"Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking" - JMK
- Last night I caught some of yesterday morning's Washington Journal discussion of job training in the U.S. and one of the things the interviewee focused on was apprenticeship in the U.S.. This was of particular interest to me because I'm now in the midst of editing a report from the spring and writing a final report on the evaluability of the Department of Labor's registered apprenticeship program as it is used by the long-term care industry. My trip to South Carolina the other week was a site visit to one of these programs. Hirsh recently wrote an article at the National Journal on these types of programs here.
- One of the important points he makes is that while the government can facilitate some of these programs, business needs to be allowed to take the lead because they know what skills are in demand. This is one of the virtues of apprenticeship. Since classroom training is combined with a lot of on-the-job training for apprenticeships, training is by definition relevant to the jobs available for workers. Bob Lerman, an economist I work with at Urban and a professor at American University, has a report here on the apprenticeship program from the perspective of employer sponsors.
- Apparently C-Span has been looking at job training all week. Here are Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday's programs.
- Gene Callahan recently posted a passage from Polanyi on apprenticeship: "It follows that an art which has fallen into disuse for the period of a generation is altogether lost. There are hundreds of examples of this to which the process of mechanization is continually adding new ones. These losses are usually irretrievable. It is pathetic to watch the endless efforts—equpped with microscopy and chemistry, with mathematics and electronics—to reproduce a single violin of the kind the half-literate Stradivarius turned out as a matter of routine more than 200 years ago. To learn by example is to submit to authority. You follow your master because you trust his manner of doing things even when you cannot analyse and account in detail for its effectiveness. By watching the master and emulating his efforts in the presence of his example, the apprentice unconsciously picks up the rules of the art, including those which are not explictly known to the master himself. These hidden rules can be assimilated only by a person who surrenders himself to that extent uncritically to the imitation of another. A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition."
- Here's a video about apprenticeships and other opportunities outside of college from CNN yesterday. It also features Robert Lerman, who I mentioned earlier:
- And this is Robert Lerman last year discussing the issue on Bloggingheads:
If you haven't noticed, Jonathan Catalan has been churning out a ton of material at mises.org lately. I usually like reading him because I think he makes a lot of very good points, but even when I don't agree with what he writes is well reasoned.
His most recent piece, though, is one I simply cannot endorse but is intriguing enough that I thought it was worth sharing to get reactions. Jonathan has a side business writing term papers for other students. He's mentioned it before, and I've kept my thoughts to myself for the most part - I have strong views but I don't want to be a proselytizer. But since he's putting it out there in such a straightforward way in this venue it seems more appropriate to respond.
I adamantly disagree with him on at least four fronts:
1. First and foremost selling or buying term papers is very unethical in my mind, although Jonathan argues that it is not. The person buying these term papers is lying and cheating. I'm not sure what more needs to be said about it. People who sell term papers profit from lying and cheating. Nobody that's unwilling to produce their own work (or work with others in an appropriate way - i.e. with all contributing) should be at a university that expects them to.
2. Jonathan is wrong about curricular decisions. He writes: "Curricula, more often than not, are decided by boards and administrative groups who simply dictate what is to be taught. So the skills that someone may acquire as a university student are determined, not actually by the individual, but instead by someone else, who has absolutely no idea about the goals and objectives of that individual." For one thing, the people making these curricular decisions are usually educators. But even if they weren't, Jonathan is wrong to suggest that the goals and objectives of the individual aren't taken into account. Students make educational decisions based on course offerings. It made a big difference in my application decisions at all levels of education. Students also demand a degree that will be of recognized quality in that field, and to do that universities rely on experts in that field to design curricula. If universities aren't meeting student demand, application rates will go down. This is how choice works.
3. Jonathan is also wrong about the interaction between university education and the labor market. He writes: "They saw a correlation between higher productivity and an increasing degree of human capital. What they failed to come to terms with is the causality of the relationship. Higher human capital does not create more productive jobs. You can train as many engineers as you want, but if you train 1,000 engineers for 500 positions, then you will have a surplus of engineers, and that surplus will have to do something else for a living." People respond to incentives and their own subjective preferences when choosing fields, and labor markets have proved to be incredibly efficient. People choose to get engineering degrees when there is a demand for engineers (or people with engineering skills). I should know, I've spent the last year working through the major research of the last 75 years or so on labor supply in the engineering labor market, I've been pouring over 30 years of data on it, and I'm drafting a chapter for an NBER volume on it. The consistent conclusion has been: marketswork. Students make investments that benefit them and that are in demand in the market. It's not like you show up to a university and are ordered by an administrator to be an engineering major, after all.
