More Women Than Men Pursuing Higher Education

Below is a chart of the gender imbalance in terms of associate degrees awarded that made based on data from a blog post by Richard Whitmire.



This chart shows that not only are there racial disparities in educational levels, but also that women of all races are more likely than men to finish at least associate degree education levels.

Whitmire quotes:

Bottom line: “Women outperformed men in college enrollment rates for all races/ethnicities. Overall, 44% of 18- to 24-year-old women were enrolled in college in 2006, compared with 36% of men.”

So what exactly does all this mean? I'm not entirely sure, but the shortage of men on college campuses is already starting to affect the dating environment. Historically, women have tended to prefer men with education levels equal to or above their own. These numbers indicate there will be far more college educated women than men in the future, which could have a whole host of social ramifications such things as increasing the opportunity cost for a woman to bear children, increasing wages of women relative to men (possibly eventually exceeding the average salaries of men), etc. This in turn may make the old world of a father being the main breadwinner for the family increasingly rare and make competition for college-educated men increasingly intense.

There are a lot of social norms and expectations that many people of both genders hold when it comes to marriage which are based on the historical reality of more men going to college than women. It will be interesting to see how these norms change in the face of these new demographic realities.

The Future of Education

Paul Caron writes:

Take the time to watch this fantastic one-hour video by Michael Welsh (Kansas State) on The Future of Education -- I guarantee it will change the way you think about integrating technology into your teaching.

I fully echo Caron's sentiments on this video. It is superb and highlights the largely untapped potential for using web-based technology (YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, etc.) to take advantage of The Wisdom of the Crowds to turn classrooms into interactive learning laboratories.

At the end of the video, Welsh shows a simulation he and his students perform that mimics the development of an artificial world from 1450 to 2050 and beyond. I would absolutely love to see a similar simulation done in an economics course highlighting how various institutions (legal systems, political systems, cultural norms, etc.), geographies, and resource allocations can lead to vastly different outcomes for people groups over time -- similar to an agent-based model using live people in lieu of computerized agents.

Needless to say, this video has given me a ton of ideas for teaching in the future. I can't wait until I can get a classroom of my own and try to put some of these ideas into practice.

To get a preview of what the video linked to above is like, watch Welsh's earlier video, The Machine is Us/ing Us:

The Diminishing Returns of College

The declining value of a college education?

...the wages of college educated workers have been increasing more slowly than the cost of college, which means that the returns to college (monetary ones at least) have been falling. As students take out more and more loans (over $21,000 on average according to the Project on Student Debt), we may see more and more 18 year olds make the decision that college is simply not worth it.

The return on college may still (probably is?) positive on average, but as long as tuition continues its explosive growth, the return on college will fall, and... will be seen as the leading cause in the decline of enrollments.

My friend (and college professor), Napp Nazworth has more thoughts on the matter.

Does Education Really Make You Smarter?

An intriguing piece by Norman Nie and Saar Golde:

Public debate has been dominated by the belief that education builds human capital, causing increased income, health and political participation, among many positive outcomes. But new research suggests that costly expansions of education may not always bring the promised social results. In some cases, those expansions may do little but sort people according to their native ability.

Read the whole thing.

So does this mean I've wasted the last three years in school?

(HT Andrew Gillen)

American Tragedy

(A photo of Detroit, the city with the lowest high school graduation rate.)

Richard Florida continues to convince me with further evidence that where you live can play a large role in life outcomes. Unfortunately, this time it is with extremely sad statistics:

Here is a list of urban school systems where the projected high-school graduation rate is less than FIFTY percent. The overall average by the way for the nation's 50 largest cities is - get this - 51.8 percent.

