Sig. Na. Ling.

So over at Unqualified Offerings Thoreau has a great blog post up.  You should go read it.

• Value in scarcity, broadly and narrowly construed

He considers philosophy majors (in the broader context of Whether Brick And Mortar Colleges Can Survive In The Face Of The Internet), and notes that philosophy majors make (relatively speaking) a shit-ton of money… because they’re smart.  I have no reason to doubt that he’s correct; the only philosophy majors I met in undergrad who were dumber than I was — I’ll note, perhaps unpleasantly, that I went on to get a doctorate — were in a bunch of required courses whose names started with “one-” and, maybe, “two-”.  So yeah, the PHIL majors in my sample tended to be pretty clever.

Thoreau, however, wonders whether “[t]here is value in training capable people to attain the level of intellectual sophistication that a good philosophy program instills.”

I submit that this conundrum is a catastrophic conflation of correlation with causation.  (I don’t even have an English Lit degree and I pulled off some pretty awesome polysyllabic alliteration there.  Govern yourselves accordingly.)

I’ve been reading a lot of The Last Psychiatrist lately, partly because he drinks more than I do but also because he’s put a fair bit of effort into unravelling why people send their kids to college at ruinous expense (mostly, but not always, to the kids) for absolutely no good goddamn reason at all.  In the first part of his epic Hipsters on Food Stamps rant — go ahead and click through, I’ll still be here in an hour when you’re done — he wonders:

I am not anti-liberal arts, I am all in on a classical education, I just don’t think there’s any possibility at all, zero, none, that you will get it at college, and anyway every single college course from MIT and Yale are on Youtube.  Is that any worse than paying $15k to cut the equivalent class at State?

Now, let me tell you a story a friend of mine loves to tell, from his perspective.  Text in brackets is mine.

The three of us — William [not his real name], me, and Matt, took Advanced Software Engineering last semester [or whenever].  It was basically User Interfaces In Java, although we saw the Design Patterns book for a few minutes in the second lecture.  William loved that shit, so he went to all the lectures, and he got a seven [out of nine].  I didn’t really care, so I skipped most of the lectures, and somehow I got an eight.  But Matt only attended the first lecture, the midterm, and the final, and he got a nine in that class.

(Yes, I’m the Matt in that story.)

I tell you that not to convince you that I’m amazing — the Ph.D. will have either done that already or convinced you irretrievably otherwise by now — but to convince you that that course was a waste of my fucking money.  Not my time, I spent all of maybe twenty hours on it that semester, and I can’t say it wasn’t a little bit educational.  I learned that I hate Java with the burning fire of a thousand suns, and also that 2000-vintage Swing was, while eminently hateable, better than anything else on the GUI-widget-set market at the time.  Also, in the first lecture one of the other guys in the class found out the hard way that he was colour-blind, so that was a thing.  I dunno what the fuck else I was supposed to have been educated upon in that course.  And they gave me the highest mark they could!

So if you’re an undergraduate programme committee member — and if you really are, I’m sorry — why would you put a course like that on the required list in the syllabus?  There are a lot of excellent cynical reasons, but the only pedagogical reason I can come up with is “so that every student we graduate must demonstrate, at the end of a semester of either skipping or attending class, that s/h/it knows how to make a calculator in Java.”  Actually I did that in high school, but thanks for taking four months to make me prove it to you.

This is not to say that I got no knowledge or skills of value from my undergrad.  If nothing else, the compilers course was worth the price of admission (and if you’re a CS student reading this blog, for fuck’s sake take a compilers course, it will change your life).  But I kind of doubt that I had to go to university to learn any of this stuff… maybe I had to go to university to be persuaded to study LL languages before attempting to write a compiler, but if you’re reading this sentence you don’t.  In any case compilers wasn’t a required course; I selected into it (as did both of my friends from the anecdote above).  And, of course, I got a B.Sc. and a GPA that convinced a grad school to admit me, whence I got a Ph.D. and a bunch of publications, whence I got a useful job.

And that last sentence is my point.

