How much does it matter where you go to college?

There was a fairly recent study that showed that it’s not so much where you went to college that matters for future life earnings (though, that’s certainly a very incomplete measure of “success”), but rather where you got in to college.  I.e.  If you were smart and talented enough to get into Harvard, you should still succeed greatly even if you chose to slum it at NC State.   Apparently, there’s more to it than that.  In the Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann sums up the major strands of evidence on the issue:

Study 2: IF YALE REJECTS ME, AM I DOOMED?
Nope. There’s evidence that where you apply is more important than where you attend.

In studies this decade, academics have gone out in search of naturally occurring experiments to try and figure out if it’s the school that counts when it comes to earning potential, or the student. One of the best known efforts was by Stacy Berg Dale of the Andrew Mellon Foundation and Alan Kreuger of Princeton, who came to the unexpected conclusion that, in some respects, where you went to college was less important than where you applied…

The big surprise: Selectivity didn’t matter. Academic siblings ended up making just about the same wages after college regardless of how choosy their school was. In fact, where the students applied, and their final class rank in school, were much better correlated with earnings than their school’s admissions standards. If you were smart enough to get into Yale, or even take a shot at it, you were probably smart enough to earn like a Yale grad.

There was a big caveat, however. Although tough admissions standards didn’t count for much, tuition prices did. Students who went to more expensive schools consistently outearned their peers during life after college. Dale and Kreuger theorized that spending per student may have been the explanation. While an ambitious sophomore could probably find like-minded classmates to study with anywhere, they couldn’t make up for their school’s resources. The authors also allowed that students at posher colleges might come from wealthier families, which could have an effect.

I also think it is quite possible that choosing to pay the tuition premium reflects an individual who values earnings more in their career choice than an equally smart individual who chooses a much more affordable high-quality state school.  The type of person who gets into Duke and chooses UNC is different from the type of person who gets into Duke and chooses Duke.  Presumably, this personality difference may affect career choices in a way that affects earnings independent of the quality and advantages from a Duke education.

And lastly, this:

Study 3: IF I CAN’T GET INTO A GOOD STATE SCHOOL, AM I DOOMED?
Actually, yeah. You might be.

In a 2009 paper, Texas A&M professor Mark Hoekstra used a somewhat simpler experiment to try and solve the elite college question. He compared the earnings of white, male students who had barely missed the admissions cut-off for an unnamed public flagship university to those of students who had barely been accepted. Although the subjects were roughly similar in academic terms, the differences in their future earnings were profound. Enrolling at the flagship increased wages by 20 percent, a divide illustrated vividly in the chart below.

Well, NCSU is a “co-flagship.”  Good for our students.  Presumably, better off just barely getting in than not getting in and heading off to ECU or UNC-G.  Weissman also links to an interesting (but I have to suggest dubious) chart on colleges ranked for return on investment.

Hooray for my (and Kim’s) parents.  Apparently they are great investors as Duke comes in #11.  NCSU or UNC (where I’ll be investing) come in much, much lower.

Interesting stuff.  Leaves me with two questions: 1) Just how useful a measure of what a college does for you is earnings? 2) What exactly is it that leads to higher earnings?  As for the latter, I strongly suspect that it ends up being a lot more about who you know and who you are than what the college teaches you.    That said, my Duke education was absolutely amazing and I honestly feel has been a real benefit to me in life and career.  That said, so not worth the additional money over a strong state flagship.  (Now, the basketball rooting riots, that may be worth it).