Philadelphia Philadelphia City School District - 49.6
Miami Miami-Dade County School District - 49.0
Oklahoma City Oklahoma City Public Schools - 47.5
Denver Denver County School District - 46.3
Milwaukee Milwaukee Public Schools - 46.1
Atlanta Atlanta City School District - 46.0
Kansas City, Mo. Kansas City School District - 45.7
Oakland, Calif. Oakland Unified - 45.6
Los Angeles Los Angeles Unified - 45.3
New York New York City Public Schools - 45.2
Dallas Dallas ISD - 44.4
Minneapolis, Minn. Minneapolis Public Schools - 43.7
Columbus, Ohio Columbus Public Schools - 40.9
Baltimore Baltimore City Public School System - 34.6
Cleveland Cleveland Municipal City Sch.Dist. - 34.1
Indianapolis Indianapolis Public Schools - 30.5
Detroit Detroit City School District - 24.9

The full list is here.

Ponder the implications of this from everything to human development, crime, social cohesion, and economic competitiveness.

Seeing numbers below 50% is particularly tragic. This is indicative of the future of those cities, the quality of the educational systems, and most importantly, the likely future prospects of the youth of those cities.

The statistics for Detroit make make me particularly grateful my parents left Michigan for the DC area years before I was born.

The Wall Street Journal argues that these statistics show why we need school choice now more than ever.

I would be curious to see a breakdown of the graduation rates based on gender, race, and income level. I would expect to see a much higher graduation rate for girls than for boys, meaning that the rates for boys are far worse than what is represented here. Either these statistics are wrong or else places like Detroit may be graduating near-zero rates of boys from high school. When boys don't graduate from high school, high rates of crime are almost certain to follow.

This truly is an American tragedy.

An Uneducated Electorate = Democracy Lost

An outstanding video clip Richard Dreyfuss on the importance of educating America's youth about civil liberties, debate, and how to be independent thinkers:

Pete Boettke writes:

I don't know much about Dreyfuss's politics, and in this context I don't really care because the sentiments he expresses here are the same educational sentiments that I hold dearly and motivate me as a teacher.  It is about learning how to think, and from that, all else follows.

Here is a discussion of Dreyfuss's civics initiative. He refers to his current position as pre-partisan.  He wants to focus on the educational mission that gives students the tools to be informed participants within the democratic process.  James Buchanan has argued for a similar role for the economists within a democratic society --- to give students the tools of reasoning and understanding of evidence to be informed participants.

Rent-Seeking In Higher Education

Seth Roberts:

A nice essay by Paul Graham about the effects of making start-ups easier says that one effect will be changes in our education system:

Performance is always the ultimate test, but there are so many kinks in the plumbing now that most people are insulated from it most of the time. So you end up with a world in which high school students think they need to get good grades to get into elite colleges, and college students think [correctly] they need to get good grades to impress employers.

A world in which lawyers are forever judged by the law school they attended, which greatly surprised a lawyer friend of mine. If you can leave college to start a company, your professors have less power over you. One more way the Web is like the printing press, which led to a vast reduction in the power of the Catholic Church. The printing press made it much easier to start new religions.

The less traditional your career path, the more flexibility you have for how to get there. Advances in technology, particularly computers, have certainly lowered the costs of start-ups and forming new businesses.

As anyone who has taken Econ 101 can tell you, lower prices mean greater frequency. As tuition prices rise and the price of starting businesses falls, I'd expect to see more people trying to start companies and fewer people in school. I think Arnold Kling made this point once, but I can't seem to find the link.

Read Seth Robert's post For whom do colleges exist? and see my previous post The Value of Formal Education.

The Decay of the Ivory Tower?

Michael Barone:

I am old enough to remember when America's colleges and universities seemed to be the most open-minded and intellectually rigorous institutions in our society. Today, something very much like the opposite is true: America's colleges and universities have become, and have been for some decades, the most closed-minded and intellectually dishonest institutions in our society.

English departments have been packed by deconstructionists who insist that Shakespeare is no better than rap music, and history departments with multiculturalists who insist that all societies are morally equal except our own, which is morally inferior.

Economics departments and the hard sciences have mostly resisted such deterioration. But when Lawrence Summers, first-class economist and president of Harvard, suggested that more men than women may have the capacity to be first-rate scientists -- which is what the hard data showed -- then, off with his head.