There will ever be more Norman Borlaugs

What’s that I hear?  Is it scientists humiliating the sad crisis-mongering neo-Malthusians?  Must be a weekday, then.

• Turning grass and trees into food: Neo-Malthusians mocked by human ingenuity again (Reason Hit & Run)

Good show!

Honest contempt, its hour come at last, slouches toward Pennsylvania to be born

By way of Andrew Sullivan we discover that the University of Pennsylvania Health System is gonna stop hiring smokers.  Ostensibly this is intended to reduce health-care costs, but as any fule no smokers tend to cost “the system” less over their lifetimes because their lifetimes tend to be rather short.  (I admit that it might be arrogant to expect a university’s health system making economic decisions to be current on health economics research, but fuck you, that’s how I roll.)

No, this escalation from nudge to shove — as with the attempted high-capacity assault soda ban in New York City — is simply an expression of contempt.  Smoking is a blue-collar working-class habit, and the clerisy in UPenn doesn’t want any of (shudder) them on its staff.  If you dig far enough down the Penn Medicine page, in fact, you’ll find this gem:

Faculty and staff who are employed by the University are not subject to this policy.

Uh huh.  A nurse smoking a Marlboro is filthy and irresponsible.  A prof smoking a Gauloise is culturally diverse.

“When it works, it’s magical!”

That’s great.  How often does it work?

Frances Woolley writes on Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer’s decision to forbid telecommuting:

• Collegiality as a positive externality (Worthwhile Canadian Initiative)

I think you can get the point of her post from the title.  But on to specifics — as a supporting anecdote, Dr. Woolley offers this:

Last week I had lunch at Nuffield College, Oxford. It was a wonderful experience. All the members of the college – faculty, graduate students, administrative staff – roll up some where around lunch time and help themselves to a free all-you-can-eat-buffet. They sit together on long wooden tables and talk about everything under the sun – from hitchhiking adventures to the latest research projects to academic politics to philosophy. Intellectual bliss.

Collegial mind-meetings are great when they happen.  How often do they happen?  Perhaps Oxford is an enchanted paradise where learned collegiality is always right around the corner and staff lunches that discuss academic politics never turn into wretched hives of academic politics manifest — we can hope that Oxfordites are not only aware of the use-mention distinction but are also able to apply it — but that argues more for the exceptional nature of Oxford than it does for having lunch with your colleagues.  (Also, how many of us can rely upon a free all-you-can-eat buffet to draw us into that intellectual bliss?)

Dr. Woolley also enumerates some positive externalities of working on site:

When a collegial, creative, sensible or helpful person comes into the office, he or she creates positive externalities – unpriced benefits – for co-workers. When that person stays at home, they produce negative externalities – a closed door, an empty space, a crackling conference call connection.

Well, okay, the positive externalities of on-site work are implicit, while the negative externalities of working from home are enumerated.  This boils down to “great co-workers are great to have around”, which is hard to argue against… except that not all co-workers are great in all ways all the time.  That gregarious extrovert who manages to make meetings fun?  His cellphone buzzes like a giant angry wasp every time he gets a text, which is every five minutes.  The cheerful veteran who knows the codebase inside and out and is happy to take the time to walk you through it?  Talks so loud you can hear him through three office partitions and a concrete structural wall.

Collegiality is great… some of the time.

Alex Tabarrok takes a more skeptical view of the live experience, this time related to teaching:

• Online education and jazz (Marginal Revolution)

A common responses to my article, Why Online Education Works, is that there is something special, magical, and “almost sacred” about the live teaching experience. I agree that this is true for teaching at its best but it’s also irrelevant.

[...]

In The Trouble With Online Education Mark Edmundson makes the analogy between teaching and music explicit:

Every memorable class is a bit like a jazz composition.

Quite right but every non-memorable class is also a bit like a jazz composition, namely one that was expensive, took an hour to drive to (15 minutes just to find parking) and at the end of the day wasn’t very memorable. The correct conclusion to draw from the analogy between live teaching and live music is that at their best both are great but both are also costly and inefficient ways of delivering most teaching and most musical experiences.

