor of law, emeritus, at the University of Western Ontario.

Martin warms up with a little tune about university students: “Each fall, a horde of illiterate, ignorant cretins enters Canada’s universities. A few years later, they all move on, just as illiterate, just as ignorant and rather more cretinous, but now armed with bits of paper, which most of them are probably not able to read, called degrees.”

Then, in deeper tones, Martin sounds off about universities: “Canadian universities are closed and fearful institutions, which actively enforce uniformity on their members.”

[. . .]

Martin brings everything to a rousing conclusion that, one way or another, pretty much explains everything:

“There are two phrases that can be used to describe every law faculty in Canada. The phrases are: ‘feminist seminary’ and ‘psychotic kindergarten’.”

I guess it’s safer to say things like this after your active teaching career is behind you . . .

December 23, 2009

QotD: College football and graduation rates

Filed under: Education, Football, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:06

In college news, TMQ contends that football-factory coaches emphasize winning above all else because there is no reward for academic outcomes. Cory Scott of Ambler, Pa., notes this column by Jay Paterno, the quarterbacks coach at Penn State and Joe’s son, proposing that academic success be added as a factor in the BCS formula. If it were a factor, Jay Paterno finds, Alabama would still be in the title game next month — but facing TCU rather than Texas. Here, Lindsey Luebchow of Yale Law School takes a similar approach with her third annual Academic BCS rankings. Luebchow analyzes the top 25 football schools at season’s end and factors in both graduation numbers and the NCAA’s “academic progress rate.” Looked at this way, with more classroom emphasis than Paterno’s ranking, the BCS Championship Game would pit Penn State against Stanford — while Texas, with horrible academic stats for football, plummets all the way down from No. 2 to No. 25 and an appearance in TMQ’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback Bowl Presented by TMQ.

Paterno and Luebchow are on to something big. The BCS is all about elaborate computer formulas. Football-factory coaches and boosters often claim for the sake of show they care about academics. Make it official — add academic measures to the BCS computer formula! Do this, and within a single year there would be intense focus on classroom performance at every BCS-hopeful school. This isn’t a whimsical idea, it is a perfectly serious and practical idea — if the NCAA and the BCS want to prove they’re not just moving their mouths when they say they care about GPAs and graduation.

Gregg Easterbrook, “TMQ’s ‘Twelve Days of Christmas'”, ESPN Page Two, 2009-12-22

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