Read the whole thing.

(HT Instapundit)

Steve Jobs on Teacher Unions

I find myself liking Steve Jobs even more than I realized:

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs lambasted teacher unions Friday, claiming no amount of technology in the classroom would improve public schools until principals could fire bad teachers.

Jobs compared schools to businesses with principals serving as CEOs.

"What kind of person could you get to run a small business if you told them that when they came in they couldn't get rid of people that they thought weren't any good?" he asked to loud applause during an education reform conference.

"Not really great ones because if you're really smart you go, 'I can't win.'"

In a rare joint appearance, Jobs shared the stage with competitor Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Inc. Both spoke to the gathering about the potential for bringing technological advances to classrooms.

"I believe that what is wrong with our schools in this nation is that they have become unionized in the worst possible way," Jobs said.

"This unionization and lifetime employment of K-12 teachers is off-the-charts crazy."

At various pauses, the audience applauded enthusiastically. Dell sat quietly with his hands folded in his lap.

"Apple just lost some business in this state, I'm sure," Jobs said.

(HT Russ Roberts)

Education and Dating

From the New York Times:

Even as husbands and wives have moved closer together on measures of education and income, the divide between well-educated, well-paid couples and their less-privileged counterparts has widened, raising an awkward possibility: are we achieving more egalitarian marriages at the cost of a more egalitarian society?

Americans are increasingly pairing off by education level, according to the sociologists Christine Schwartz and Robert Mare. In an article published last year in the journal Demography, they reported that the odds of a high-school graduate marrying someone with a college degree declined by 43 percent between 1940 and the late 1970s. In our current decade, the researchers wrote, the percentage of couples who are “educationally homogamous” — that is, share the same level of schooling — reached its highest point in 40 years.

Assortative mating by income also seems to be on the rise. In a 2004 study of couples wed in the 1970s through the early 1990s, the researchers Megan Sweeney and Maria Cancian found an increasingly strong association between women’s wages before marriage and the occupational status and future earnings prospects of the men they married.

Hattip Greg Mankiw.

Should Government Take A Yardstick to Colleges?

Looks like someone thinks so:

Ever since Education Secretary Margaret Spellings unveiled plans seven weeks ago to overhaul the nation's higher education system, she and her staff have been trying to relieve anxieties.

All she wants, Spellings says, is better information made available to families, taxpayers and policymakers so they can make better decisions about how they spend their money. And given how little is really known about how well students are served by higher education, she says, she doesn't see why anyone would find that unreasonable.

“If you want to buy a new car, you go online and compare a full range of models, makes and pricing options,” she says. “The same transparency and ease should be the case when students and families shop for colleges, especially when one year of college can cost more than a car.”

Some don't like the car analogy. Choosing a college is a more like choosing a spouse — it can't be quantified, says Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity University in Washington, D.C.

Nearly two-thirds of all high-growth, high-wage jobs created in the next decade will require a college degree, Spellings says, yet only one-third of Americans have one. “If we believe we must educate more Americans, particularly those of color and reduced economic means, how are we going to be able to do that without any information about how well we're serving that customer?”

A 2006 report by the Washington-based American Institutes for Research shows that more than half of graduating students at four-year colleges and at least 75% at two-year colleges lack the literacy skills needed to handle tasks such as understanding credit card offers or summarizing arguments of newspaper editorials.

My take: I do think advanced education could benefit from greater transparency. It would give greater accountability to institutions of higher learning that would incentivize them towards efficiency and innovation. I am a bit uncomfortable with government adopting this role, however, because I'm concerned what would be measured would be far too subject to political manipulation.

What I do think would be good is to require certain information (such as median time to graduation, percent employed within 3 months of graduation, median debt loads, annual tuition, average SAT scores of incoming freshman, etc.) to be made public, especially for publicly funded institutions. I can't see any harm in this and see much good that could come from this information.

