Momentary Language

Despite rising costs, the most selective colleges are now an even better deal for students

In her recent paper, "The Changing Selectivity of American Colleges," Caroline Hoxby notes that the US higher ed landscape is characterized by a marked disparity in selectivity:

This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then.

Hoxby suggests that much of this increasing disparity in selectivity can be explained by the decreasing importance that students now place on the location of schools relative to their hometowns and increasing emphasis placed on college resources and the composition of the student body:

students used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body. It is the consequent re-sorting of students among colleges that has, at once, caused selectivity to rise in a small number of colleges while simultaneously causing it to fall in other colleges.

Two of the upshots of Hoxby's analysis is that the stakes associated with the college selection process might well be higher than ever for prospective college students, and that -- despite recent complaints that college costs have been rising too quickly -- the most selective colleges might now be offering even better value-for-money than in earlier decades:

that the integration of the market for college education has had profound implications on the peers whom college students experience, the resources invested in their education, the tuition they pay, and the subsidies they enjoy. An important finding is that, even though tuition has been rising rapidly at the most selective schools, the deal students get there has arguably improved greatly. The result is that the "stakes" associated with admission to these colleges are much higher now than in the past.

The crisis of the US university?

We've noticed a fever-pitch in diagnoses of a crisis in US higher education in the media and on the blogs over the past months.

It's somewhat hard to take such talk seriously, when one compares the nightmare visions depicted with the reality on the ground.

The most recent evidence for the reality: 13 of the top 20 universities on the QS world rankings are located in the United States.  (And not one of them has abolished tenure yet.)

Here they go again

This time it's the Economist's turn, repeating the old saw -- heard so often in recent months -- that American higher education "may go the way of GM."  (Where have we heard exactly the same comparison before?)

What is "Schumpeter"'s reason for thinking that, "If colleges were businesses, they would be ripe for hostile takeovers, complete with cost-cutting and painful reorganizations," in the words of a passage from US News & World Report that the author quotes approvingly?

1. Increasing costs - particularly at the Ivies and other elite institutions - to pay for such nonessentials as "academic reputation ... and bling (luxurious dormitories and fancy sports stadiums) rather than value for money."
2. Increasing emphasis on research rather than on teaching, as exemplified by the fact "that senior professors in Ivy League universities now get sabbaticals every third year."
3. Administrative bloat.

All of this, says "Schumpeter" -- and performance is sinking:

• Only 40% of students graduate in four years.
• "The Kauffman Foundation, which studies entrepeneurship, argues that the productivity of federal funding for R&D, in terms of patents and licenses, has been falling for some years."

I love the Economist, but in this case "Schumpeter" guilty of playing fast and loose with the data.

How, you may ask?

1. We've dealt with some of these issues before -- for example, how the examples of profligacy and emphasis on research productivity are hardly representative of the range of colleges and universities in the US.  This criticism still holds.
2. Furthermore, when "Schumpeter" cites profligacy and coddling of professors, examples are taken from the crème de la crème; when the stat that only 40% of students graduate is cited, this is an average across all degree-granting institutions.  Honesty would require that "Schumpeter" compare apples to apples.  Those expensive schools at which professors spend so much time researching?  Their graduation rates are closer to 90%.  Perhaps you get what you pay for.
3. As for the Kauffman study on scientific and technological productivity in higher ed, if "Schumpeter" had taken the time to consult Kauffman's own blog, it would have become clear that the problem is less one of research productivity than of commercialization and licensing of those research products.

What are we left with?  There remains the problem of (a) spending wars on lavish dorms and facilities and (b) administrative bloat.

Neither of these problems, however, are the result of the Academy's self-image as an isolated cloud-cuckoo land.  The former problem, those spending wars for lavish facilities to attract students, is simply a function of the market for attracting the interest -- and money -- of students and their parents.  Surely the Economist likes markets.

And the latter problem, that of administrative bloat, of university presidents "conduct[ing] themselves like corporate titans, with salaries, perks, and entourages to match"?

I'd suggest it's too many university senior administrators acting as if, in the words of that US News quote, "colleges were businesses."

Nonsense on stilts (cont.): Camille Paglia edition

The utterly unfounded assault on the Academy and the liberal arts continues -- this time from Camille Paglia (here).

