Tyler Cowen, quoted by Alice Korngold in her "Living and Working to 100":

“Online education will move from the add-on to the centerpiece,” Cowen told me. “Higher education will move towards a hybrid approach with top faculty teaching online, and motivational coaches working with students on a personal level.” Cowen sees the hybrid model making college education more affordable. He envisions new job opportunities in statistics, search, programming, and logic, “since you need people behind smart machines.” Cowen also envisions job growth in the motivational sector.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Education
        

The Socratic method is forever a part of received Western wisdom, and I've always kind of hated it. The Socratic method involves dialectic, opposing viewpoints, professors playing dumb and a lot more questions than answers.

My memories of it in college involve entire class periods wasted on half-baked speculation by 19-year-olds, unrelieved by the slightest guidance from the teacher. I just wanted to know the answers. I didn't want to hear what college students who were just as clueless as I had to say about Immanuel Kant. I wanted to know what the professor thought was important to know.

Now I am happy to find at least one pedagogue who agrees. Here is Douglas Detterman, quoted by Robert Haskell, who is quoted by Bryan Caplan at George Mason University. When he started teaching Detterman says:

I thought it was important to make things as hard as possible for students so they would discover the principles for themselves. I thought the discovery of principles was a fundamental skill that students needed to learn and transfer to new situations. Now I view education, even graduate education, as the learning of information. I try to make it as easy for students as possible. Where before I was ambiguous about what a good paper was, I now provide examples of the best papers from past classes.

Before, I expected students to infer the general conclusion from specific examples. Now I provide the general conclusion and support it with specific examples. In general, I subscribe to the principle that you should teach people exactly what you want them to learn in a situation as close as possible to the one in which the learning will be applied. I don't count on transfer and I don't try to promote it except by explicitly pointing out where taught skills may be applied.

Listen up, professors! Perhaps this can start to solve the higher-education productivity problem.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 5:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)
Categories: Education
        

This is a little surprising. Hopkins Carey Business School Dean Yash Gupta is leaving at the end of the year to join the private sector. Gupta arrived in 2008.
UPDATE: Apparently Gupta was a candidate recently to be provost at the University of Iowa, where he was questioned about his tendency not to stay in jobs for very long. See the Daily Iowan story here.

Here is the memo that went out to faculty today:

The establishment of the Carey Business School in 2007 marked a landmark moment in the proud history of business and management education at Johns Hopkins, a history that dates back to the early years of the 20th century.

Since then, the new school has accomplished so much, with the recruitment of a core group of full-time research faculty, new headquarters in Baltimore's burgeoning Harbor East business district and the establishment of the university's first MBA program designed for full-time students. Those developments brought the school to yet another milestone last summer, when the Carey School's faculty and staff moved into their new quarters in the Legg-Mason Tower and welcomed the first class in the school's Global MBA program. The Carey Business School has quickly become a vital component of The Johns Hopkins University.

I give all due credit for this significant progress to the first dean of the Carey School, Yash P. Gupta, who has been a tireless evangelist for the school and brought us to this important moment.

During his tenure, Dean Gupta has successfully recruited a core group of exceptional scholars and business practitioners to our faculty, hired a new administrative team, developed the

Continue reading "Hopkins business dean to join SDP Telecom as CEO" »

Posted by Jay Hancock at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Education
        

Maryland Public Television's Jeff Salkin and I talk about requiring high school students to take a semseter-long course in personal finance and economics.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Education
        

A December Hancock column was about the need for efficiencies in universities to lower the cost and make them accessible to more people.

Professors and university administrators like to think their product is more important than a car.They're right. But that's why it's so critical to get the economics of higher education right. If universities can't deliver the kind of quality improvements and cost reductions embraced by other industries, investing in tomorrow's workers and citizens becomes a bigger and bigger problem.