4. There is value to a liberal education and if you don't agree, don't pursue a liberal education. Jonathan ridicules the idea that people really need to write term papers. In many careers people don't have to of course. Even at my job as a researcher, the kind of writing I do is often nothing like what you do in school, and it's not even the activity I spend most of my time doing. But Jonathan ignores the pedagogical purpose term papers. It's not because people write these papers in the real world - it's a method for forcing students to read and learn material, process and synthesize it, and articulate their ability to understand and apply what they've learned. It's a matter of critical thinking skills and being an articulate person. That does have value in most jobs. A lot of people would benefit from just going to technical schools. One problem with the American educational system is that it's bifurcated: we have lots of people that drop out and don't go to college and lots that go to four year institutions, because we have failing secondary schools and a culture of liberal education. We could benefit from a culture of technical and vocational education too. But as of right now, that's in weak demand. Given what's in demand, though, there's nothing illegitimate about writing papers.
And if you don't want to write papers at a school where you are expected to write your own papers you shouldn't pay someone to do it and then lie about it: you should simply refrain from attending.
Krugman has two good posts (here and here) on what economists call "skill biased technological change" - technological change that influences the skill-composition of labor demand. Traditionally, the literature has covered change biased in favor of skilled workers (hence the name).
I've always found this to be a fascinating and important area of work - I don't have time to go through each piece now and comment in detail, but I wanted to provide the links. One of the things that isn't mentioned here is a discussion of mid-level skills, and their role in driving the college wage premium. This is a strain of the discussion that I get a lot at the Urban Institute from guys like Bob Lerman (of American University, btw), Harry Holzer, and Hal Salzman (formerly of the Institute - my co-author on my NBER engineering labor supply chapter). Anyway - lots to talk about. It's no surprise they don't get into that here.
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.
Perhaps an imposing title for some readers, but bear with me - it seems like it's been blaring in my face from all directions lately.
The research I presented with Hal Salzman at NBER the other week was a broad overview chapter on trends in the supply of engineers. The work has been veering towards a very specific labor supply problem, namely the inelasticity of labor supply. For non-economist readers, that means that the supply of engineers is not responsive to price changes in the way that we usually think goods and services are. Think of a supply and demand model where the supply curve is vertical. The result is that when demand for engineers increases, their wages increase but you don't get many more engineers. One of the reasons for this, of course, is that it takes time to train an engineer (so supply doesn't adjust over night) and guys like me can't just jump into the field to take advantage of the higher wages. But some, like Romer (2001), have suggested that the problem goes much deeper than an adjustment lag, and that graduate institutions aren't set up to be responsive to market signals. Our chapter has been steadily veering towards this research question: how do engineering programs respond to market demand? Yesterday Hal also passed on this article on the responsiveness of programs, which reports on this paper presented at the AEA meeting in January. It's not just a problem with the engineers, though.
Theology and the Humanities Evan has a great post up on graduate programs in theology, where he critiques a review of these schools by R.R. Reno. Many issues come up in Evan's discussion (in fact most of it is on the dominance and relevance of "schools of thought" in theology departments, which is very interesting), but one of them is simply that students are often taking stabs in the dark when they apply to these schools. Economics graduate schools have a complex ranking and tier system that is fairly transparent and broadly embraced, but my impression is that theology departments (and many other disciplines) really don't have this. Reno, to be fair, makes an attempt to remedy this by reviewing the major departments, and Evan does his part by responding to Reno. I'm guessing neither of them see schools strictly as a labor supply institution, but from a labor market perspective the opacity is troubling. Some of this is a problem with the institution itself, and some of it is an information asymmetry problem plaguing applicants. This video has been making the rounds, and illustrates perfectly this problem of information asymmetry (or, as the kiddies call it, "optimism").
I've heard these issues from the humanities for a long time from Evan. It sounds rough. Unlike economics or engineering, there isn't a robust private market for graduate-level humanities students. We could say that the cultural maintenance work that humanities scholars do is a massive positive externality.
UPDATE: A theology student friend of Evan's links to a cartoon that gets at the heart of the issue and asks "Could God make a degree so useless that even he couldn't get a real job with it?"
Law Another article that has been making the rounds on precisely this problem is this Slate piece suggesting that too many lawyers are supplied. The demand for lawyers has fallen dramatically, but supply is not being as responsive. Kling talks about the article here and Andrew Sullivan talks about it here. I imagine this is more of an adjustment lag than a long-run issue. Law school takes less time and is very expensive (for the student) relative to PhDs that are often covered by financial aid or grants. In addition, law students are intimately connected to the labor market through their summer internships.
