Category Archives: Education

Is education really an investment?

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Education, particularly at the tertiary level, is usually viewed as an investment by economists. It’s a voluntary cost that you pay to get skills and qualifications that will increase your future wealth and prosperity. That metaphor is reflected in the wealth of research into the ‘rate of return’ on university study and the discussions of externalities from the accrual of skills.

Nonetheless, it is a controversial view since the investment metaphor is not a natural choice for most people. Indeed, most people refer to the fun they had at university, the people they met, and the parties they attended. These are the ‘consumption’ elements of university education in the language of economists; the parts that you would pay to enjoy then and there with no expectation of future benefits. Now, via Economic Logic, I see a paper that asks prospective students how they view tertiary education and finds that

…most students do appear to value college consumption amenities, including spending on student activities, sports, and dormitories. While this taste for amenities is broad-based, the taste for academic quality is confined to high-achieving students.

As summarised by the Economic Logician, “except for the top students, high school graduates do not care about academics at all. All they want is excellent “college consumption amenities.” And this likely explains why they learn so little while in college. Their focus is on the university as a consumption good, not an investment good.” The policy-maker’s view of the value of university and the student’s view are very different.

What does this mean for policy, then? Well, if the private value of university is largely in the consumption value then the total value is far higher than most estimates suggest since they are usually based entirely on investment value. That has implications for the level of the subsidy we want to provide to tertiary students. In addition to the efficiency questions we also need to ask whether,as a society, we want to heavily subsidise most students’ on an extended holiday?

Academies manipulate their intake

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The Guardian reports that

Some academy schools have been accused of manipulating admissions to improve results and using covert selection methods… A number of academy chains are seemingly more focused on expanding their empires than improving their existing schools.

Should we be surprised, and is it a major problem? On the first question, no, it is exactly what we’d expect. Through manipulating admissions and expanding their empires schools gain prestige and wealth. We may prefer them to do that through improving the attainment of students, but many will naturally attempt to use all possible means. The scope for doing so revolves around how closely the Government can contract for the outcomes it wants. As Hart, Shleifer, and Vishny say in their classic paper

…the case for in-house provision is generally stronger when non-contractible cost reductions have large deleterious effects on quality, when quality innovations are unimportant, and when corruption in government procurement is a severe problem. In contrast, the case for privatization is stronger when quality-reducing cost reductions can be controlled through contract or competition, when quality innovations are important, and when patronage and powerful unions are a severe problem inside the government.

So the trade-off when allowing more autonomy to schools is between the benefits of innovation–through either cost reduction or observable quality improvements–and the costs of unobservable reductions in the quality or equity of service delivery. We can never eliminate the costs, although the Academies Commission’s report suggests ways to improve the current monitoring; nonetheless the cost-benefit analysis may still be positive. What the Commission’s report doesn’t address is the other side of the equation: the gains from innovation in education and the benefits to students. Weighing those against the costs to equity will be the real test of the academies. If most of their innovations turn out to be new ways to game the system then they will have failed. If, on the other hand, there are significant increases in the quality or cost-effectiveness of education then the gaming detected in this report may be a side-show. On the second question, the report doesn’t give us answers.

A related point, made by Shleifer, is that we need to be careful about understanding the counterfactual. It may be that some academies are always able to select better students by some means. However, the locally funded school system usually exhibits obvious segregation, too. Even if there is some selection in academies, that needs to be compared to the current system’s level of segregation rather than looking at it in isolation.

University enrolments are down

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The FT reports that university enrolments in the UK have dropped 6% over last year, following a similar fall in the previous year. It speculates that this may be, in part, because “the rise in fees from £3,375 to an average of more than £8,000 appears to be suppressing demand.” No doubt the reduced subsidy has had an effect but we need to be careful with language here. The FT’s reporting suggests that demand has been ‘suppressed’ by the fall in the Government’s fee subsidy. It might be more accurate to say that the subsidy no longer inflates demand to the same extent.