The piece talked about marginal gains being made in survey courses at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and elsewhere. The savings aren't being passed along to students -- they're shared with the academic departments offering the courses. As Matt Yglesias blogs, referencing Mark Kleiman, this kind of tiny change won't end the constant escalation of high-ed costs. You need a radical, disruptive competitor to the traditional college, "something that doesn’t at all look like our canonical image of a college." Yglesias:

What you could plausibly hope to see happen is the creation of an institution of higher education that’s (a) much worse than the University of Michigan, (b) better than nothing, (c) radically cheaper than the University of Michigan, and (d) scalable. Then you could imagine a model like that moving incrementally up the quality ladder. CAP put out an interesting paper from Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, Louis Soares, and Louis Caldera laying out some of the fundamentals here.

Of course the Christensen et. al. paper talks about applying online learning and other tools being employed by the Maryland system in a much more intensive way. This kind of talk makes traditional academicians deeply uncomfortable, because the way to slash college costs is to employ many fewer professors. But as Yglesias says, "Either a college education will turn over time into something that only a narrow elite can afford, or else our idea of what “a college education” looks like has to transform into something with a lower cost structure and more scalability."

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
Categories: Education
        

A few days ago I blogged about divorce insurance. Now we have another risk-management product: grade insurance. The people who run Ultrinsic don't describe their product that way. It's billed as a "motivator" that pays off if you get top grades. But, as HuffPost reports, you can also bet that you'll fail.

From Ultrinsic:

While hanging out together one Sunday afternoon, I mentioned to my friend Steven Wolf that I had an exam the following day and that if I were to study I was sure to get an A. (At the time, I was a student at University of Pennsylvania.) But I was enjoying my Sunday afternoon, and I told Steven that I had no intention of studying. That's when, in order to provide me with motivation, we made the following agreement: If I got an A on the exam, he would give me $100, and if I didn't get an A, I would give him $20. Steven and I quickly realized that lots of other students might like this kind of motivation. To that end, we began developing what is now Ultrinsic Motivator Inc. - Jeremy Gelbart

They're tried it out at Penn and NYU and say they're rolling it out this fall at more than 30 other, so-far unidentified schools. Googling "Johns Hopkins" and "Ultrinsic" turned up no relevant hits. To keep people from gaming the system, Ultrinsic says it has algorithms that account for prior performance of individual students and set the odds accordingly. So you have to "exceed expectations" (or sharply fall below them, if you bet on flunking) to make money.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Categories: Education
        

Stanley Fish continues the discussion on whether students should be able to rate their teachers, affecting teachers' pay and careers. One teacher responds in a definitive way:

“Sorry kids, you are not the authority in the classroom. Me Teacher. You student. Me Teach , you learn. End of discussion . . . Education is not a business. You are not my customer. My classroom is not Burger King. You do not get to ‘have it your way.’”

Posted by Jay Hancock at 2:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Education
        

The market is a fabuous thing, the best mechanism for raising standards of living and allocating capital. But it's hardly perfect, and it doesn't work in all situations and for every product. Too often zealots push the free-market concept over the edge of the cliff. Example 1: Electricity deregulation. Example 2: Subprime mortgages. Example 3: Executive pay.

Example 4 comes from Texas, where the Texas Public Policy Foundation is promoting the idea of rewarding college professors with "up to $10,000 based on anonymous student evaluations, called 'customer satisfaction,'" according to The Eagle. Texas A&M is already doing it.

It's the "customer" model gone berserk. College kids and their parents pay thousands for an educational "product," the reformers are thinking. Why, they're no different than somebody buying bread at Safeway. They should be able to make their preferences known! Let those 19-year-old customers rule!

Writing for the NYT, Stanley Fish has the appropriate response:

If a waiter asks me, “Was everything to your taste, sir?”, I am in a position to answer him authoritatively (if I choose to). When I pick up my shirt from the dry cleaner, I immediately know whether the offending spot has been removed. But when, as a student, I exit from a class or even from an entire course, it may be years before I know whether I got my money’s worth, and that goes both ways.

What's surprising is that people who think of themselves as conservative are associated with the idea of paying teachers based on student preferences. Conservatism used to be about having youth defer to authority figures such as teachers. Conservatism is about responding to challenges with discipline and hard work, even if the taskmaster meting out assignments isn't your best friend. Conservatism is about having schools, churches and other institutions mold sometimes recalcitrant youths, building character to turn out productive members of society.

