We Don't Need No . . .
Matt Yglesias asks a very good question: how do we measure value in education?
Well, usually we measure “value” with reference to an objective. You can, for example, measure value-added in classroom instruction by measuring what students’ level of mastery is before the class and what it is afterwards. That should eliminate the selection effect. But it’s meaningless if you don’t agree on what you’re supposed to be teaching in the classroom – or, for that matter, whether what is being taught in the classroom is the main driver of “value” for consumers of education.
Yglesias’ post is a comment on a Lamar Alexander piece calling for colleges to provide a 3-year BA (something that is already generally available – a budget-conscious friend of mine graduated Swarthmore in 3 years, by taking an extra-heavy course load and getting as much credit as possible for work done in high school). But why 3 years? Why not provide a college version of the GED, a battery of exams that you can study for and, if you pass, get the equivalent of a college diploma. Why shouldn’t such a thing exist?
Well, if anyone wanted it, it would exist. “Anyone” means employers. If you’re looking to hire for a position that requires a BA in a relevant field, why would you care whether an applicant had a “real” BA with a B average from XYZ State or a certificate stating that he or she had scored the equivalent of a B on the Baccalaureate Equivalency Exam (BEE)? Indeed, I would think there were certain ways in which you’d prefer a BEE holder to a BA holder: the former might be more of a striving self-starter, able to learn independently; he or she might be more eager to get out into the working world without wasting time and money; and, most important, you wouldn’t have to wonder wether the BEE holder had “really” earned that B average, or whether he or she went to a “gut” program or school, because the exam would be the same for all BEE holders, and would be readily audited by the public.
But we don’t have such a thing. Which suggests that employers and professional schools aren’t that interested in how well you may have mastered a bunch of material you were supposed to have been taught in college. So what are they interested in?
I once worked for a hedge fund that fancied itself as a kind of Microsoft of the investment world. They were extremely open to weirdos of various kinds working for them – guys with whole-body tattoos, guys who spoke almost no English, guys who’d run away to join the circus when they were 16, guys who liked to wear colanders on their heads to keep away the bad voices; they even hired the occasional female. But every job applicant had to submit their SAT scores as part of their resume. And, at least when I was there, every entry-level generalist applicant was put to work delivering the mail.
What was the logic behind this? Well, they were using SAT scores as a proxy for an IQ test, because you’re not allowed to administer IQ tests (any exams administered as part of a job application have to be narrowly tailored to the specific requirements of the job or have to have near-perfectly equal outcomes for all racial groups, and since the latter is very unlikely the former is really the requirement). And they were using the mail-room time as an extended period for observation of the applicants: to observe if they play well with others; if they are self-starters who finagle their ways into more substantive projects than delivering mail; if they are hyper-attentive to detail (the obsessive weirdness of the mail-room routines was something to behold) – and if they are too proud to do boring scut work if that’s what the higher-ups tell them to do. So that’s basically what they wanted to know: your IQ; any relevant experience; and your personality and character.
Obviously, different employers are going to have different needs. IQ matters for just about every job, but not to the same degree, and there are plenty of jobs out there where you don’t want people who are too smart either (because they’ll get bored). But I’m hard-pressed to think of any employer who’s going to care that much about the substance of an applicant’s college education outside of the narrow area of expertise in question. If you’re a recently-graduated psychology major applying for an entry-level job at a local television station, what about your psychology degree could your interviewer possibly care about? And if you don’t really care about the substance of the degree, then the substance of the BEE isn’t going to be terribly relevant either, right? Which makes it clearer why there’s no real impetus (from employers, anyhow) to conjure such a thing into existence?
The folks who should care about “value” in education are parents and students. And they do! It’s just that, if you’re thinking about economic value, then most of what a college degree confers is precisely the sorting function that happens before you even show up. The Harvard degree mostly says that you got into Harvard, and secondarily that now you know lots of other people who got into Harvard.