The test

My 6th grade son has spent time in school every day for the past month “preparing for the EOG (end of grade)” NCLB tests rather than actually learning new things.   Fortunately, they at least did not waste time on an EOG pep rally as many schools do.  There is just way, way to much pressure put on these tests.  He said to me, “I wish we didn’t have to worry about it so much and when it was time, just take the test.”  Amen.  Not to mention, David will surely pass these tests easily.  How about concentrating the extra help on the kids who will actually need the extra help to learn the material in order to pass the tests.  But 45-60 minutes a day of extra “test preparation” for every damn student in the schools is such a complete waste.  David is now on day 2 of 3 of testing.  Fortunately he takes after his dad and rather than being at all stressed out, seems to be approaching the whole thing with a certain bemused detachment.  Nonetheless, this great anonymous essay by a DC public school teacher today totally resonated with me:

I’m not sure what’s worse, the testing itself or the preparation and anxiety built up beforehand. As I sat through a DC-CAS pep rally, the magnitude of this testing madness hit me like a freight train. This is what children are getting pumped up for? This is what teachers have been “working towards all year”? This is the “pinnacle” of our teaching? I felt like I was in some creepy twilight zone as I watched other teachers and administrators chant and watched the confused students cheer. To see the students get excited about their potential success on the test was not the point of contention for me. The fact that the students are subject to poorly-conceived, low-quality tests and used as pawns to determine educational funding, as well as the fate of their teachers, is not something worth cheering about…

I planned lessons throughout the [test administration] meetings and graded papers in the background, only contributing my thoughts in areas which I found to be egregiously unreasonable or unjust. For example, lined paper for scrap paper, smiling at students (this is what they say is “coaching”), and allowing students to stand and stretch during testing would absolutely not be tolerated. As I listened to these rules, I pictured my bubbly bunch of eight year olds’ faces. Then, the real bomb was dropped: Absolutely no bathroom breaks during testing unless the child was showing physical signs of distress. In addition, we also needed to prevent multiple bathroom trips by determining how badly each child had to use the restroom. Well, any teacher knows that once one student has “an emergency,” they all have emergencies. How am I to be the judge of the content of each child’s bladder? To this I was told it would be easier to deal with angry parents of a child who had wet themselves, than to have to explain the situation to the monitors from central offices.

Just wow.  David’s school was desperate for proctors and basically called all the parents in the school.  I left a message for the guidance counselor and said I could help as long as I did not have to just sit there with nothing staring at kids taking tests for four hours (e.g., thought I might work on some overdue manuscript reviews).   You’ll not be surprised to learn that my return call informed me that they could only use me as a proctor if I could state at kids taking a test for four hours.  Not happening.

Congress votes to ruin my future research

I would not argue too greatly with the idea that NSF funds more political science research than is truly worthy.  That said, the idea of singling out the political science budget within NSF is wrong on so many levels.  Monkey Cage:

The Flake amendment Henry wrote about appears to have passed the House last night with a218-208 vote. The amendment prohibits funding for NSF’s political science program, which among others funds many valuable data collection efforts including the National Election Studies. No other program was singled out like this. The vote was essentially party line, with only 5 Democrats voting in favor and 27 Republicans against. Here are some of our previousposts on Tom Coburn’s failed efforts to achieve the same thing.

This is obviously not the last word on this. The provision may be scrapped in the conference committee (Sarah Binder?). But it is clear that political science research is in real danger of a very serious setback.

The aforementioned National Election Studies, I would suggest, are responsible for somewhere between 70-90% about what we understand about American elections.  I use this data all the time in my research, but more notably, I don’t think I’ve published a single piece of scholarship that was not heavily dependent upon the knowledge that’s come from these studies.   If this is approved by all of Congress, this would truly be a devastating blow to our future understanding of American politics.  Though, I guess Republicans would prefer that.

Higher Ed online

I’ve read a number of stories on the big news on Harvard going in with MIT on edX– a joint partnership to make their classes freely available on-line.  There’s been a lot of breathless commentary on what a big deal this is (the headline for the Atlantic post is: “The Single Biggest Change in Education Since the Printing Press,” and maybe I’m just a Luddite, but color me unconvinced.  From the Atlantic:

Over the past few years, the tools that could make for really excellent online distance learning have emerged in a piecemeal fashion. We have reliably good videoconferencing, live video streaming, collaborative document editing, and so on. We don’t know how best to translate classroom education to the online realm, but the tools are there, and, sooner or later, someone is going to figure it out.