But the Texas Public Policy Foundation wants to put students in the driver's seat. SDS and the other lefty student radicals who tried to hijack college administrations in the 1960s would surely approve. Coming next from the TPPF: Letting U.S. Marine recruits -- the "customers" at Parris Island boot camp -- rate their drill instructors?

UPDATE: Evidence here, via Greg Mankiw:

[S]tudents appear to reward higher grades in the introductory course but punish professors who increase deep learning (introductory course professor value‐added in follow‐on courses). Since many U.S. colleges and universities use student evaluations as a measurement of teaching quality for academic promotion and tenure decisions, this latter finding draws into question the value and accuracy of this practice.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Categories: Education
        

If Allen Zaruba had called himself a "slave" on a corporate plantation instead of using what the Sun calls "a racially insensitive term," he'd still have his job as an adjunct professor at Towson University. His firing is attracting attention because of our fascination with race and language taboos. (Zaruba is white but had a black stepfather.) But the case will also renew discussion about the low pay and status of adjunct faculty. Among many questions: If Zaruba had tenure, would he have been fired?

For a nice portrait of adjunct life, check out this piece by Audrey Williams June in the Chronicle of Higher Education last fall.

They don't make much money, they don't have health benefits, and they don't have job security. So why do adjuncts keep showing up to teach in college classrooms semester after semester, year after year?...

[Adjunct James Davis] expects to earn about $18,000, in all, this year from teaching and additional work as a tutor in the writing center at Roosevelt University. The recent downturn is forcing him to re-evaluate his career goals. He admits that if he were "a little bit more aggressive I could probably have more classes right now because of all the colleges that are here." But without a car, he says, he's limited to teaching at colleges that are close to one another.

And after applying for three or four full-time jobs each year around the country, "I'm getting tired of chasing the carrot at the end of the stick," says Mr. Davis. "It's disappointing because you're taught all your life if you work hard, you'll be rewarded." He has been dabbling in other money-making opportunities, such as freelance writing or publishing, from which he might fashion a new career.

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Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)
Categories: Education
        

Maryland is arguing with itself over whether to extend the time it takes teachers to obtain tenure. I'm sympathetic to the idea of tenure in academia. The ideal academy and academicians should be shielded from political and commercial pressures, from getting fired for having unusual or anti-establishment views. Colleges and universities are idea incubators. Important ideas often have the effect of goring somebody's ox or making the proprietors uncomfortable.

But should teachers in primary and secondary schools get what some argue is a job guarantee for life, once tenure is achieved? The argument against would be that lower-school teachers are largely in the business of inculcating skills rather than philosophy. They follow a rigid curriculum. They may have less individual leeway -- and one could argue that they should have less leeway -- to get into the ideological territory that causes fights at universities. Is this premise correct? If so is it a reason to water down or abolish high-school and grade-school tenure? I'm not sure.

I reject the notion that teachers need protection because of the normal workplace threats of biased bosses and office cliques. Every worker has to deal with that. But on the question of whether they need protection for academic reasons, I'd like to hear ideas. What do you think?

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (55)
Categories: Education
        

Gov. Martin O'Malley's three-year tuition freeze was admirable, but it was beginning to be counterproductive. As I wrote in September, under the resource constraints caused by flat tuition, Maryland universities have been obliged to reject more and more students just when people need the low-cost education state facilities can provide.

Salisbury and Towson have been rejecting almost half the kids who apply. Meanwhile the community colleges are jammed. We're rationing education, and that's not good for anybody.

For the September column I asked O'Malley spokesman Rick Abbruzzese if tuition might go up. "For the next school year, I think it is possible," he said. Today the Associated Press's Brian Witte reports that O'Malley would support a 3 percent tuition increase. I suspect the Regents probably want something more like 5 percent.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Categories: Education
        

Maryland schools superintendent Nancy Grasmick is making what The Sun's Liz Bowie calls "bold proposals" to improve teacher quality. I suppose by Maryland standards they are bold. Grasmick wants to make teachers prove themselves for more than as little as two years before they get tenure and protections from getting fired for incompetence. She wants three years or four years. Some states require up to seven years, Bowie reports.