Once upon a time, City College provided the kind of “value” degree that Yglesias is looking for: tuition was free and the school was tough. But (a) those were the days when you could sit in an intro lecture class and your professor could say “look at the person on your left; look at the person on your right; one of the three of you will not be here by the end of the semester” and mean it. We’re still sorting in this model – we’re just sorting after admissions. And (b) those were the days when hordes of Brooklyn Jews could not descend on Harvard en masse because of a variety of quotas. If Harvard renewed its commitment to having a student body that “looks like America” – and therefore a lot less like Westchester County (or Davos, Switzerland) – then the “value” of degrees from schools lower down on the list would start to go up, because the sorting mechanism would be broken. But education consumers don’t want the sorting mechanism to be broken. They want it to work.
I’m more familiar with the question of evaluation from the perspective of primary and secondary education, since I’m involved in the charter school world. But charter schools have two huge ways of passing the buck that colleges don’t have. First of all, there are state-mandated standards of various kinds that we have to conform to. We don’t need to figure out if we agree with those standards; we just have to teach to them. And we can measure how well we do that. Second of all, we’re trying to get our kids into – and through – college. That takes longer to measure; our school hasn’t graduated its first class yet, and it’ll be 4 or 5 years after that before we know how well we’ve prepared our kids for college. But that’s data we’ll eventually get. And in the meantime, we can do all kinds of absolute and relative assessments of how our students are mastering the material we’re trying to teach them. Because there is such a radical disconnect between what is taught in general degree programs and what employers want to know about recent graduates, colleges can’t pass the buck in the same way (or, I should say, 4-year colleges can’t; 2-year programs, which are basically training for specific jobs, do pass the buck, training students to do precisely what specific types of employers want).
And we don’t want them to! We want college to be able something other than adding economic value. We just don’t really agree on what that “something” is – and therefore we don’t have any good way of measuring it.
And we shouldn’t agree! Ultimately, I come at this whole question from another end. The last thing we need is one number that measures “value added” across various academic institutions. All that would do is improve the sorting mechanism; if people really cared about the number, the schools with high value-added scores would get more applicants, become more selective, and become the “new Harvards.” To a considerable extent this is exactly what happens already; second-tier schools invest in new infrastructure, poach academic stars to beef up particular departments, etc., and wind up with better students and move up into the first tier.
What we need, rather, is greater diversity in mission between institutions so that something other than the status/prestige/sorting mechanism is driving competition between institutions. We need more schools that say, “we follow a Great Books approach”, more schools that say, “we have a strict labor component to our educational program”, more schools that say, “we expect our student body – and our faculty – to lead an upright, Christian life”, more schools that say, “we take student democracy very seriously – the student body and their reps basically run this place, including choosing the faculty” – you name it. Some of these ideas are going to strike any given student as absolutely ludicrous, and so they’ll self-select out of the pool. But others will be right up that student’s alley – will be places he or she would turn down Harvard (ok, maybe not Harvard – Columbia) to go to.
The more mission-driven an institution is, the more secure it is going to be in answer the question “why are we doing this?” The more self-selecting the student body is, the less institutions will obsess about their selectivity. And if there were less of a focus on selectivity, there would be less of an arms race driving ever-greater expenditures on things not terribly closely related to an actual educational mission (whatever that may be).
How do you get more mission-driven institutions? The answer to that is shockingly simple: you need institutions to be led, and frequently created, by lunatics with a mission. And since institutions of higher education are incredibly expensive, that means we need crazier rich people.
This is something I harped on almost 2 years ago, in response to another Yglesias post. Our super-wealthy show an incredible poverty of imagination – and when they do something crazy, it’s really embarrassing. This country is badly in need of a totally new breed of culture warrior – not somebody who rants on Fox News, but somebody who can preach to the obscenely wealthy and explain to them that they are obliged to devote themselves to some eccentric ambition that will fire the imaginations of generations yet to come. And that they are competing with other obscenely wealthy people in this.
I mean, I’m all for the Robin Hood model of getting rich jerks to give money to supremely competent and data-driven “philanthropic portfolio managers”. But I’d trade a considerable amount of “value” for a bit more sheer awesomeness, and a bit less conformity.