In such an environment, the dons of elite education could batten down the hatches and try to preserve the limited-supply model that has served them well (see: newspapers, record labels, publishing houses). Or, they can choose to embrace the openness and radically democratic accessibility the Internet makes possible.

This morning two of the top universities announced a collaboration that signals they are taking the latter path: MIT and Harvard are each pouring $30 million into a nonprofit partnership edX, which they hope will make the top-notch faculties and courses of their schools available for free to millions of people around the world — free for anyone with an Internet connection. In presenting edX, the initiative’s new president, Anant Agarwal, called the opportunity presented in online education “the single biggest change in education since the printing press.”

If a college education was only about watching professors deliver information with no interaction than this truly would be fabulous.  Alas, I think most college graduates understand there’s a lot more to a college education.  For one, actual interaction with faculty.  And, maybe even more importantly, actual interaction with peers.   Through a number of conversations through the years and my own experiences, I’ve come to believe that in many ways the biggest difference between an elite undergraduate versus ordinary undergraduate education is not the quality of the professors, but the quality of the classmates.

I also want to point out that Harvard and MIT’s “top-notch faculties” are top notch for their scholarship.  I’m sure that many of them are great teachers, too, but that most definitely has very little to do with why they are at Harvard or MIT.  If you really just wanted people to convey the information from Physics or History 101 in a compelling and engaging manner chances are you’d do just as well, if not better, with the faculty from UMass.

And finally, the fact that actually taking, rather than watching, a college course leads to a level of commitment and intellectual engagement that are responsible for a far deeper learning than comes from watching videos.  I, for one, am pretty sure that a lot of the learning I did in college came from studying for tests.  And, we now know that testing itself actually leads to learning.

Now, I don’t want to belittle what Harvard and MIT are doing and I believe that it really serves a positive social value and that many people really may get a lot out of it (just as many people get a phenomenal amount out of reading books).  But let’s not pretend it’s a substitute for an actual college education.

Paying for college football

Interesting Bloomberg article on just how much Rutgers students subsidize their football team.  A little-known truth is that all but a handful of the most successful college football programs are a net drain on their university budget.  Rutgers has taken it to an extreme level, with the average student paying $1000/year to field a persistently mediocre football team.  Rutgers is not along, they are just the worst.  Bloomberg also put together a really interactive chart that looks at total support for the football team out of the university budget for public universities in major conferences:

Click here for the interactive version where you can see spending per/student when you move the mouse over a school.  Very please to see that the NC State subsidy is only $50/student.  Now, that seems more like it to me.  I’m sure its pretty high at Duke because it’s got to be expensive to compete in the ACC and Duke sure doesn’t bring in a lot of revenue.  As a private school, though, they don’t have to provide the financial data.  As for my graduate school alma mater, Ohio State’s football team is one of those lucrative few that is a net plus for the university.

College accountability and social science

David Brooks takes our universities to task for not doing a good enough job educating our students and especially for not having any accountability mechanisms like the standardized K-12 testing.   The column is based largely on Academically Adrift, which I’ve mentioned several times here.

Colleges are supposed to produce learning. But, in their landmark study, “Academically Adrift,” Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that, on average, students experienced a pathetic seven percentile point gain in skills during their first two years in college and a marginal gain in the two years after that. The exact numbers are disputed, but the study suggests that nearly half the students showed no significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years in college…

It’s not enough to just measure inputs, the way the U.S. News-style rankings mostly do. Colleges and universities have to be able to provide prospective parents with data that will give them some sense of how much their students learn.

There has to be some way to reward schools that actually do provide learning and punish schools that don’t. There has to be a better way to get data so schools themselves can figure out how they’re doing in comparison with their peers.

In 2006, the Spellings commission, led by then-Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, recommended a serious accountability regime. Specifically, the commission recommended using a standardized test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment to provide accountability data. Colleges and grad schools use standardized achievement tests to measure students on the way in; why shouldn’t they use them to measure students on the way out?

