Tag Archives: Education

New Freakonomics Podcast: Does College Still Matter? And Other FREAK-y Questions Answered : Rental houses.

  By Stephen J. Dubner | April 15, 2011 - 2:22 pm | Uncategorized
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Freakonomics Radio

“Does College Still Matter? And Other Freaky Questions Answered”: In our second round of FREAK-quently Asked Questions, Steve Levitt answers some queries from listeners and readers.

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Our latest podcast is another attempt (here’s the first) to answer some of the questions you’ve asked us on the blog. (You can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the link in box at right, or read the transcript here.) Here’s how it begins:

 

DUBNER: A reader named Jonathan Bennett asks, “Is it true that college education is no longer a factor, or [is] even a disadvantage, when it comes to employment?” Levitt, what say you?

LEVITT: [laughs] I think that never has anyone made a statement more false than Jonathan Bennett’s statement that education would be no help or a disadvantage in the modern economy. Of all the topics that economists have studied, I would say one we are most certain about are the returns to education. And the numbers that people have come up with over and over are that every extra year of education that you get will translate into an 8 percent increase in earnings over your lifetime. So someone who graduated from college will earn about 30 percent more on average than someone who only graduated from high school. And if anything, the returns to education have gotten larger over time. They’re as big as they have ever been.

Measuring something like gains to education is necessarily tricky: how do you sort out the effect of education itself when the college-going population is likely very different from the non-college-going population? To that end, Levitt describes a clever study that found a way to isolate the impact of education:

LEVITT: So back in Vietnam, men were entered into this draft lottery.  And if you got a very low number, it meant you were likely to go to Vietnam.  If you got a very high number, it meant you were safe. There was a way, however, to avoid service, which was to go to college.  So what happened was, the men who were unlucky and got bad draft numbers, many more of them went to college than did the people who got high draft numbers.  Now they wouldn’t have gone to college otherwise.  They went only to avoid going to Vietnam.  So what the economists have done is they’ve compared the people who got kind of medium draft numbers.  So they weren’t sure if they’d be drafted or not, but in the end they ended up not being drafted.  But many of those men still went to college.  And they compared that group of people, who were identical in principle to the people who were lucky and got really high draft numbers.   And those high-draft-number people — they didn’t have to go to college to avoid Vietnam.  So many fewer went to college.  And consequently, if you follow them through their lives — the people with the medium draft numbers, who didn’t go to Vietnam, but many more went to college — and you compare them to the people with the high draft numbers, who neither went to Vietnam nor went to college, and you see returns to education.

Another reader wanted to know Levitt’s view of healthcare reform:

LEVITT: Well, my friends in the Obama Administration aren’t going to be very happy with me, but I really, I don’t think it solved any of the important problems that we’re facing with healthcare.  So virtually every economist will tell you that there were two things you needed to do to healthcare reform to materially improve the situation.  The first was to break the link between the provision of healthcare and employment.  And that is just an archaic element of our healthcare system, which really makes no sense.  And yet because of tax subsidies, it’s the way most people get their healthcare — through their employer.  It shouldn’t be.  There’s no good economic justification for it.  And yet, if anything, I think this healthcare reform bill actually strengthened that link.  … [Healthcare] is virtually the only part of the economy where I can go out and get any service I want—cancer treatment, open heart surgery, have a wart removed, whatever it is—and I pay $3 for it or $5 for it or nothing, even if it costs $50,000 or $100,000.  I mean, imagine if you had the same situation with automobiles.  Where I could show up at the car dealership and I could say, ‘I want the Mercedes for free.’  Well, people say, ‘You can’t have the Mercedes for free.  You have to pay $50,000 for it.’  You say, ‘Why not, I have an inalienable right to free healthcare.  Right?  Why don’t I have an inalienable right to a free Mercedes?’

Note to Levitt: I don’t think your friends in the Obama Administration are the only ones who won’t like your views. Smiley face.

Finally, Levitt also addresses a listener’s question about how recent drug busts in the slums of Rio de Janeiro will affect crime there. For his take on that — you may be surprised — check out the podcast. Thanks, as always, for your questions. They were excellent, and we’ll keep answering them in future podcasts.