Yes, quite.  I’ve spent a lot of time in classrooms, and I’ve had a lot of memorable experiences.  Problem is, the bad memories outnumber the good memories by about ten to one.  (Remove public school from consideration — focus only on postsecondary — and the ratio drops to about two to one.)  Furthermore, I’m not convinced that there’s any correlation between “memorable classroom experiences” and “subjects I learned well”.

Who ought to pay for college, and how?

Chatting with a friend today about this post from Megan McArdle, I mentioned that figuring out how to pay for college — in general terms, not “You should get a part-time job”-like specifics — is kind of a tough problem.  My friend disagreed rather cryptically.  So you get a blog post.

The default assumption among the crowd I hang out with is “college should be free”, which translates to “college should be paid for by governments”, which again translates to “college should be paid for by taxpayers”.  This is odious on its face.  While I’m sure many of these folks have mental images of Whitey McRichfucker sobbing to his Congresscritter about how he couldn’t afford the Rolls he wanted — he had to settle for a Bentley, like a plebeian — because of the 50% Higher Education Surtax he paid this year, a quick examination of how rich people pay taxes in reality (the parable of Warren Buffett and his secretary will suffice) indicates that this isn’t how governments pay for anything, much less for college.  No, any tax revenue you’re going to direct towards college probably comes in large part from the working and middle classes — a large proportion of which didn’t go to college  – or their employers, and any debt you issue simply belongs to future versions of the same.  Then there’s the opportunity cost complaint you’ll have to deal with in parallel: Money being fungible, any gov-bucks you direct towards paying for college tuitions are gov-bucks that could have bought homeless shelters or immunization programmes.

Coupled with the fact that colleges are still by and large the province of the “pretty well-off” to the “filthy rich”, advocates for publicly-funded college education are (much like sports fans) advocates of hideously regressive transfers.  I’m a heartless libertarian and that makes me cringe.

The one argument I halfway respect in favour of universal public tuition funding is the notion that getting a college education makes for “better” citizens (making the general public freeloaders on educations they didn’t somehow pay for) or, in aggregate, that a population of college-educated people is somehow “better” (making it more of a collective-action problem).  Both forms of the argument assert that my degree makes you better off — and, crucially, that this benefit is not already captured by my salary (or wage, or whatever).  I remain unpersuaded.  It’s possible that a college degree makes people better citizens, or better voters (though from what I’ve seen of campus politics I suspect it makes them worse) but I’ve only heard this asserted, never dignified with actual data.

(I should mention that I rather approve of means-tested tuition-support bursaries.)

So probably tuitions should be paid by the students themselves, or perhaps by their loving parents (or for particularly extreme scholars, by Red Bull).  Problem is, by and large, younger adults are severely lacking in both cash and credit, so no bank’s likely to lend them money straight up.  The pecuniary benefit of a college degree is only likely to manifest after — probably well after — graduation, and as Bryan Caplan recently showed it’s not something that pays off in half measures: If you drop out three years into your degree, you don’t get three-quarters of the wage premium.  There’s a whole bunch of uncertainty involved in picking a school and a programme, in financial terms and otherwise.

Furthermore, tuition rates do an utterly abysmal job of communicating these factors, which is pretty much what prices in any halfway-functioning market are supposed to do.  So even if our intrepid students can scrape up the dosh to go to college, they don’t get much help making any kind of informed tradeoff based on what they want versus what they’re willing to pay versus what they’ll get from any given option.  (That is, unless “what they want” involves the NCAA almost exclusively.)  Instead, back in the real world, they get showered with cheap debt and encouraged to buy whatever strikes their fancy, under the blithe assumption that of course they’ll be able to pay it all back some day.  Sound like anything you recognize from… 2006, maybe?