Here’s the thing, K-12 standardized tests basically focus on reading and math.  That’s it.  We have fairly similar expectations about what all High School graduates should know.  I don’t think we can say the same about college graduates.  So long as we except that physics, computer science, accounting, business management, biomedical engineering, art history, and English literature, etc., are all appropriate college majors you show me a test that you honestly think can evaluate fairly, students across all these majors.

Check out the sample from the CLA.

That’s going to be a tough questions if your focus has been physics or chemistry or many other seriously hard majors where you obviously learn a lot of stuff during college.   The truth is, the CLA was created by social scientists and it has a huge bias towards measuring the things that social sciences value.  Now, heck, I’m a social scientist and I honestly think the ability to do a good job on the sample question is a valuable skill for any working adult in our society, but I don’t kid myself that answering questions like this means we are actually do a better job educating our students than faculty in disciplines that are very different from my own.

Not surprisingly, Brooks all too easily glides right over these difficulties in order to provide his platitudes about accountability.   I would be quite open to the idea of some sort of assessment to see how good a job we are doing educating our students.  But don’t kid yourself that this would be a simple and straightforward task.  As they say, the devil is in the details, and this strikes me as quite devilish.

What makes an effective teacher

Last semester while participating in a faculty book club on Academically Adrift, I had a bit of an epiphany.  I realized that I was doing an excellent job of entertaining my students and keeping them engaged, but not necessarily an excellent job of teaching them the lasting critical thinking skills that would help make them successes after NCSU.  I get very good teaching evaluations, but my intuition has been that the high numbers are largely the result of being funny, engaging, and approachable.  Now, I do think all those thinks make it easier for my students to learn from me, but when they are rating me on a 5 point scale, I don’t really think it is much about either the content or skills they are learning.  How interesting then, to come across this study on the very matter via the Tomorrow’s Professor blog (which I strongly recommend for all faculty and grad students, by the way):

The research design for this project was cross-sectional, with surveys administered to 265 faculty and students at a private liberal arts college. ..This opportunity for definition was afforded by providing a list of thirty options to the respondents and asking them to rank from 1 to 4 (with 1 being their best choice) their response to the question: How do you define an effective teacher? For clarity, options for the answers to the question included statements such as: motivates students to do well in the course, uses a variety of teaching methods, makes the grading requirements clear, and so on…

Results

…

As displayed in Table 1, some of the more common definitions of an effective teacher by students were: a sense of humor (15%), someone who is able to relate to students’ lives (13%), someone with patience and flexibility (21%) [emphasis mine], someone who is able to keep students’ interest (44%), and someone who clearly indicates materials to be tested (16%). As displayed in Table 2, some of the more common definitions of an effective teacher by faculty members were: the love of the subject (50%), an instructor who outlines the course expectations (22%), someone who utilizes a variety of teaching methods (24%), someone who is organized (44%), and someone who encourages student questions (22%).

A-ha!  Small study, but pretty much right along the lines I had been thinking.  Now, don’t get me wrong, being funny, relatable, and patient are all very good things to have in a professor (and my ratings suggest that I do, in fact, possess these things), but I think it is pretty clear that these are not necessarily the hallmarks of effective teaching.  My question to me is: will by evaluations go down as I place more emphasis on critical thinking?  Hopefully not, as I still plan on being funny, relatable, etc.  But even if they do, that’s okay– that’s what tenure is for.

[Of course, whenever I say good things about my teaching, I always do like to link to my (still) worst evaluation ever.]

Yes, I do work hard enough

Okay, maybe I actually spend too much time blogging (but, I suppose we could see that as “teaching” to a broader audience.  Or not).  Anyway, this Op-Ed in the Post arguing that too many college professors are overpaid for not enough teaching is just horrible.  Whatever academic experience David Levy has had it sure seems nothing like mine.  To wit:

Though faculty salaries now mirror those of most upper-middle-class Americans working 40 hours for 50 weeks, they continue to pay for teaching time of nine to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks, making possible a month-long winter break, a week off in the spring and a summer vacation from mid-May until September…

An executive who works a 40-hour week for 50 weeks puts in a minimum of 2,000 hours yearly. But faculty members teaching 12 to 15 hours per week for 30 weeks spend only 360 to 450 hours per year in the classroom. Even in the unlikely event that they devote an equal amount of time to grading and class preparation, their workload is still only 36 to 45 percent of that of non-academic professionals. [emphasis mine].  Yet they receive the same compensation.