Instapundit shares his thoughts:

Universities don't like this, but it's hard to (1) tell everyone how important higher education is to America; (2) take lots of government money while providing it; (3) support regulation of every other industry; and (4) argue for laissez faire in your own.

One counter-argument might be that establishing a requirement for this type of information may incentivize greater government regulation of higher-education. My hunch is that it seems like this argument is overwhelmed by the need to have accountability for publicly used funds.

I like the idea of legal requirements for publicly funded institutions to share certain information with the public and a private organization forming to synthesize this and contrast it against private institutions.

Public vs. Private Schools

Following up on posts by Arnold Kling, Tyler Cowen, and myself on the desirability of opening up public education more fully to competition, Andrew Coulson at Cato had this to say (emphasis me):

There’s a common perception in this country that public schools are underfunded, and that if they could only spend as much as private schools do, they’d be in clover. When it is pointed out that the average private school tuition is around half of total public school spending per pupil, defenders of the status quo counter that tuition only covers a fraction of total costs.

So wouldn’t it be interesting to know how much private schools actually spend, in total, per pupil? Well now we do, at least for the state of Arizona.

In a study released yesterday by the Goldwater Institute, I analyze the results of their most recent private school survey. Among the other fascinating findings is that public schools spend one-and-a-half times as much per pupil as do private schools. Or, looked at the other way, private schools spend a third less than public schools.

Some other fascinating tidbits:

Teachers make up 72 percent of on-site staff in Arizona’s independent education sector, but less than half of on-site staff in the public sector.

Arizona independent school teachers earned the equivalent of $36,456 in 2004.  [The]  state’s public school teachers [[salary] was around $60,000.

Public school lobbyists claim they need loads more money to repair and maintain their buildings, so it’d be interesting to know how private schools cope with this issue on a fraction of the public sector’s budget, hmm?

Some interesting questions and it would be great to find out the answers!

There are some public schools, predominantly in middle and upper income regions that are decent, but these seem to be more and more the exception rather than the rule.  As this study illustrates, the problem is not that there's not enough money.  The problem is that the entire system is broken.  How many generations of American children have to have their futures sacrificed before we're willing to ask some hard questions and take stern measures to reform our educational system?

See more on the state of public education in middle and lower income areas in this post on "Stupid in America" and watch the corresponding video below:

The Value of Formal Education?

“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” -- Jim Rohn

Arnold Kling on Education vs. Entrepreneurship (emphasis mine):

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Gary Becker writes,

One of the challenging paradoxes during the past several decades is that American teenagers have consistently performed below average on international tests in math and sciences, and not especially well on reading tests, yet the American economy is more productive than any other.

I can think of only two classes of explanations for this phenomenon.

(1) International tests fail to measure the superior aspects of the U.S. education system.

(2) Education is not such an important factor in comparative economic performance.

I lean toward (2). It's better to have strong entrepreneurialism and mediocre education than the other way around.

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I would have to agree with Kling on this. From the standpoint of economic growth, once a certain level of basic education is achieved, the ability to innovate and think creatively is far more valuable than much of what is taught in formal education.

I spent over five years working for a Japanese employer and contrasting the cultures proved instructive. Many of my Japanese co-workers told me that their coworkers and country often struggle with innovation. A large part of Japanese education consists of very formal, rote memorization and repetition.

In contrast to American schools, where students are encouraged to ask questions and "think outside the box", Japanese students are taught to respect their sensei and to repeat what he teaches them perfectly. While they learn specific skills (such as mathematics) extremely well, they struggle with much of what we would consider to be entrepreneurial thinking. Unfortunately, this is reinforced by a very rigid business environment that is relatively hostile allowing new businesses to start or old businesses to fail. I believe this has played a large factor in why Japan's economy has been languishing for more than a decade.

My Japanese manager once summed it up by saying:

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"Japanese people make good engineers but terrible salesmen. Chinese people make terrible engineers but good salesmen. They always win at negotiation."

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Stuart Buck echoes Arnold Kling:

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A very common idea is that more education equals greater economic growth. What's more, one of the main ways that Third World countries could advance is to spend more money on education. Now this may not be true at all.