I don’t have any solutions to offer, but I surely admire the problem.  The usual libertarian-SF answer-trope is, as Ms. McArdle mentions, for private investors to buy shares in students’ future incomes.  Given that the state won’t even let you buy a kidney to save your nephropathic child’s life, the odds of this ever happening on a broad basis are pretty dismal.  If we think of this particular trope as the higher-ed equivalent of venture capitalism, it suggests that we look at other ways in which people start businesses, it suggests that an alternative is the usual “start small, exploit local knowledge of a specific market, and grow sustainably” — the autodidact’s path.  Unfortunately, the education premium seems largely to be built on certification effects (think of colleges much like licensing cartels), so this is unlikely to become a particularly viable alternative any time soon.

Higher-ed bubble watch, north-of-the-border edition

One of these days I’d like to use the very same title for a blog post about postsecondary inflation in Alaska, just to fuck with people.

Anyway, the Globe and Mail is running a pretentiously-titled feature on postsecondary education in Canada called “Our Time To Lead”.  It features this rather exhaustive discussion of our higher-ed bubble:

• Can Canada’s schools pass the next great intelligence test?

As per the standard template for these stories, it leads off with a Special Snowflake who shuns the sciences for an Arts degree, claims to find that “it’s more important to be happy than financially secure”, and “always thought of [an undergraduate education] as knowledge for the sake of knowledge.”  Cue juxtaposition with a multicredentialed graduate whose Master’s degrees in History and Education can’t get him a job as a schoolteacher in Toronto, so he’s folding towels at a gym alongside teenagers he’d like to be teaching.  And, of course:

And to think, he says, he once looked down on high-school friends for heading west after Grade 12 to land jobs in the oil industry.

“I thought they didn’t understand the importance of university. Now, I see them beginning a phase of life I wanted to have right now,” he says.

You know what they say, guys: Syncrude’s always hiring.

You will find the list of complaints that follows to be tediously familiar:

• Students saddened when they don’t feel “challenged” or “engaged” by two hundred-seat first-year lectures taught (variously) by distant, distracted, research-focused professors or harried, harassed, and underpaid adjuncts and TAs;
• Faculty frustrated with undergraduates who arrive ill-prepared, who can neither construct a sentence nor factor a quadratic, and who “prefer to amble leisurely through a four-year degree like consumers ordering an education to go”; and
• Employers exasperated with graduates who present themselves without critical communication and problem-solving skills.

We’ll charitably look past the juxtaposition of undergrads who see university as a temple of Higher Learning, rather than a crass skill-factory churning out employees for consumption by the Great Corporate Maw, and those that complain that they’re not being taught relevant job skills.  Perhaps those two sets of students are independent.  (Perhaps, if you were in the second set, you even know what it means for two sets to be independent — although if you’re anything like the comp-sci undergrads alongside whom I suffered you probably don’t consider set algebra to be a relevant job skill.  If that’s the case, then God willing, your DBA will drag you out into the parking lot and beat you with a rubber hose like your Intro Databases prof should have.  Look: Now even I’m complaining about Universities These Days.)

The verbiage that follows contains an eloquent anecdote in support of the signaling theory of education:

The head of a trucking company told Dr. Weingarten that he hired only university grads as truckers. The cab of a truck is complicated, he said, as are the logistics of warehousing. In any case, “if I have two students come to me, both prepared to be a truck driver and work for x amount of money, and one of them has a degree, why shouldn’t I hire the university grad?”

Why indeed?

It also points to a rather compelling story about the inflation of the higher-ed bubble, at least on this side of the 49th (opening caveat obviously excluded), which begins with this delightful piece of omphaloskepsis:

“Whom does the university serve – the students, their families, the faculty?” asks Ken Coates, the Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation at the University of Saskatchewan and co-author of Campus Confidential, which explores how the system’s failure to manage a growing student population has eroded the quality and value of a degree. “As long as they are publicly funded institutions, shouldn’t we be focused on how we serve society as a whole?”

Are universities — and/or university educations — designed or expected to serve “society as a whole”?  We surely shovel enough public funds at them.  (Sorry, homeless people, Ken Coates needs a Canada Research Chair in Regional Innovation!  Maybe we’ll build you a shelter next fiscal year.)  Indeed they are, as Canada’s fourth most-beloved Prime Minister, Lester B. Pearson, would tell you:

[T]he loftier ambition of liberal education has always been to create citizens who are well-read, critical thinkers, strong communicators and civically engaged – the qualities Mr. Pearson lauded when he told the students that a degree called on them “to serve their country” and not themselves.