This is so stupid on so many levels.  Fortunately, I came across this terrific rebuttal by Robert Farley.  I especially love that he uses that beloved frame of mine: lying or stupid:

Right; the reason for the increase in college tuition is “insufficient teaching schedules,” not the massive increase in administrative costs. This is helpful; we now know that David Levy is lying about cause and effect, and can adjust our expectations for the rest of the op-ed. This is aggravated by a second (obvious) fallacy; the “insufficient” teaching time is almost invariably made up for by cheap, temporary, low cost adjunct faculty, lecturers, and grad students. Having senior faculty double their teaching load wouldn’t have faculty costs; it would simply push out the very low cost workers we now hire to fix the “shortfall.”…

Okay, so two possibilities. The first is that Levy is too stupid or ignorant to appreciate that faculty positions at most private universities and “state colleges” do in fact include research requirements, and that salaries at institutions that don’t have a research requirement are considerably lower than those at research institutions. I’ll allow it’s possible that the man is either a moron, or is ignorant of the basic structure of the profession. The other (more likely) possibility is that he’s simply lying, and expects his audience to know nary a thing about the actual structure of faculty compensation in the United States.

As I understand it, my contract is fairly common for my field; 40% teaching, 40% research, 20% service. Do the math; this means that 60% of my job performance is evaluated on terms other than teaching. I’m at an R-1 university, but I’ve seen a lot of contracts at other schools that are similar, and at schools where the research load is less the teaching load is heavier. Indeed, at UK it’s not uncommon for non-tenure track Lecturer positions to include service and research requirements, above and beyond a much heavier teaching load…

In case you’re wondering, 12-15 hours per week is a 4:4 load or a 5:5 load; I have NEVER encountered anyone able to undertake such a load on less than fifty hours per week of actual work. Indeed, I’d guess closer to sixty hours. I simply cannot believe that Levy is ignorant of this; he’s just lying. He wants his readers to believe that an assumption of 1:1 inside-outside the classroom is standard, which is simply absurd, even if faculty do their best to ignore student e-mails and grade completely through scan tron. And it should be noted that research and service requirements are ON TOP OF THIS load.

Thank you Robert Farley!  I would’ve simply said the same things less thoroughly and less artfully.   Shame on the Post for publishing such crap.  (Then again, their Op-Ed page is the home of Krauthammer).

In a totally different vein, I also thought Ygelesias‘ take was interesting (mostly because I think he’s wrong):

The basic issue isn’t that professors are lazy, it’s that they’re workingunproductively. As you can see above, real output per employed person in the United States has skyrocketed over the decades even as annual hours worked per employed person has fallen.

That’s how you make progress, not by “working harder” but by working more productively. Journalists, for example, can write articles much more quickly in 2012 than was possible in 1962. It’s much easier to edit text on computer than on typewriter, it’s much faster to find phone numbers on the Internet than by flipping through paper books, it’s much easier to leave messages for people or see what calls you’ve missed, it’s possible to communicate with sources and colleagues via email and IM, you can look data up on FRED, and so forth. Professors have access to most of these same tools and they use them and relates technologies to conduct their research much more efficiently (looking up old articles on JSTOR instead of digging through a library, collaborating with coauthors in other cities over email) but they haven’t succeeded in becoming much more efficient at teaching.

Yglesias makes the error of equating “teaching” with time spent in the classroom.  In fact, all those great tools for making research easier also make time spent preparing for class more productive.  For example, in preparing my health care policy lecture recently, I took information from all sorts of great sources all over the internet and assembled them quickly in a compelling visual presentation.  I cannot even imaging doing something half as good in twice the time, pre-internet.   That said, the Levy Op-Ed is still horrible.