Clearing Out the “Rubber Rooms” – Rental properties bc.

  By Freakonomics | April 13, 2011 - 7:00 pm | Uncategorized
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Photo: iStockphoto

Steven Brill‘s excellent 2009 article on New York City’s “Rubber Rooms,” classrooms filled with teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence, provoked understandable outrage at New York’s beat-up school system.  Now, two years later, it seems many of these teachers are being returned to the classroom.  ”Many teachers accused of incompetence or misconduct sidestep termination hearings and take city Department of Education deals in which they admit some wrongdoing, pay an average $7,500 fine and return to the classroom,” reports the New York Post. “Some also agree to take college classes, study how to handle stress or even undergo testing for substance abuse.

In some cases, the DOE gets rid of accused teachers in deals that change their ratings from ‘U’ (unsatisfactory) to ‘S’ (satisfactory) if they agree to quit — thus helping them get jobs elsewhere.”  One thing the DOE doesn’t seem to be doing is firing many teachers: “Of 744 educators formerly in exile, only 33 have been fired after administrative hearings.”

Freakonomics Radio: Smarter Kids at 10 Bucks a Pop : Rental properties edenvale.

  By Stephen J. Dubner | April 8, 2011 - 2:01 pm | Uncategorized
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A primary school student with glasses from the Gansu Vision Intervention Project in Gansu, China. (Photo: Albert Park)

Our latest episode of Freakonomics Radio (you can download/subscribe at iTunes, get the RSS feed, listen live via the link in box at right below, or read the transcript here) is about education reform — sort of. Most ed reform addresses the supply side of the equation. That is, what should teachers and schools be doing differently? But this story is about the demand side, the students themselves. What if there were a cheap, quick, and simple way to lift some students’ grades?

That’s the question that drove two economists, Paul Glewwe at the University of Minnesota and Albert Park at Oxford, to conduct an experiment in a poor, rural province of China called Gansu. (You may remember reading about recent landslides there, which killed more than 1,000 people.)

The paper that Glewwe and Park wrote, with co-author Meng Zhao, is called “The Impact of Eyeglasses on the Academic Performance of Primary School Students: Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Rural China.”

Albert Park with students Guan Guopan and Long Nan at Datong Township No. 1 Jr. H.S. (Photo courtesy Albert Park)

Glewwe and Park learned that, while 10 to 15 percent of the young students in Gansu had vision problems that could be corrected with eyeglasses, only two percent of the kids who needed glasses actually had them. So, working with local health officials, they set up an experimental program to get free glasses to kids who needed them, while also establishing a control group of kids who needed glasses but, at least during this experimental phase, wouldn’t get glasses.

In the podcast, you’ll hear about a) how effective the glasses were in raising test scores; b) the surprising fact that the take-up rate for the free glasses was relatively low, and possible explanations for this; c) how this intervention compares in efficacy and cost to the typical ed-reform interventions taking places around the world.

Paul Glewwe with a happily bespectacled primary-school student. (Photo: Albert Park.)

You will also hear how curious it is that many poor schoolkids in China (and/or their parents) wouldn’t accept free glasses that would help them see better while many Americans spend hundreds of dollars for eyeglasses with clear-plastic lenses, which don’t help them see better at all but do help them look better. The main talker in that section is Harvey Moscot, an optometrist and president (and fourth-generation member) of the legendary New York eyewear shop MOSCOT, which happens to run its own eyeglasses program for needy kids, called the Moscot Mobileyes Foundation Inc.

Here are a few excerpts from the podcast. First, Glewwe on how hard it is to isolate inputs that really move the needle in education:

GLEWWE: There’s nothing that comes through really strongly across a variety of countries or contexts, like ‘oh, this is the thing that matters.’ Like, you know, the level of the teacher’s education — sometimes that matters, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s quite frustrating, actually, to try to understand what’s going on. It’s pretty clear that it’s complicated. And some people would say what really matters is sort of the incentive for all the people involved. If everyone has the right incentive, then learning will take place. But even that, I did some research in Kenya where we tried to give teachers prizes for having kids with higher test scores, and it didn’t work very well. So, we’re still trying to learn a lot, and there’s a lot of people doing research on this topic, but we still have a lot to learn.