As in the case of Mark C. Taylor and others, Paglia introduces her discussion under the pretense of analyzing the effect of the Great Recession on higher education.  Paglia then uses that pretense as an excuse for a further attack on the liberal arts that is utterly devoid of any foundation in evidence.

Paglia begins her piece with a string of flat assertions unsupported by even the hint of data:

• "Meaningful employment is no longer guaranteed to dutiful, studious members of the middle class in the Western world."

Fact check: according to recent figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate among college graduates was 4.5% -- less than half that of those with only a high school education.

• "College education, which was hugely expanded after World War II and sold as a basic right, is doing a poor job of preparing young people for life outside of a narrow band of the professional class."

Fact check: unlike earlier decades in which a college education was seen as preparation for life as a "man in a gray flannel suit," college grads can be both motorcycle mechanics and Fellows at the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture. 

Particularly if one is concerned with preparation for life -- and not merely preparation for a career -- there is no evidence at all to suggest that the lives of college graduates are more impoverished or less fulfilled than those of non-graduates.

• "There is little flexibility in American higher education to allow for alternative career tracks."

Fact check: see previous.

So all of Paglia's unwarranted assertions are dubious at best.  What about her suggested remedies?

Paglia's big-picture remedy is the gutting of the liberal arts.  She suggests:

Jobs, and the preparation of students for them, should be front and center in the thinking of educators. The idea that college is a contemplative realm of humanistic inquiry, removed from vulgar material needs, is nonsense.

Of course, if this were taken seriously, many educators would have to abandon their chosen professions.  Philosophy?  Clearly not germane in an education system in which "the idea that college is a contemplative realm ... removed from vulgar material needs ... is nonsense."

Okay, perhaps that's not so terrible -- who cares about the philosophers, anyway? However, there would also be no need for theoretical mathematicians (other than to teach prerequisites for engineering, econ, etc.), physicists (ditto), astronomers (at all), biologists (other than for pre-med requirements), cognitive psychologists, historians, ... the list goes on.

What about how Paglia herself boils down her big-picture lesson into a more immediate solution for higher education?  Here's her solution, in her own words:

Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.

Wow.

The Great Recession has seen the utter collapse of the housing industry, and with it the attendant loss of thousands of jobs in construction and handwork trades, and Paglia's brilliant solution is ... to train more people for those jobs that no longer exist. 

Remember those statistics cited above -- working class peers with young children are finding it increasingly harder to support themselves and their families in an increasingly tight job market.  Add to this the increasingly small share of wealth belonging to those working class families, and Paglia's prescription becomes even more baffling.

One might have thought that a better diagnosis would lead to a recommendation that we do a better job both of training college students for the complex, ever-changing, information-intensive, highly quantitative, cosmopolitan jobs that will become increasingly more important in the 21st century global economy, and of training them for the many hours of the week when they are not working -- training them to appreciate fine art, literature, the marvels of science, the joys of community service ... wherever it is that their passions take them when they are not at their paying jobs.

Paglia's solution, in contrast, is to prepare students for the jobs of the 18th century, where perhaps -- in her romantic vision -- under a spreading chestnut tree a village smithy stands.  (Longfellow's pre-industrial idyll was already becoming an outdated romanticization when he wrote it!)

That the Chronicle would publish such absolute drivel is completely baffling ... not to mention depressing.

WHAT'S the case for abolishing tenure?

In a recent post on Slate, "The case for getting rid of tenure", Christopher Beam seems largely to rehash points made by Mark C. Taylor against the tenure system. These points have received a great deal of attention elsewhere (e.g., here), so I thought it useful to consider them in detail, point by point.

1. Tenure is expensive.

Here Beam:

Mark C. Taylor, chair of the Columbia University department of religion and author of the forthcoming Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities, calculates that someone who serves as an associate professor for five years and then gets tenure for 30 years costs a private university $12.2 million. Public universities pay $10 million over the same period.

I don't know about Taylor, who as an expert in Derridean deconstruction is perhaps seeking to overthrow the phallocentric hegemony of basic arithmetic, but Beam, as a putative journalist, ought at least to apply a little common sense to these numbers.

$12.2 million over 30 years would mean that an associate professor at the -- average! -- private university would be earning around $400,000 a year. Even if one includes benefits like health insurance, 401K, etc., I know of very few star professors at even the top universities who earn that much.