College doesn’t make you liberal; liberals make colleges

Came across this nice column by Chris Mooney about the relationship between college and liberalism.  Short version: it’s the selection bias, stupid.  (And for the record, I think selection bias is one of the most important social science concepts that is massively unappreciated by the general public).

It’s certainly true that college professors are overwhelmingly liberal — as are scientists. As Ireported last year in The American Prospect, the best research suggests that just 14 percent of professors are Republicans. Similarly, just 6 percent of American Association for the Advancement of Science members back the honorable elephant of the GOP.

But why? Sociologist Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia, along with his colleagues Ethan Fosse and Jeremy Freese, make a compelling case that the liberalism of academia is partly driven by “self-selection“: for liberals, pursuing an academic career is naturally appealing. So they tend to stay at universities and pursue graduate degrees and doctorates, and ultimately, come to make up most of the professoriate.

By contrast, conservatives have a different set of values, interests, and priorities. They are, for instance, more likely to want to go into the business world and make gobs of money. Such things push young conservatives away from academia, or at least from staying there very long. Thus, they leave these institutions open to being dominated by liberals.

It certainly doesn’t help that the right has been attacking colleges for decades. So liberals have learned to like them, and conservatives have learned to distrust them.

Mooney endorses this sociological view, but then argues there’s likely some self-selection on the basis of psychology going on here as well:

It’s clear that humans beings have different personalities — some more open to new and abstract ideas and more exploratory, some more closed and defensive — and these personalities have strong political implications. I discussed some of this research in my last piece here, and much more extensively in my forthcoming book The Republican Brain.

If all of this is right — and the body of evidence is extensive and compelling — then liberals just arethe kind of people who like to hang out in places like universities and try out new ideas (and substances, and music, and… use your imagination). By this analysis, universities are a lot like coffee shops and Cambridge, Massachusetts: the kind of places where liberals just feel like they belong. And Santorum is as powerless in the face of this as we all are in the face of human nature.

Conservatives, supposedly, support tradition and stability and doing things the way they’ve always been done. And they support building the institutions of society in such a way as to realistically reflect who we are, and who we always will be.

Well, perhaps the liberalism of colleges and of scientific inquiry is a core part of that picture. And if so, not only is there no point complaining about it, but there’s every reason to be happy about it — at least if you’re really “conservative.”

Perhaps we’ll always have liberals, hanging out in colleges, pushing conservatives’ buttons. And perhaps we’ll always have conservatives feeling uneasy about it, or worse — denouncing universities as liberal bastions and claiming they’re indoctrination mills.

Just call it tradition.

Not a lot to add, mostly because I’m fairly well persuaded and I would say that it largely fits with my experience of the past 18 years of graduate school and professor-dom.

The Value of a Liberal Arts degree

Nice post by Yglesias this weekend on the value of a liberal arts degree– a subject I’ve really been thinking a lot about lately:

This seems mistaken to me. In order to do well in courses on 19th Century British Literature or Social Anthropology or Philosophy or American History in a properly running American college, what you need to do is get pretty good at reading and writing documents in the English language. These are very much real skills with wide-ranging practical applications. Clearly relatively few people are professional writers, but a huge amount of what goes on at the higher levels of a typical business is a steady stream of production and consumption of reports and memos. If you can compose an email that’s 10 percent clearer in 90 percent of the time as the other guy, you’re going to get ahead in a wide range of fields. Outside of office work, a big part of the difference between a hard-working individual who’s pretty good at his job and a person who’s able to leverage his skills and hardwork into an entrepreneurial or managerial role is precisely the ability to research things and write up plans. Everyone knows that a kid growing up in rural India is obtaining valuable skills if he gets better at English, but this is equally true for a kid growing up in Indiana.

Now of course perhaps not every liberal arts program is in fact imparting reading and writing skills to its graduates. But that’s a problem of execution not of concept.