The most useful skills that you will ever get from formal schooling are fairly basic: reading, writing a coherent description or argument, and basic math. A lot of what's studied in high school or college may be very interesting, and can make one a well-rounded person, but has little or no relevance to economic growth.

By contrast, if there exists any knowledge that leads to economic growth, the overwhelming majority of it is captured in businesses and other institutions, and cannot be taught in schools. For any type of business that you can imagine, the overwhelming majority of the information necessary to run the business consists of informal knowledge that has accumulated over years or decades.

Anything that increases business activity in Third World countries -- whether globalization or micro-credit loans that encourage local entrepreneurs -- is far more likely to produce the sort of education that creates further economic growth. Even better, entrepreneurship allows people to gradually accumulate the necessary knowledge to run their own businesses.

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Beyond a certain point, the value of much formal education faces diminishing marginal returns. I have worked in engineering, journalism, teaching community college, child development, sales, marketing, project management, retail, and more. I have also volunteered in disaster relief, been involved in leadership positions at churches and non-profits, served for several years on a community service committee for Westinghouse, was a character lead at Give Kids the World, etc. Of all the things I've learned in school beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic (I'll include algebra and trig with this), the most useful for any of these jobs have been basic statistics, economics, and finance, and (maybe) a little physics (for my engineering work). Beyond this basic skill set, the most valuable things I've learned have been from life experiences and learning on-the-job.

The one area that would have been most valuable to learn in school would have been communication. While we are taught writing skills, speaking and presentation skills are also critical. One of the engineers I worked with when I was a co-op at DuPont told me that 90% of my future engineering career would depend on my ability to communicate well with others. He was absolutely right. People skills are far more important than is typically stressed in most formal education. The ability to not only communicate, but also get along with others is invaluable.

If I could make a short-list of what to add to high-school and college curriculum, it would be:

• Public Speaking
  
• Statistics
  
• Economics
  
• Finance

In addition to this list, encouraging young people to innovate and take risks would be my recommendation for the best education money could buy.

Some other thoughts:

For developing countries, I think the best "bang for the buck" they can get is to develop stable laws and institutions to encourage and protect entrepreneurship. I have yet to visit a developing country where people were short of entrepreneurial drive. I've lost count of the number of times I've been swarmed by sellers trying to get me to buy various trinkets and souvenirs. What they lack is credit markets to grow their businesses and laws to protect their investments and make opening new businesses relatively easy. If these were in place, I trust the people in these areas would be innovative enough to develop the educational institutions they'd need to prepare future generations to continue to grow their economy.

For more on this, read "The Role of Institutions in Entrepreneurship: Implications for Development Policy" by Frederic Sautet.

Men, Marriage, and Education

Russ Roberts:

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The New York Times reports on some interesting data on marriage. Men without college degrees are much less likely to marry than in the past. Note the sex ratios by education at the bottom:


(click image for larger view)

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Read the whole article!

Private Schools for the Poor

As part of my fellowship, I've been doing some research over the summer on private schools for the poor. Here's a great article by James Tooley on the subject:

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The accepted wisdom is that private schools serve the privileged; everyone else, especially the poor, requires public school. The poor, so this logic goes, need government assistance if they are to get a good education, which helps explain why, in the United States, many school choice enthusiasts believe that the only way the poor can get the education they deserve is through vouchers or charter schools, proxies for those better private or independent schools, paid for with public funds.

But if we reflect on these beliefs in a foreign context and observe low-income families in underprivileged and developing countries, we find these assumptions lacking: the poor have found remarkably innovative ways of helping themselves, educationally, and in some of the most destitute places on Earth have managed to nurture a large and growing industry of private schools for themselves.

So the accepted wisdom appears to be wrong. Though elite private schools do exist in impoverished regions of the world, private schools are not only for the privileged classes. From a wide range of settings, from deepest rural China, through the slums of urban India and Kenya, to the urban periphery areas of Ghana, private education is serving huge numbers of children. Indeed, in those areas where we were able to adequately compare public and private provision, a large majority of schoolchildren are in private school, a significant number of them in unrecognized schools and not on the state’s radar at all.