Furthermore, I don't understand the argument here. Even if there were no tenure, universities would still have to pay their faculty. Suppose we thought that a fair system of remuneration would reward experienced faculty on a non-tenure system an average of $120,000 per year, including benefits. If those faculty are doing well, the university would do well to retain them -- say, for 25 years or so. Over the course of those 25 years, the cost to the university would be $3 million.

According to Inside Higher Ed (here), the average salary for a full professor in 2008 was slightly over $100K -- with benefits, close to our figure of $120K per year. This means that right now, under the current system, the cost to the university is the same as it would be without tenure.

This, of course, assumes that we wish to retain good teachers, pay them for their skills adequately, offer salary increases that keep pace with inflation, etc.  Note, however, that except for retention, tenure itself does not tie an institution's hands with respect to any other aspect of the contract between professor and institution.

So the cost argument is utterly bogus. It's embarrassing for Taylor to make it (he ought to know better); it's perhaps more embarrassing for others to parrot it unthinkingly.

2. Tenure, because it forces professors to focus on their research, is bad for students.

Again, Beam:

Then there's the effect of tenure on students. "Publish or perish" is the maxim of tenure-track professors. The corollary, of course, would be "teach and perish." Tenure committees claim to weigh publishing and teaching equally, but in practice publishing counts most. Taylor recalls a colleague winning a teaching award early in his career. Mentors urged him not to put it on his résumé. When the best young teachers focus their energies on writing rather than teaching, students pay the price.

This is one piece of fallacious reasoning after another.

First of all, as a factual matter, it is far from true that tenure committees at all schools weigh publishing and teaching equally; at many schools, teaching is weighted more heavily than publishing.

Second of all, even at those schools at which "publishing counts most," it does not follow from this that teaching is not valued.

I'll ignore Taylor's use of a single anecdote to prove a case as beneath contempt; for Beam to editorialize from this single case that "the best young teachers focus their energies on writing rather than teaching" is simply shoddiest journalism of the worst sort.

Finally, one ought to note that, again, this is NOT an argument against the tenure system. Even if it were the case that all schools did weight publishing inordinately (which -- again -- is not the case), this would at best be an argument for tenure reform, rather than abolition.

Since, as a matter of fact, there is a wide variation in the extent to which publishing plays a role in the tenure process, this would seem to be a situation in which prospective students can "vote with their feet" in choosing the extent to which they wish their school to value professors who publish.

The fact that many of those students are choosing schools like UC Berkeley, Wash U in St. Louis, Oberlin, and Yale, among many others, would suggest that many students at least don't object to professors who devote time to research.

3. Tenure promotes intellectual inflexibility.

Beam, again channeling Taylor:

Just as tenure creates economic inflexibility, it also creates intellectual inflexibility. By hiring someone for life, a school gambles that his or her ideas are going to be just as relevant in 35 years. Tenure can also discourage interdisciplinary studies, since professors are rewarded for plumbing deep into an established subject area rather than connecting two different ones.

The first criticism here incorrectly assumes that one's ideas are static. This is seldom the case, however. Few academics maintain their reputations merely because their early work remained relevant over the span of decades. (Note the "merely"! Many academics had big ideas whose early work remained relevant. For three examples off the top of my head: E. O. Wilson, Thomas Kuhn, Noam Chomsky.) However, many academics themselves remain relevant because they are founts of ideas over the span of decades -- many ideas, changing over time.

The second criticism here seems wrong on its face. The examples of academics who, post-tenure, use the increased security that tenure provides to stray outside of their more narrow disciplinary comfort zones are too numerous to mention, but would seem to include such public intellectuals as Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, Stephen J. Gould ... and, yes, Mark C. Taylor, certainly no disciplinary expert on higher education policy.

4. Tenure makes professors lazy.

Critics say that tenure hurts students by making professors lazy. Course loads vary widely from school to school: At some public universities, professors teach nine or 10 courses. At smaller schools, they teach as few as one or two, totaling as few as 140 classroom hours a year. If you can't be fired, what's to stop you from refusing to teach an extra course? "I honestly don't know what a lot of academics do a lot of the time," says Taylor.

Again, course loads are separate from tenure -- as is evident from the fact that such loads, as stated in the quote, vary widely from school to school.

Thus, the only issue relating to tenure is that tenure protects professors from being forced to work unpaid overtime. Note that it does not protect them from teaching whatever course load is normal at their institution -- be it 5 courses per semester or less (or more).

In other words, this argument against tenure also reveals itself to be utterly specious.