Freakonomics Radio

“Smarter Kids at 10 Bucks a Pop”: It won’t work for everyone, but there’s a cheap, quick, and simple way to lift some students’ grades.

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Park on how this project was different, and important:

PARK: I think that a lot of the people going around trying to think about how can we improve education and learning tend to focus on how we can improve schools, and teachers, textbooks, et cetera. And this problem is a little bit different, because it’s really about the behavior of students and their parents. Sometimes those get simply overlooked in people trying to find solutions. … And I think there’s a whole area of future potential to think more about the behavior of students. … [I]n China, the biggest payoff is actually getting into college, because there is a huge return to higher education. … So, undereducated youth are increasingly disadvantaged.

And Moscot on why Chinese kids might refuse glasses whereas in the U.S., it’s estimated that some four million people wear “planos” (glasses with non-prescription lenses):

MOSCOT: It doesn’t surprise me. I don’t think the fashion aspect of eye wear in China has taken place like it has in America. Famous Chinese icons probably are not wearing their glasses like they are in America. In America, eyeglasses are the coolest thing you can put on your face right now. From any hip-hop star to any idol of a sports star that wears them when they’re not playing their sports influences children’s perception of eyeglasses.

Hyman Moscot in front of the Moscot store on Rivington Street in 1934. (Photo: MOSCOT)

Trouble in Higher Ed – Regina rental properties.

  By Freakonomics | April 7, 2011 - 5:00 pm | Uncategorized
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Photo: John Walker

The Chronicle of Higher Education is running the second installment of an interesting two-part essay on the declining expectations and level of learning taking place among college undergrads. The author, Thomas H. Benton, cites several factors at fault: students doing less long-form writing and reading, grade inflation, Boomer professors presiding over the largest age-gap ever in academia. These factors all tie into Academically Adrift, a new book by two sociology professors, Richard Arum of NYU and Josipa Roksa of Virginia. It’s a polemic against higher education’s incentive systems and the cushy environment that is the American university these days, where the goal seems to be how best to accommodate students, rather than challenge them.

Computers and Calculators in Schools | Rental properties edenvale.

  By Sanjoy Mahajan | March 31, 2011 - 5:00 pm | Uncategorized
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Photo: iStockphoto

Neal Koblitz, professor of mathematics at the University of Washington, begins his critique of computers in K-13 mathematics education as follows:

In Peru, as in many Third World countries, the system of public education is in crisis. Teachers’ pay — traditionally low — is falling rapidly because of inflation. The schools are dilapidated, and there is no money for basic supplies. …

Yet President Fujimori has said that he wants to get computers into the schools as soon as possible. The government’s priority is to “modernize” the economy and the educational system, and computerized learning is supposedly one way to do this.

Change Peru to New York City, and Fujimori to the city’s Department of Education, and we reproduce the current news of New York City’s half-a-billion-dollars-and-change effort to shove more technology into the classroom while eliminating 6,100 teaching positions (4,600 of those through layoffs).

In my last entry, I criticized high-stakes tests as the most damaging item in public education. But miseducation is a very competitive field, and I had momentarily forgotten about calculators and computers (whose baleful effects extend to the private schools). It’s hard to think of a better way to ensure that students not be able to reason or think for themselves.

Here is a small illustration of the problem. As I was finishing graduate school, I was helping to pack up the computer lab and ship it across the country. I went down to the IT desk and asked the price of one DAT tape for backing up all the files. I was told $6.50. Then I realized that we would need several, so I asked the price of the box of 10. The sales clerk whipped out his calculator and fiercely punched away. Perhaps he was figuring the different-in-every-county California sales tax — was it 7.25 percent or maybe 8.375 percent? Just as I had thought up that explanation, he announced the results of all the calculation: “That’ll be sixty-five dollars.”

It happened almost 13 years ago, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. The situation today is even worse thanks to graphing calculators, which have done for students’ understanding of algebra and functions what the regular calculators have done to their understanding of the number system.