(It is perhaps too lofty an ambition of journalism programmes to create writers who can use the Oxford Comma properly.  We’ll let that pass.)

This is a bit of a creepy ambition to rabid individualists like me — it reads like a tepid Canadian mandate to transform malleable, putty-like young adults into a rather diffident set of New Socialist Men.  But have a read at another Pearson sound bite:

“Will the emphasis on wise and unhurried teaching and research be replaced by the demand and the dimensions of a knowledge economy?”

Maybe the best way to serve your country rather than yourself would be to forego that taxpayer-subsidized four-year vacation in the Land of the Liberal Arts and pick up a B.Sc. and a good job in that knowledge economy, eh hippy?  It brings to mind this admonition from P. J. O’Rourke’s commencement address:

Don’t chain yourself to a redwood tree. Instead, be a corporate lawyer and make $500,000 a year. No matter how much you cheat the IRS, you’ll still end up paying $100,000 in property, sales and excise taxes. That’s $100,000 to schools, sewers, roads, firefighters and police. You’ll be doing good for society.

How many people are willing to chain themselves to a seventy-hour work week in order to “do good for society” by bumping themselves into the highest tax bracket?  Some sacrifices, especially the chronic and banal, are too great to make for an abstract ideal.  Fuck civic virtue.  But don’t let’s pretend that you’re serving your country by studying Keats and Kant rather than Kronecker and Kepler.

There’s a less theoretical and more immediate benefit to shovelling people into post-secondary institutions, too: It keeps them out of the unemployment numbers.

As James Côté, co-author of Lowering Higher Education, points out, the government’s postsecondary cheerleading solved the supply problem of youth labour by parking them on campus. But it failed to plan for how graduates would find work related to their field of study. Canada has one of the highest graduate underemployment rates among Western countries, swelling the ranks of Keats-quoting baristas.

The classical education so beloved by fictional terrorist Hans Grüber, and which is the inspiration for if not the fact of many modern Bachelor’s of Arts curricula, is an aristocratic relic.  It’s a nostalgic throwback to a class and age when gainful employment was considered vulgar rather than laudable.  It, along with with the marked diaeresis, should perhaps be reëxamined.

A pair of tidbits on public transit

Because fuck my commute right in its furry little ear.

——

Rush-hour public transit is a special hell for introverts because it puts us unavoidably in close contact with other Hated Fellow Bipeds.  Some of those fellow travellers place a quite unreasonable emphasis upon “being sociable” or “friendliness”, which brings with it the need for those of us who don’t want to help you talk about your day to post the nonverbal equivalent of “please die in a crotch fire” without being so offensive as to draw even more attention.  Yale University sociologist Esther Kim actually managed to get published for documenting said FOAD signals:

• How to use psychological tactics to avoid strangers on a bus (Wired Magazine)

Kim systematized the unspoken rules into a list of strategies commonly used to keep a free seat:

• Avoid eye contact.
• Lean against the window and stretch out your legs.
• Sit on the aisle seat and listen to music to pretend not to hear people asking for the window seat.
• Place a large bag or multiple items in the empty seat to make it time-consuming to move.
• Look out the window with a blank stare to appear crazy.
• Pretend to be asleep.
• Put your coat on the seat to make it appear already taken.
• If all else fails, lie: Say the seat has been taken by someone else.

Good thing someone published that list in a high-impact factor journal or I would never have guessed that those tactics weren’t utterly sincere.

But “keep a free seat” isn’t the only motivation driving transit asshattery, and if you’ve ever actually commuted by bus you can probably guess what comes next:

The game changed, however, when drivers announced a bus would be full. Riders just wanted to avoid the “crazy” person and sit next to a “normal” person.

Kim found that race, class and gender weren’t key concerns when commuters realized someone had to sit next them. They were primarily concerned with maintaining their own safety.