Grasmick also wants to link teacher evaluations to student test scores and get the ability to increase pay for those who can teach tough subjects such as math or Chinese. Imagine -- evaluating teachers based on results! Paying more to employees who have mastered difficult subjects that students need to learn in the 21st century economy! It's telling that Maryland policymakers had to use the prospect of getting federal stimulus money as an excuse to propose these changes.

But, I mean, really. Even if the time to get tenure is extended from two years to four years, it'll still be hard to dismiss teachers who slack off later in their careers. The reforms would go another step in elevating the idol of standardized test scores. And it's ridiculous that the school system should even have to negotiate with the union to pay more to physics and calculus teachers. For most people quantitative skills are harder to learn and harder to teach. Bilingual teachers are the exception rather than the rule. Schools should be free to pay science, math and language teachers what they're worth.

UPDATE: Teachers are getting quite defensive in the comments section, which puzzles me. I'm advocating excellence and accountability for teaching. In what respect does that contain an "antagonistic undercurrent," as one teacher commented? We should demand excellence and accountability in every profession, including journalism. I revere teachers. In another life I would have become a teacher. I have been volunteering as a tutor in an inner-city Baltimore elementary school for more than a decade, and I can't believe the toil and dedication of the professionals there. Teaching is one of society's most important professions. That's why we should hire the very best people we can, hold them to high standards, pay them what they're worth when they meet expectations and hold them accountable when they don't.

Pointing out that some teachers protected by tenure aren't delivering results our kids deserve is not the same as deprecating all teachers.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (27)
Categories: Education
        

The California Regents just raised tution by 32 percent. In Virginia, Virginia Tech, the College of William and Mary and Mary Washington are all raising tuition. Maryland should move in the same direction -- only more on the order of 5 percent. Gov. O'Malley's three-year tuition freeze has left Maryland universities without the resources to admit and educate everybody who wants to be educated. Maryland universities are rejecting applicants at record rates. We're rationing education.

Here's the recent column arguing in favor of a tuition increase. Here's a video reprise of the column in a chat with Jeff Salkin on Maryland Public Television.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 6:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Education
        

Of course metro Baltimore did very well in the Daily Beast's rankings of smartest cities. We're No. 10 out of 55 major metro areas, beating out Philly, New York and San Diego but trailing Boston, Washington and Hartford. An educated, literate workforce is Maryland's economic strength, compensating for the place's highish cost of doing business.

The methodology itself was smart. The Beast measured how much of a metro area's population went to college, how many universities a metro area has, whether or not the population pays attention to politics and whether the denizens buy nonfiction books. The biggest surprises for me were how poorly Chicago (24th), Atlanta (23rd) and LA (27th) did, and how well Hartford did (6th).

Among the losers: Fresno, Calif., Louisville, Ky., Phoenix and Harrisburg, Pa. Phoenix was 50th smartest out of 55. Its smart-city IQ of 63 was less than half Baltimore's 135.

The Beast seems to have interviewed our mayor, who seemed delighted to be asked a question that doesn't have to do with grand juries.

“We are very blessed to have wonderful schools [and] universities,” says Sheila Dixon, Baltimore’s first female mayor, “but ultimately it is the engaged, educated, and active citizenry in the City of Baltimore that deserves the recognition.”

Well, not just the citizenry of the city. Daily Beast ranked metro areas, which for us includes all the counties surrounding Baltimore.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 6:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)
Categories: Education
        

Today's column is about increasing financial literacy and requiring Maryland high school students to take a semester of personal-finance instruction. Among the sources I consulted was this recent paper by Annamaria Lusardi of Dartmouth, Olivia S. Mitchell of Wharton and Vilsa Curto at the National Bureau of Economic Research. They write about the responses of young people to three basic consumer-finance questions. Answers are below the fold, along with the percentage of incorrect responses given for each question.

1) Suppose you had $100 in a savings account and the interest rate was 2% per
year. After 5 years, how much do you think you would have in the account if you
left the money to grow: more than $102, exactly $102, or less than $102?