Right on. If we had a more creative and eccentric plutocratic class, we could let a thousand Ave Maria Universities bloom, but actually get something cool out of it.
This is also related to why that David Brooks piece about returning to the supposedly humble days of our WWII victory irked me so.
— Matt Frost · Oct 20, 04:54 PM · #
What’s embarrassing about the EMP? I live in Seattle and I like the EMP, bizarre architecture and all.
— JS Bangs · Oct 20, 04:58 PM · #
Noah, If posts like this are the result of your infrequent posting, I’m all for these extended absences. This is the most interesting thing I have read in a very long time. Which actually makes me nervous; this post is so chock full of fascinating points and ideas that I’m worried that it can’t be discussed meaningfully as a whole (I certainly am having a hard time figuring out where to begin). I’m afraid the comments and external discussions will end up focusing on a single aspect and the rest will get lost, never having fulfilled its potential for really meaningful discussion. Would you consider breaking it up into smaller, digestible chunks, so that we can have at it in a more focused way?
Maybe it’s too late for that here. But it’s something to think about going forward. At any rate, congratulations. I look forward to the responses.
— Jay Daniel · Oct 20, 05:25 PM · #
I’ve hired hundreds and promoted scores over the past 10 years. I will try to boil it down. It costs us approx 55K to hire and train someone. Maybe they work out, maybe they don’t. For us, that’s a heck of a lot of $$ to spend on a gamble, so we try to improve our odds.
Employers need to know 2 things: can they do the job, and if they can, will they do the job?
Like your hedge fund and the SAT, we use the college degree as a signifier to answer (at least in part) the first question.
Would like a GED college degree answer that question for us? I don’t think so. What we want to know is, does the applicant know how to get up every day and drive somewhere and park their butt in a chair and do something relatively repetitive for 8 hours at a time? Believe me, this is a skill lots of people don’t have.
Do we care where the degree is from? No. It makes zero difference.
That said, I have never seen one of the “management trainees” that rotate through positions before they assume corporate executive positions with degrees from “lesser” colleges or universities. They all have prestige degrees (and they make sure you know it). This is a different kind of signifier, obviously, because these hires really don’t know any more than the other ones when it comes down to it. But I guess the prestige degree signifies a different skill set.
— luko · Oct 20, 05:41 PM · #
You don’t need obscenely wealthy people to come up with outrageously original ideas in order to educate people. You just need enough people willing to shout quite loudly that being educated is a privilege and a necessity. I cannot tell you how many young people, with advanced degrees from good schools, cannot spell their way through a competent few paragraphs. They have no idea what is on a piece of paper. Is it the 15-second attention span, too much text-messaging, the concept that narcissism is the new cool? Image is everything. Substance is nothing. When I taught eons ago in a Bronx high school, the brilliant idea was to do away with the dress code and with required subjects like foreign language in order to motivate the students to learn. The students did not improve in either attitude or education. School was a place to socialize and be bored. Apparently work is the same for a great many people. It may be that the stiffer job market will wake people up that maybe learning how to read and write as well as to pay attention is more important than image. Aunt Laura
— Aunt Laura · Oct 20, 05:54 PM · #
Can’t comment on the whole piece yet, but one thing caught my eye. You say:
Well, if anyone wanted it, it would exist. “Anyone” means employers. If you’re looking to hire for a position that requires a BA in a relevant field, why would you care whether an applicant had a “real” BA with a B average from XYZ State or a certificate stating that he or she had scored the equivalent of a B on the Baccalaureate Equivalency Exam (BEE)?
But a few paragraphs later you mention that business are prohibited from using tests which “aren’t narrowly tailored to the specific reqiurements of the job”. Couldn’t that be a big part of it, that they would like to use such tests but can’t out of either the actual threat of the law or the risk of making themselves vulnerable to lawsuits? If so, it goes against your argument that employers don’t want things like a BA GED.
