Three links on education

First, Professors Robert Archibald and David Feldman discuss their new book on the economics of higher education at the New York Times website. Both are at William and Mary. I never had either of them as a professor, but I of course I saw them around the department a lot. The discussion is very good - it talks about the reasons for rising tuition costs, the problems with identifying this as an "affordability" problem, and the role that technological development plays in the price of high-skilled labor (which of course drives a lot of the college costs). All very good stuff. They do a good job contrasting how an economist thinks about problems with how a non-economist thinks about problems.

The cover of the book shows the Wren Building at William and Mary, which was built in the late 1600s. If I recall, it's the longest continually operating educational building in the Western Hemisphere. I had one class in the Wren Building on Virginia history. It's a really beautiful structure in the heart of the "old campus". Thomas Jefferson studied, lived and ate in this building along with many other early alumni. You can also find bullet holes in the outer walls from Union soldiers using it as target practice during the Civil War, when Williamsburg was occupied. Another connection I have to it is that I was married in the Wren Chapel - which is the wing on the right side of the picture on the book cover (this picture shows the back of the building).

Anyway - enough memories.

The other education link I have is a series of blog posts at The Huffington Post by a family friend, Ed Schmidt, who Evan just discovered blogs there. He seems to have just started in October, but appears to blog once a week or so. Ed comes at education from an interesting perspective - he's an architect that specializes in school design, so his discussion of education emphasizes a lot of these school facility and infrastructure concerns. He went to college with my uncle, aunt, mom, and dad at Virginia Tech, which is how we know him. He and his wife still live not too far from me here in Arlington. So it was neat to see him blogging there, and I plan on keeping up with his thoughts.

Finally, Yale has put out a Call for Papers for its eighth annual Bouchet Conference on Diversity in Graduate Education. The conference is named for Edward Bouchet, who was apparently the first self-identified African-American to earn a PhD. I plan on submitting the research I'm doing on the engineering workforce for the NBER volume. One of the interesting things we've looked into is the composition of new engineering programs that have been initiated during our study period. Do they rely disporportionately on foreign students to get started? How big are they compared to established programs? We're going to expand this to look at broader definitions of diversity in these new programs, and expand the population that we're looking at to new or growing programs (as opposed to more static or shrinking programs). Do growing engineering programs rely disproportionately on foreign students or on whites in order to grow, or do they maintain the same diversity they were able to support in previous years? Or do they increase the diversity of their program. I think it should be research that's of interest to this conference - and while "diversity in higher education" is fairly well-covered ground, I think what we're doing by highlighting new and growing programs will be somewhat new.