Economics and the Social Sciences And then, of course, there's the labor supply process that I'm currently trying to jump into. As I said above, I think economics is uniquely transparent in its rankings and in how explicit it is about what it takes to get in and what you can do with the degree when you leave. A lot of the reason for this is that while a large share of economics PhDs (I've heard half I think - is that right?) go into academia, it's not a purely academic degree in the way that humanities degree can be. I think the same issue with managing expectations during the application process applies, though. Anyone that's applied to an economics program knows that there are two kinds of advice you get from people: (1.) the encouraging, excited advice, and (2.) the tough-love advice that all but tells you it's not worth it if you don't go to a top tier school. I recently got the second version from a colleague at work. It's well intentioned and I'm glad people get this advice, but not exactly the kind that I needed at the time that I received it. You all know what schools I'm applying to - I think it's a nice range, with some very well ranked programs in the mix. I think all of them are OK for a non-academic job in the D.C. area, which seems like the most likely course for me (although I'm warming up to academia). But this raises exactly the same issue of supply elasticity. Even given the transparency of a lot of the economics PhD application experience, a lot of applicants still need to be told that for an academic position you're in trouble without a top-tier school.
A user-generated video about political science similar to the one above presents another asymmetry that manifests itself as a supply inelasticity - namely, that social scientists are incentivized to do research that isn't useful for the real world. George Mason professors make this case a lot, although others would argue that their department suffers from exactly the same problem:
Does anybody else have interesting anecodes/links/information on the elasticity of graduate labor supply? At this point I have a personal, bibliographical (my chapter), and scholarly interest in the issue and would love to hear thoughts.
- Romer, Paul. 2001. "Should the Government Subsidize Supply or Demand in the Market for Engineers?" Innovation Policy and the Economy, vol. 1.
Recently my mind has been reoriented from macroeconomic to microeconomic concerns, specifically education.
First, I wanted to share this C-Span taping of an event on racial disparities in education and employment that happened at the Urban Institute. The discussion was built around research that I conducted with Marla McDaniel using the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. I ask a question on new hire tax credits at 1:04:15. A lot of this was about the employment patterns of young whites and blacks, which was the focus of our research, but career and technical education, as well as apprenticeships also came up.
I'm also gearing up to work on this NBER chapter on the engineering workforce, which has reoriented me towards a lot of these questions about the extent to which our higher education system is able to supply the labor market with the workers it needs. I have a few articles to share on this. Yesterday, I read this AP article which was reprinted in the Washington Post on the shift away from four year degrees and towards more technical degrees. Glenn Reynolds explicitly compares the "education bubble" to the housing bubble and suggests it's going to burst. I'm not sure I entirely agree with the idea that we have an education bubble. The college wage premium is still very wide, so decisions to go to four year institutions seem to be responding to real earning prospects. I don't know whether tuition is keeping page with the college wage premium - perhaps higher education is somewhat overvalued, but the point is education does pay. It's hard to explain that away as a bubble unless you're going to claim that the demand and supply side of the labor market both simultaneously over-valued education and did so steadily over the course of several decades. This isn't to say that everyone earning a degree needs to earn one. College is a status simple and it is personally fulfilling, so there are certainly people in college who don't need to be there from the perspective of the labor market. But that's very different from saying that there's a bubble.
Joel Trachtenberg - former president of my graduate alma mater (George Washington University), and namesake of the public policy school where I earned my degree, argues that one solution may be a three year degree. The president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities disagrees.
I think that more options is always going to be better, which predisposes me towards supporting a three year degree that may more appropriately fulfill some students' needs. But I think the bigger problem is not at the high end of the education scale, but at the low end. Our problem isn't a higher education bubble, it's a bi-modal education distribution. We have far too many people who drop out of high school or who have a terminal high school diploma, and far too few people with mid-level skills: associates degrees, technical schools, certifications, apprenticeships, etc. That comes from a failing secondary school system and a world famous higher education system that emphasizes four year degrees, with far fewer institutions providing mid-level skills.
Thinking about how educated our workforce needs to be is always a little odd for me too. Because I'm interested in long-term investments and the problems that the market faces in providing these long-term investments, I'm also always thinking not just about what kind of education we need for the current labor market, but what kind of education we would need for the ideal labor market. In my view, the market economy introduces discount rates that are far too high. Basic research is too risky, so it is underinvested in. The market militates against the big investments that would be optimal were we not constrained by what Keynes called "the dark forces of time and ignorance": colonizing Mars, mining the asteroids, engineering life, guiding evolution, Dyson spheres, seasteading, terraforming other worlds - you name it. These things are hard for the market to invest in, and so we bump along sub-optimally as we always have. If I were to consider optimal levels of investment in both physical and human capital, I would guess that we are considerably under-investing in higher education. But you have to strike a balance between the world we live in and the world that we could or should live in. So my official line is that we need to graduate more high school students and more of them need to continue on to mid-level technical training, while we maintain the high quality of higher education. But ideally - if I thought society would be willing to make more investments and take more chances on the future - I'd go even farther than that.
Daniel Kuehn is a doctoral candidate and adjunct professor in the Economics Department at American University. He has a master's degree in public policy from George Washington University.
Posts