— greenish · Oct 20, 06:41 PM · #
Always reminds me of Spence’s Nobel lecture about asymmetries of information and signaling in the job market. An MIT lecture transcript on this subject is here, Spence’s original paper is here.
And good post, Noah. I’m going to have to let your thoughts on self-selection stew for a little bit. Right now I’ve got nothing.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 20, 06:46 PM · #
Excellent post. You and I come from the same place and I largely agree with you about everything.
A number of remarks, from my perspective:
1- I love your hedge fund’s recruiting process. Of course it would be even harder to recruit that way in France, in part because employers are required to keep employees in one function. Using the mailroom as a proxy for being an analyst at a hedge fund would get you thrown in jail (well, perhaps not literally). Under French labor law, if you offer an employee a change in occupation and the employee turns it down, that’s an illegal termination and you have to pay damages.
2- Similarly, the City College thing has been tried in France, and the results are pretty damn dismal. It’s more like, “look to the person to your left and to your right; by the time the semester ends, neither of them will be there.” It’s an appalling betrayal of everything a democratic government should care about, the way our educational system works.
3- Absolutely agree with you about diversity in higher education! Again, things are much worse in France, for a number of reasons. But the conformity is crushing.
— PEG · Oct 21, 08:07 AM · #
The problems start to accrue when the student and his parents ask “Why are we doing this?”
I’m all for mission diversities, but so long as college costs money, lasts for only four years, and terminates in real life, mission will never be more than a marginal sorter. Employers just aren’t interested in campus aesthetics and short-term existential elections.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Oct 21, 02:18 PM · #
I’m doubtful about where you seem to think things should go for a lot of reasons.
For one thing I think youare understating some of the diversity in higher ed. Northeastern, for example, pretty much set itself down as a place were cooperative education was almost standard, Williams did a stellar job selling itself as an undergrad-focused alternative to the Ivy League, Cal Berkeley, aided by innovatin in recruiting, sold itself as another very different alternative to the Ivies, etc. MIT applicants and Harvard applicants are pretty different from each other and the pool overlaps much less than you’d think, so clearly there’s a (perceived?) strong difference there. I recognize these aren’t as diverse as you’re thinking, but they’re there. And the diversity grows further down the market, on which more later.
But I’m hating on the idea of students making choices toward really alternative education schemes. For one thing your model starts to flail when you realize that the model has to compete not just for students but for faculty and that, combined with the prospective faculty member’s wish to remain academically marketable, is where a lot of the conformity is going to come in. For example no sane person is going to want to teach at the university where students make all the business calls (and the education will suck: the renowned old chemist who mentored me in grad school, being tenured and having nothing to lose, did a multi-year experiment to confirm that the biggest variable in his teaching evaluations was that lowered grading standards got him higher ratings: I was convinced by his data). You have to win both students and faculty, and to make it worse those two things are coupled — the students want to be where the outstanding faculty are and the faculty want to be where the outstanding students are — and everybody wants to be where they can generate publishable stuff according to the academic standards set by the existing elite universities. Try breaking that in any realistic way.
Then I also reject, frankly, the idea that the students really want to make those choices. The bland genericization of curricula and school layout (to the extent that they aren’t in fact diversely mission-driven) serves two functions. For one, of course, there’s a very big middle-class student population for which college is a kind of extension of the (not diversely mission-driven) high school system: you go, and keep doing the same kind of thing but with slightly more sex and drugs, and then they give you a more awesome degree. But more importantly, well, 18-year-olds is dumb. Even the very focused, skilled, mature ones often totally switch academic focus while in college, or change a lot of worldview: much of our interest in how higher education is structured after all comes from the sense that that’s an age and environment in which people’s sense of what they want or need is very very plastic. So I’m not won over by the idea that you reach great outcomes by allowing a lot of firm committment to something far out of the mainstream unless it’s a real, real reversible decision, and that itself constrains how far out it can be. Note that the trend in public ideas about young people’s choices here favors me: it often seems in America today the age of majority, at which we expect people to be responsible for something, is like 40, and going north (I read that they’re proposing to let people be considered dependents on their parents’ healthcare well into their 30’s, and thought, wow, do they get to breast-feed too?) So I don’t think there’s a big cry out there to let late teenagers make big life choices.