The difference is important because the main justification given for subsidies is that tertiary education generates some wider benefit to society. The important question then is how great the benefit is relative to the subsidy, and so how much we want to subsidise to boost demand. Talking about ‘suppression’ implicitly assumes the optimality of the previous subsidy and ignores the distortionary effect that the subsidy has had on the market for tertiary education. If the externalities from tertiary education are small then it is entirely possible that the fall in student enrolments represents a welfare gain for society.

Performance evaluation of teachers

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From the AER:

…observable teacher characteristics like graduate education and experience are not typically correlated with increased productivity [among teachers]. Many researchers and policymakers have suggested that, under these conditions, the only way to adjust the teacher distribution for the better is to gather information on individual productivity through evaluation and then dismiss low performers. This paper offers evidence that evaluation can shift the teacher effectiveness distribution through a different mechanism: by improving teacher skill, effort, or both in ways that persist long-run.
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We find that teachers are more productive during the school year when they are being evaluated, but even more productive in the years after evaluation. A student taught by a teacher after that teacher has been through the Cincinnati evaluation will score about 10 percent of a standard deviation higher in math than a similar student taught by the same teacher before the teacher was evaluated.
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our estimates indicate that postevaluation improvements in performance were largest for teachers whose performance was weakest prior to evaluation, suggesting that teacher evaluation may be an effective professional development tool.

Not a surprising result but it’s always nice to have the empirics to back up your assertions.

Should student loans be bigger?

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I share Holly Walker’s concern about the plight of post-graduate students. She is disturbed by a new survey showing that

[post-graduate students] committed to finishing their study highlight[ed] concerns about being able to provide basic needs for themselves without access to the [recently cut student] allowance, such as food and shelter.

As Matt has discussed previously, it is hugely unfair that students do not enjoy the same safety net as the rest of society when they struggle to find employment during their studies. If they are making a genuine effort to find part-time work during their studies, they should have access to a benefit or allowance, just as anyone else does.

The more important question is whether they should be supported through their studies even if they choose not to engage in part-time work. In that case I don’t see a convincing rationale for providing free support to students. They are voluntarily investing in their human capital in anticipation of better opportunities for themselves in future. As we have discussed previously

[t]hree years after completing their degree, a bachelor’s graduate will earn 51% more than someone with only secondary qualifications. Someone with a master’s degree will earn 74% more and a doctoral graduate 120% more.

It makes sense that a person would invest in education to take advantage of those wage increases, along with all the other benefits of a tertiary education. However, it is hard to justify forcing the rest of the population to pay for their personal investment that they benefit from so greatly.

Nonetheless, some people find it hard to raise the money to attend university, despite the likelihood of higher future earnings. That is why we have a student loan scheme. If students are finding it difficult to pay their way during post-graduate study then it probably means that they are unable to borrow enough during their studies. That is because student borrowing is extremely expensive for the government, so the government limits its liability and costs by capping the level of borrowing. A simple solution would be to re-introduce interest on student loans, since the interest comprises the majority of the government’s cost of lending. That would allow the government to lend out more money to students at a lower cost.

Through that change we could allow students to live more comfortably during their studies, and ensure that the transfers to those, relatively wealthy, individuals do not become inequitably large.

The moral imperative of amoral theorising

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Luigi Zingales:

Oddly, most economists see their subject as divorced from morality. They liken themselves to physicists, who teach how atoms do behave, not how they should behave. But physicists do not teach to atoms, and atoms do not have free will. If they did, physicists would and should be concerned about how the atoms being instructed could change their behavior and affect the universe.
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My colleague Gary Becker pioneered the economic study of crime. Employing a basic utilitarian approach, he compared the benefits of a crime with the expected cost of punishment (that is, the cost of punishment times the probability of receiving that punishment). While very insightful, Becker’s model, which had no intention of telling people how they should behave, had some unintended consequences. A former student of Becker’s told me that he found many of his classmates to be remarkably amoral, a fact he took as a sign that they interpreted Becker’s descriptive model of crime as prescriptive. They perceived any failure to commit a high-benefit crime with a low expected cost as a failure to act rationally, almost a proof of stupidity.