Shockingly, people really don’t want to get assaulted.  Yeah, I’m surprised too.  This is my surprised face.

“Ultimately this nonsocial behavior is due to the many frustrations of sharing a small public space together for a lengthy amount of time,” Kim said in the release. “Yet this deliberate disengagement is a calculated social action, which is part of a wider culture of social isolation in public spaces.”

Surprised.  Face.

——

We go from explaining asshattery on behalf of bus riders to explaining asshattery on behalf of bus-system-running freeriders.  Careful readers will recall Frances Woolley’s excellent piece on the conflicting goals of public transit systems: Getting poor people to work cheaply; getting rich people to work with a (we hope) reduced carbon footprint; and providing good jobs for unionized employees.  I submit that many — most? — public transit decisions are being made for a fourth reason: Accruing status to the system’s directors.

For example, greater Vancouver’s transit administration is running dangerously low on funds, to the point where it’s dipping into its cash reserves (bloated by some admirably canny real-estate deals during the recent boom) to cover operating expenses.  It has consequently cancelled a number of planned improvements and expansions to its commuter bus routes.  The decades-old Evergreen Line project, however, is pressing forward regardless — a stunning piece of triumphalism which just happens to parallel a major bus route in subsuburban Vancouver.  Were this about moving more people from Point A to Point B, it would surely suffice to (say) double the number of buses on that route, at lower cost and with greater flexibility.  This isn’t about making people’s commutes easier, though: it’s about self-satisfied triumphalism rising on brutalist concrete columns above the stuck-in-traffic masses.  Who cares if it bankrupts Translink?  They can just blame the provincial and municipal governments for not wanting to raise taxes in an election year.

 

“What is the purpose of college?” is too broad a question

By way of Tyler Cowen we find this rather good piece by Noah Smith:

• College is mostly about human capital, not signalling

As Tyler says, RTWT.  It’s interesting, and probably insightful.  But I part company with Smith right about here:

Economists (including at least one in my PhD graduating class) have dedicated untold numbers of papers to showing that college doesn’t produce useful skills. But I think that this is missing the point; useful skills, which you mostly learn on the job, are not the only valuable form of human capital. There are three extremely important forms of human capital that you can’t acquire on the job:

1) Motivation,

2) Perspective, and

3) Human networks.

These, I believe, are the types of capital that college is designed to build, both in Japan and in the United States.

(Emphasis added.)

For most people, “college” means a four-year bachelor’s degree, so that’s what I’ll focus on.  In my case, I gained the vast majority of my motivation and perspective in a single 16-month internship.  Everyone else I spoke with in my cohort of the internship programme reported the same thing.  As for human networks, I’ve remained in touch with a whole three people I met in undergrad (and if we’re keeping score, none from the internship), but I treat human networking much the same way as I treat getting up before ten or owning a phone — an irritating and distasteful thing I have to do in order to make interacting with the rest of you meatbags a less painful process on the whole — so I’m probably not all that representative.

On the other hand, my undergrad education did a fucking amazing job of teaching me useful skills.  On my very first day at that internship, I sent my 300-level algorithms prof a gushing thank-you email for beating graph algorithms so thoroughly into my head.  I learned Perl and XML on the job, among other specific skills, but if I’d had to learn (say) software engineering and graph theory on an as-needed basis I’d have produced some truly awful and inefficient code.  (Incidentally, that’s how I learned differential geometry in grad school — “on the job”, “as-needed” — and I’d have been much better off simply auditing a course in the math department.)

So is Noah Smith simply wrong?  Not really; his post is credible and insightful.  But I think it highlights a difference between STEM fields — which require a broad and deep background of specialized training before job-specific “useful skills” can be applied — and traditional liberal-arts fields.  Let’s chuck law and medical school in with STEM, there; I think it’s clear that freshly-minted doctors aren’t expected to learn anatomy on the job.  (Either that or I’m staying the fuck away from hospitals.)  I get the feeling that this scratches the surface of the perennial “how to fix higher ed” question.