Ironically, perhaps, the accepted wisdom does seem to be right on one point: private is better than public. Of course, no one suspected that private slum schools would be better. Yet our research suggests that children in these schools outperform similar students in government schools in key school subjects. And this is true even of the unrecognized private schools, schools that development experts dismiss, if they acknowledge their existence at all, as being of poor quality.

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Tooley has produced some truly fascinating research. It makes me wonder how these ideas can be better used both domestically here in the US and around the world to bring better education and hope to many of the underprivileged?

See more of Tooley's work here and his homepage here.

Ending Women's Suffrage

I just got an invite from a friend today to go to a dinner with John Stossel at the end of the month. Stossel was the journalist who produced an excellent video documentary covering the dismal state of public education in the US. It is entitled "Stupid in America".

Tonight, I came across this video which underscores his point. It is called "Ending Women's Suffrage":



A sad commentary on American education, but absolutely hilarious nonetheless!

The Right Incentives?

Good news for education in Florida:

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The State of Florida just announced a new pay-for-performance program that ties teacher salary raises and bonuses to students' standardized test scores (the first such fully state-backed program). Proponents argue that subjecting American schools to competitive forces will encourage good teaching and higher quality schools. Florida governor Jeb Bush says a system that rewards teachers for improving student performance makes more sense than a system where higher pay is tied solely to academic degrees and years of experience.

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Now if we can also start paying students for their performance, we'll really be making progress in the education system!

“Stupid in America”

Chris Coyne links to this video of John Stossel’s investigative report, “Stupid in America: How Lack of Choice Cheats Our Kids Out of a Good Education”:

The piece highlights many of the problems with America's public school system including government restrictions on choice and the role of unions in resisting reform and change.

I watched this today and it is an absolute must-see for anyone at all concerned about the current state of education in the US. In it, Stossel highlights many of the perverse incentives present in our public education system that are tremendously damaging to the youth in America.

Commenting on this same issue In Reason Magazine, Stossel says (emphasis mine):

The inability to fire the bad and reward the good is the biggest reason schools fail the kids. Lack of money is often cited the reason schools fail, but America doubled per pupil spending, adjusting for inflation, over the last 30 years. Test scores and graduation rates stayed flat. New York City now spends an extraordinary $11,000 per student. That's $220,000 for a classroom of twenty kids. Couldn't you hire two or three excellent teachers and do a better job with $220,000?

Only a monopoly can spend that much money and still fail the kids.

The U.S. Postal Service couldn't get it there overnight. But once others were allowed to compete, Federal Express, United Parcel, and others suddenly could get it there overnight. Now even the post office does it (sometimes). Competition inspires people to do what we didn't think we could do.

If people got to choose their kids' school, education options would be endless. There could soon be technology schools, cheap Wal-Mart-like schools, virtual schools where you learn at home on your computer, sports schools, music schools, schools that go all year, schools with uniforms, schools that open early and keep kids later, and, who knows? If there were competition, all kinds of new ideas would bloom.

This already happens overseas. In Belgium, for example, the government funds education—at any school—but if the school can't attract students, it goes out of business. Belgian school principal Kaat Vandensavel told us she works hard to impress parents. "If we don't offer them what they want for their child, they won't come to our school." She constantly improves the teaching, "You can't afford ten teachers out of 160 that don't do their work, because the clients will know, and won't come to you again."

My Take: Stossel has done an excellent job with this video highlighting severe, pervasive, systematic problems in America’s education system. Watching the behavior of the students in public schools and (more importantly) that of teachers and union leaders when asked questions in this video is far more condemning than writing about it could ever be.

Watch the video! It just might change the way you think about education.

Further Links:

John Stossel’s Homepage

Milton Friedman’s School Choice Research

“Stupid in America” Official Webpage

“Stupid in America” Q&A