But most of my difficulties with what you’re saying come from what I think is a wrong perception of the role of higher ed. In some sense you’re discussing “elite” higher ed, and it’s not obvious to me that the crazy billionaire wishing to help the masses should give a fuck. I mean, yeah, different types of missions might lead to really different critiques of Ovid in bachelors’ theses, and there’s some worth in that, but…. That’s not really where a lot of educational value lives. I think the places where education makes a difference are places where that degree serves as a kind of union card and in many ways attaining it is a kind of BEE.
For example, as a federal worker I see a lot of people who are ridiculously talented from years of experience but lose out on promotion to much much less experienced people with degrees. A couple times already I’ve tried to circumvent that and promote the most knowledgeable person, and gotten shot down: the job standards all permit, on paper, this kind of work-around, but in practice there’s just too much credentialism. So I end up spending a lot of time figuring out how to get people quickie degrees. I actually spend hours a week at talking to people at TUI and Troy and Fayetteville State and various community colleges trying to figure out how best to basically get people a quickie credential. A lot of that comes down to schools giving credit for life/work experience and actually there’s a lot of diversity in how they do that and what those small schools understand their mission to be (you feint at this discussing associates’ degrees above). NB this is not a terrible thing: there’s considerable precedent in Europe for giving Ph.D.‘s based on work experience, and I knew a Finnish micro Ph.D. — quite a talented one — who got his degree that way (and, shit, if Finland or Germany, homes of the decade-long thesis, can do that, then it’s probaly solid). I think that workers looking for night school degrees and post-bac programs for pulling up GPAs for med school and “life experience” credits and meet-the-job-description degrees, are looking for “value” and consequently have created a lot of diversity in how that part of the market operates. So I think if you want to flesh out how that’s going to work for us at the nancy-boy degree level you probably have to start by combing through results there, and my guess is you won’t find much aggregate effect.
But that’s the part of the market where you want the crazy rich people. For one thing I think it’ll lubricate labor in America a good deal, since there is a lot of, “I’m already marching to my own drum and skilled as hell but need a degree for it” out there. For another I actually believe that that part of the market puts a lot of pressure on the “value” part of the higher-end market: these are the parents you’re talking about, these are the GI Bill students who so revolutionized higher ed after the second world war, these are the masses of fringe academics whose work determines where the sort of basleine is for published discourse. So, millionaires: if you must cut Harvard a check let them figure out how to spend it, but if you wish to innovate do so with that correspondence school.
— Sanjay · Oct 21, 03:13 PM · #
Sanjay: around your 3rd paragraph I was getting really depressed, and then I got to your last 3 paragraphs, which I agree with entirely.
— Noah Millman · Oct 21, 03:47 PM · #
“But I guess the prestige degree signifies a different skill set.”
From what I understand there’s an insane amount of work required get into a ivy leauge school. you have to do all the high level academic work, plus all kinds of expensive and time consuming extra-ciriccular stuff. What it really means is that you have wealthy, highly involved parents that will provide the intellectual home culture, make you do all the school work/and or make you believe that you need to get into harvard, pay for all the lessons and the volunteer trips to build houses in Kenya, and drive you all over the place. So if you have those parents and can do all the work then you can (maybe) get into harvard. But than means you are definitly a certain kind of person.
About special mission colleges, they are out there. I went to the Evergreen State College in washington state (I refere to it in my mind as the Hair Experiment State College) and their whole thing was the interdisciplinary/self-directed education. My last year there I got credit for writing 4/5 of the first draft of a bad novel. But anyway, there are plenty of schools like that out there but the appeal to a certain sort of student. At Evergreen in the 90s it was queers, hippies, riot grrls (an boys), and older transfer students (me). The only sports team was a low level soccer team. The mascot was the Fighting Goeducks (a goeduck is a large clam with huge penis-like siphon). It had about 2000 students if I remember correctly. And there are lots of other weird little colleges like this. Tons of christian colleges, etc…
I now live in Madison and see the kinds of students that go there. A lot more students. Much more “normal.”