5. Tenure is bad for academics themselves.

But the clincher for the anti-tenure argument may come from the very people it is supposed to benefit: academics. Specifically, young academics. Consider the career path of an aspiring full-time tenured professor: Four years of college, six years getting a doctorate, four to six years as a post-doc, and then six years on the tenure track. By the time you come up for tenure, you're 40. For men, the timeline is inconvenient. But for women who want to have children, it's just about unworkable.

That's one reason the number of full-time tenured professors has dropped so much in the past few decades: Women have joined the academic work force, but some have opted to take a part-time role.

I don't even understand the argument in the first quoted paragraph. Since tenure takes a significant time investment in order to achieve, we ought to abolish it altogether? I can't begin to address this one, because I can't imbue it with even the semblance of rationality.

The second quoted paragraph is stunning because of the evidence it provides of Beam's complete lack of knowledge of the facts in the higher education landscape. The reason the number of full-time tenured professors has dropped so much is because the tenure system is being dismantled in favor of the hiring of poorly paid adjuncts and graduate teaching assistants -- often to the detriment of undergraduate education. (On this point, see, for example this 2008 article in Inside Higher Ed.)

To imply, to the contrary, that the shrinking numbers of tenure-line positions in higher education is due, to any significant degree, to a choice on the part of academic job-seekers would be like implying that the large number of child laborers in Victorian England was because unemployed adults preferred to let the little tykes have something to do with their time.

What was he thinking?

I always thought Crick was the smart one. This proves it. (Here is a link to the Times of London, to which Watson first made his remarks.)

Rorty as the mirror of philosophy (1931-2007)

When I began reading analytic philosophy seriously in the early 1990's, my introduction to the contemporary scene was Richard Rorty -- particularly his books Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and, more importantly, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

His breezy, seemingly superficial conversational style ... and, perhaps more significantly, his hard-won hostility to what he perceived to be the aridity of philosophy in the analytic tradition ... made Rorty, in some ways, ill-suited to be a popularizer of contemporary work in philosophy, even of philosophers whom he admired, like Quine or Davidson. Nevertheless, those very traits made for work that was always engaging, unfailingly provocative, and often brilliant.

As reported by Todd Gitlin, Rorty died on Friday, June 8, 2007. His voice will be missed.

[See also the discussion of Rorty at Waggish, here. Now they tell me ... the NY Times has finally posted an obit here.]

Paul Cohen (April 2, 1934 – March 23, 2007)

According to the AP, Paul Cohen, the mathematician noted for his revolutionary work in set theory, has died. The American Mathematical Society describes his contribution thus:

He made fundamental contributions to mathematical logic, mathematical analysis, and partial differential equations. In particular in solving Hilbert's first problem, "Cantor's Problem on the Cardinal of the Continuum," in which he proved that the axiom of choice and the generalized continuum hypothesis are independent of Zermelo Fraenkel Set Theory, he introduced the powerful technique of forcing, which today remains one of the basic tools in set theory.

Here's a quote from Cohen's Set Theory and the Continuum Hypothesis (p. 151):

A point of view which [I feel] may eventually come to be accepted is that [the continuum hypothesis] is obviously false. The main reason one accepts the axiom of infinity is probably that we feel it absurd to think that the process of adding only one set at a time can exhaust the entire universe. Similarly with the higher axioms of infinity. Now [creating] the set of countable ordinals ... is merely a special and the simplest way of generating a higher cardinal. The set C [the continuum] is, in contrast, generated by a totally new and more powerful principle, namely the power set axiom. It is unreasonable to expect that any description of a larger cardinal which attempts to build up that cardinal from ideas deriving from the replacement axiom can ever reach C. ... This point of view regards C as an incredibly rich set given to us by one bold new axiom, which can never be approached by any piecemeal process of construction. Perhaps later generations will see the problem more clearly and express themselves more eloquently.

“At least you got to say this for a liberal s.o.b. like Schlesinger — when his candidates go into action, he’s there writing speeches for them.”

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning historian and counselor to presidents, died yesterday in Manhattan at the age of 89. (The Times story is here.)

Traces of a many-hunekered soul

George Johnson is an exemplary science writer -- clear-headed, inquisitive, vivid, enthusiastic, and wide-ranging in his interests. Who better, then, to review a new book by Douglas Hofstadter, who exemplifies all of those traits as well -- and in spades!