5 ducats

Education's Value

Zach nails it in this comic, the paradox that in an era of an enormous, free, accessible information, it costs more than ever to get a college education. A determined person could be much better educated in a year of free Internet learning than an entire undergraduate degree. A college degree is a social rubric, a status symbol to show that you are willing to waste an enormous amount of time and money in order to fit into an organization, which shows that you will be willing to conform to whatever silliness awaits you in employment.

We have confused education for knowledge and thinking, which is a shame, because knowledge and thinking are so vital to our own personal happiness and to society's prosperity. Education should have two goals:

1. Convey basic knowledge and cognitive skills (i.e. reading, arithmetic).
2. Teach students how to learn and think outside of school. 

In order to succeed, the student must enjoy learning. In families where children are not encouraged to learn, early childhood education is essential so that children will enjoy learning and not be at a discouraging disadvantage from which most never recover. We should also discourage competition and testing while the basics are being taught (beyond the evaluations that are needed to determine if the student is ready to be taught more advanced information).

Competition can be a great motivator for those with natural talent in a given skill, but it embarrasses and discourages pursuit of those skills by those with less natural ability. That is true in academics as well as athletics. It is essential that all students advance to the level where they learn how to learn and think outside of school - and that rarely happens if they associate reading with failure.

What colleges should not be are giant lecture halls teaching information. Once you learn how to learn and think on your own, then that is a waste. Likewise, college should not provide job training because that information will rapidly be obsolete, probably before the student enters the workforce. Which is why learning how to learn is so important for employment. Once on the job, a hands-on apprenticeship is superior to learn infinite employment specifics.

What college should be is mentoring. The Internet has lots of information, but is isn't good at answering questions, explaining what you don't understand, and in particular guiding the student through complex thinking. Interaction between the teacher and between students helps to challenge our thinking, and it also satisfies the social interaction which we crave. I think this is self-evident, but is getting lost as we increasingly look at primary education as a public cost rather than a public good, and at college education as a career investment rather than a personal investment. We are all the worse for it.

Perry Preschool's David Weikart

There is a lot of analysis around the benefits of early childhood education.  But how do you educate a toddler?  And how did it all come about?  The man that came up with the pioneering Perry Preschool Project (and the foresight to have a control group) is David Weikart.  An interesting article on the man and how he did it is here.

My favorite statement from Weikart is this:

"I mean, clearly, the direct-instruction system teaches what they purport to teach," he said in the interview before he died. "The problem is that when kids get older, they don't have the other skills that are necessary, like decision-making; a sense of personal responsibility; a sense of personal initiative." And that, he said, "is a fatal flaw."

Weikart understood that education should be a lifelong process.  Unfortunately we live in a world where many people never read a book, much less the news, once they leave school.

More on For-Profit Student Loan Defaults

Follow-up on an earlier post. A couple of Univ. of Mass Amherst students give a great anaysis of the problems with for-profit student loans in this Baseline Scenario guest blog For Profit or For Students? A couple of startling facts that they present:

• For-profit loans are 12% of the total number of loans, but 48% of the total number of defaults.
• 22% of students completed a degree within 6 years at 4-year for-profits schools, versus 55-65% for public and private non-profit schools.

Lastly, they point out that the proposed Republican spending bill, which cuts money for government spending on education and many other things, would actually stop the Department of Education from implementing a plan that would curtail Federal money to some for-profit loans.  Which just goes to show that a lot of the hoop-la about deficits, and bailouts is pure cow plop. Deficits are fine as long as they bailout your campaign contributor.

The Value of College?

A new book titled 'Academically Adrift" challenges the value of college.  See here for a summary of the book.  Their empirical evidence is based on students take the Collegiate Learning Assessment, and surveys.  Among the findings:

• 45% of student test results didn't improve significantly in the first 2 years of college.
• 36% didn't improve significantly in 4 years of college.
• Most improvements over time on the test were small.
• 32% of students didn't have a class w/ more that 40 pages of reading in a week.
• 50% didn't have a class where they wrote more than 20 pages in the entire semester.
• Liberal arts majors generally had significant improvements.
• Majors in Business, Education, Communications, and Social Work had the smallest improvements.

Unfortunately, people spend an increasing amount of money and time to go to college.  And we generally go for the wrong reason.  Facts that we learn in college we could easily look up on the Internet at any time.  Technical information quickly becomes obsolete in a work application context.  Which is why I think college should teach people how to learn and how to think.  A 2 year liberal arts degree would probably suffice for most people.  Career oriented education would be better taught by an employer in an apprentice, hands-on type of role.

A Proposal to Improve Education

I just read The American Family in Black and White: A Post-Racial Strategy for Improving Skills to Promote Equality by Nobel Prize winning Econometrician James Heckman, and I strongly recommend it.  It is non-techinical, insightful, and in spite of its length covers a lot of ground quickly,  He addresses and mostly dispels the common ideological explanations/solutions for poor education typically given by both the left and the right.  Due to the sensitive nature of the paper, he does preface it with a careful discussion on race and discrimination.

I won't try to summarize, so here's the abstract:

In contemporary America, racial gaps in achievement are primarily due to gaps in skills. Skill gaps emerge early before children enter school. Families are major producers of those skills. Inequality in performance in school is strongly linked to inequality in family environments. Schools do little to reduce or enlarge the gaps in skills that are present when children enter school. Parenting matters, and the true measure of child advantage and disadvantage is the quality of parenting received. A growing fraction of American children across all race and ethnic groups is being raised in dysfunctional families. Investment in the early lives of children in disadvantaged families will help close achievement gaps. America currently relies too much on schools and adolescent remediation strategies to solve problems that start in the preschool years. Policy should prevent rather than remediate. Voluntary, culturally sensitive support for parenting is a politically and economically palatable strategy that addresses problems common to all racial and ethnic groups.

A particularly nice graph in the paper:

I think the paper largely stands on the Perry preschool study, which finds that very early education makes much more difference in a person's success (future education, crime, income) than subsequent educational efforts.  Heckman makes a nice case for both "hard" (reading, writing) and "soft" (interpersonal, self discipline) skills.  With the American family ever more fragmented and children raised out of wedlock, it is both more effective and cost-effective to focus government, private, and charitable work on improving and encouraging very early education.  Heck, if we could just get mothers to read to their children.

I think Heckman is on target, yet we continue to throw money at whatever the latest fad is (right now that's charter and magnet schools).  And we throw a whole lot of money at college, which is increasingly becoming an expensive class distinction that drags on for ever more years and provides little benefit.