Yep.  A number of years ago I recognized that the content I teach my students is almost meaningless– very few of them actually go on to work in politics– but that whatever skills I teach them should have a lasting impact.   Of course, from realization to actually changing has been more gradual than I wish.  I really should put more emphasis on helping them with their writing, but honestly, that’s probably the most time-consuming thing I can do as a professor.  That said, after reading Academically Adrift last semester, I have really made a push to increase opportunities for them to practice and improve their critical thinking skills.  I also think that social sciences are particularly useful among liberal arts, as success requires not just the research and writing skills Yglesias mentions, but also the ability to understand and interpret empirical and quantitative data in a way much beyond the humanities Yglesias mentions.  The ability to do this effectively  is hugely valuable across a variety of real-world occupations.

Like I said, I know I need to do more to help my students improve their writing, but hey, at least I’m making progress in critical thinking.  I’m pretty confident that these efforts will do nothing at all to raise the average scores on my teaching evaluations.  What I do best is entertain while educating and that certainly produces engagement which certainly helps learning (and results in generally high teaching evaluations), but that doesn’t mean I’m actually imparting to my students the most valuable skills they need.  I think to a degree, I’ve been insufficiently self-critical because of high evaluations (notable exceptions, aside).  But no more.  They’re going to get better at research, writing, and critical thinking whether they like it or not.

1% majors

Interesting piece in Economix last week about what the top 1% of Americans majored in.   Here’s the top portion of the table:

I do wonder how many of those PS majors (not bad) are up there because they went on to pursue law degrees.  Of course, most lawyers are not 1%, but the best earning lawyers clearly are.   I had forgotten about this piece, but was reminded by a recent Adam Davidson column that laments marketability of certain college degrees:

Until now, a B.A. in any subject was a near-guarantee of at least middle-class wages. But today, a quarter of college graduates make less than the typical worker without a bachelor’s degree. [emphasis mine] David Autor, a prominent labor economist at M.I.T., recently told me that a college degree alone is no longer a guarantor of a good job. While graduates from top universities are still likely to get a good job no matter what their major is, he said, graduates from less-exalted schools are going to be judged on what they know. To compete for jobs on a national level, they should be armed with the skills that emerging industries need, whether technical (computer science) or not.

Those without such specialized skills — like poetry, or even history, majors — are already competing with their neighbors for the same sorts of mediocre, poorer-paying local jobs like low-level management or big-box retail sales. And with the low-skilled labor market atomized into thousands of microeconomies, immobile workers are less able to demand better wages or conditions or to acquire valuable skills.

Well, I’m glad he didn’t single out political science along with English and history.

Self esteem in schools

So, really interesting to read that the state-of-the-art understanding of kids’ self esteem is finally making it’s way into the classroom.  Short version: you cannot give kids self esteem by always telling them how great they are; they have to earn it.  Here’s the gist from a recent Post article:

A growing body of research over three decades shows that easy, unearned praise does not help students but instead interferes with significant learning opportunities. As schools ratchet up academic standards for all students, new buzzwords are “persistence,” “risk-taking” and “resilience” — each implying more sweat and strain than fuzzy, warm feelings.

“We used to think we could hand children self-esteem on a platter,” Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck said. “That has backfired.”

Dweck’s studies, embraced in Montgomery schools and elsewhere, have found that praising children for intelligence — “You’re so clever!” — also backfires. In study after study, children rewarded for being smart become more likely to shy away from hard assignments that might tarnish their star reputations.

But children praised for trying hard or taking risks tend to enjoy challenges and find greater success. Children also perform better in the long term when they believe that their intellect is not a birthright but something that grows and develops as they learn new things.

This was actually among the most interesting findings from the fabulous book, Nurtureshock– which by now is probably the most-mentioned book on this blog.  Somehow, in all my Nurtureshock mentions, I never discussed the basic findings about self esteem (basically, what you read above).  I’m convinced that my parents always telling me how smart I was did me no favors (not that I blame them or anything, and hey, I do have great self esteem).  But I did decide that if something was hard I probably just was not very good at it and I would focus my efforts elsewhere.  After reading Nurtureshock, I do try and praise the boys for hard work and persistence, rather than innate intelligence.  Anyway, good to see that schools are catching on.  Oh, and really, you should read Nurtureshock.