2) Imagine that the interest rate on your savings account was 1% per year and
inflation was 2% per year. After 1 year, would you be able to buy more than,
exactly the same as, or less than today with the money in this account?

3) Do you think that the following statement is true or false? “Buying a single
company stock usually provides a safer return than a stock mutual fund.”

Continue reading "Are you smarter than a subprime mortgage client?" »

Posted by Jay Hancock at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)
Categories: Education
        

I will question his view of Towson University. To say that Towson and its sister schools "were supposed to educate the kids who didn't get into the University of Maryland, College Park" is ridiculous. We are not here to serve College Park. We are here to serve the citizens of Maryland, and we do that very well. It is also not valid to compare Towson University to Goucher College. Goucher is a small, private school with a student body that is a fraction of Towson's student body.

I plead guilty to unfairly maligning Towson. It is harder easier to get into than College Park. But of course it's far more than that. I've heard from people who got into College Park and chose Towson instead. I should have worded it differently. The point of the Goucher comparison is that Towson is so hard to get into these days that it has a higher rejection rate than the selective Goucher. Caret doesn't refute the rest of the column, which makes a pretty good case that Maryland is rationing higher education, to the cost of the state.

UPDATE: We'll be talking about this with C4 on WBAL today at 2:30.  

Posted by Jay Hancock at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)
Categories: Education
        

Today's column argues that O'Malley should end the three-year tuition freeze so state universities can have the resources to admit more students. The freeze is making schools less accessible, not more. Places such as Morgan State (tuition of $4,280), Salisbury U. ($4,814) and Towson U. ($5,180) are becoming quasi-elite schools, rejecting thousands of kids because the freeze has limited their wherewithal. Is it time to raise the price?

Even as interest in these schools soared, the tuition freeze and tight state budgets forced them to put a lid on admissions.

This year, Towson admitted almost 1,000 fewer freshmen and enrolled 400 fewer than it did last year. That's even though applications hit 15,623 this year, up from 11,750 in 2005.

"We actually pulled back from accepting additional applications," said Brian P. Hazlett, the university's director of admissions. "We didn't want to accept applications from students we didn't have the ability to enroll."

UPDATE: Pulled from comments:

My son was caught in the squeeze. He was not accepted at Towson and is now attending college in New York at about 5x the cost. Would've been nice to have a choice...

And please don't say Community college was a choice - it was, but - they are totally overwhelmed all over the country with some places getting 120% of last years registrations and holding midnight classes. Besides very few cc's offer much in his field.

We are very lucky to be able to afford the other option.

UPDATE II: An emailer asks a good question:

Why not raise taxes to keep tuition low and at the same time allow greater numbers of students to attend college. It will cost money, but in the current global economy it would, in the end, be a wise investment.

My answer:

Maryland taxpayers already contribute about $1 billion a year to the university system on top of what tuition brings in. And two years ago O’Malley pushed through one of the biggest tax increases in Md. history, so he’s kind of maxed out. The real question is: Why can’t we make education more efficient?

Posted by Jay Hancock at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)
Categories: Education
        

Congratulations to Principal Patrick Harris, the teachers and the pupils at Dr. Carter G. Woodson Elementary in Cherry Hill. As reported in today's Sun, their MSA test scores rocked this year. Fifth grade math competence scores went from 47.2 percent to 79.5 percent. Fifth grade reading competence went from 55.6 percent to 82.1 percent.

Fourth grade math went from 75 percent to 79 percent; fourth grade reading went from 56.1 percent to 76.7 percent. Third grade math rose from 62.2 percent to 69.8 percent while third grade reading fell from 60 percent to 51.2 percent.

The Sun's "Reading by 9" volunteer tutoring program has partnered with Woodson for more than a decade. Towson University also sends lots of help. But the main job is done by the hard-working staff.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Education
        

Says Tyler Cowen:

The higher education bubble has burst. The expiration of stimulus funds in 2011 will be a crushing event for many public sector universities.

Posted by Jay Hancock at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Categories: Education