So I think, basically, that demand is already suppling about the right amount of different types of colleges. There are enough division 1 sports schools for those who would like to attend, there are enough hippy schools, chirstian schools, etc… And obviously there are way more seats at division 1 sports schools than there are hippy schools becasue way more kids want to go to a big football school than want to go to a wierd little hippy school. Of course potential college students may not know about all the options or realize that they would be better at one type of school than another, but that is a counseling problem.
And then of course, cost is a major major factor in where you go, and often the no. 1 factor, making all the various fancy choices moot.
— cw · Oct 21, 03:50 PM · #
Way cool, cw, I have a good freind who was at Evergeen in the late 80’s/early 90’s: I visited and got a T-shirt. Then I crudded it up while waterproofing a treehouse, and he said that only made it better, so I still wear it.
— Sanjay · Oct 21, 04:04 PM · #
Your budget-conscious friend gave a diploma to Swarthmore? That’s what you said. I suppose you meant your friend graduated FROM Swarthmore.
— andrew · Oct 21, 04:21 PM · #
Tree houses were/are(?) big there. I was in one built by the ex-drummer from Love (I think I got the band right) that was insanely over-crafted. It was like being inside a piece of obsessive-compulsive furniture/sculpture. Who was your friend?
— cw · Oct 21, 05:13 PM · #
Hey, cw — my friend Patrick had been a professional chef, went to Evergreen studying biology, and went to Boston for a while thereafter studying virus structures, if that rings a bell.
— Sanjay · Oct 21, 08:00 PM · #
Actuaries are closest to BEEs right now. They give incredibly rigorous tests and don’t care much about other credentials.
CPAs, whom Charles Murray praises in “Real Education,” have been moving in the opposite direction: in lots of states, you are now required to get a 5th year of college education. It cuts down on competition. So, it’s not as if employers wouldn’t mind BEEs, but professional organizations are against them.
— Steve Sailer · Oct 21, 08:55 PM · #
I agree with Sanjay on the problem of 18-year-olds not being ready to choose. On the other hand, 20-year-olds who have spent two years on some kind of college campus would be a lot more ready. Much of the problem is that when you are in high school, it’s hard to imagine college life, much less radically different versions of college life.
But transferring is out of fashion (although it seems to have worked out okay for the President), thus the frenzy for freshman admissions.
— Steve Sailer · Oct 21, 08:58 PM · #
I largely agree with Sanjay. One thing about the kinds of credentialism he mentions, and which I too fret about, is that I often hear from other people inside the academy that it is the university that should somehow end credentialism. I appreciate what they are trying to accomplish, but this seems like a weird idea to me: the universities distribute the credentials. It’s a little unfair and counterproductive to ask them to help tear down the edifice of credentialism. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think that there is progress to be made on that front, but to a certain degree asking colleges to limit credentialism is asking an entity to audit itself.
— Freddie · Oct 22, 05:02 AM · #
Well, to be honest I suffered regret pangs after posting about the use of the word “credentialism,” which is wrong. I think there’s a separate issue about credentialism among elites to which Freddie is speaking but as with Noah and elite education I’m genuinely not clear why we give a fuck. What prevents me from promoting somebody with 20 years experience but no BA or Master’s or Ph.D. (depending) isn’t quite what we call credentialism, though there’s a little of that, so much as it is a paralytic fear of the union first and foremost, and cover-your-ass tendencies in the bureaucracy: so we tend to homogenize employees at a certain level in the Federal service and after I make a promotion my boss wants to be able to point at it and say, see, we promoted exactly who we always do.
That’s not to say there arent other kinds of credentialism. EMployees with “elite” degrees or work histories are vanishingly rare in the Federal service and can often find their powers ridiculously magnified. But exactly because it’s rare I don’t much care.
— Sanjay · Oct 22, 11:25 AM · #