voluntaryXchange

Yeah Online!

My university is trying to go big online. This is starting out with 2 graduate programs and a long-term alliance with a private firm. Mixed feelings everywhere about this (we’ve had 3 people strike out with MBA managerial economics, so I think that qualifies as a new inning or something).

Here’s a piece from the Chronicle entitled “Purdue Global Has Had a Rocky Start. Is It Growing Pains or a Sign of Trouble?” about Purdue’s experience after buying Kaplan.

Two and a half years later, the audacious deal is showing signs of trouble. Daniels, who had predicted that the deal would produce a “very substantial revenue stream,” has said that Purdue University Global, as the former Kaplan online programs are now known, is not “achieving the growth we thought we might.” The university’s annual financial report, released this month, shows that Purdue Global suffered a $43-million loss last year …

Hat tip to the vXassociatechair.

Measuring a Deep State

Here’s a proposal: one might measure the size and strength of a deep state by the inability to move parts of it out of a desirable central location.

For example, if our elected officials can’t readily move bureaucratic offices and departments out of the D.C. metropolitan area, then the deep state is quite strong. This point is made by askblog.

Or, since I work at a university, if you can’t move administrative offices out of administrative suites and buildings,  then the deep state within that school is quite strong.

Be Coachable

Bob Bowman: “The most important thing is, he’s very coachable.”

That’s a lesson most people could stand to learn. I know I could (although I’ve gotten better at this, with effort).

This video came from the vXyoungman, who was a competitive swimmer in high school.†

He brought this up to me in trying to explain what he got out of athletics (he’s a music major who wants to be concert pianist). He’s fairly assertive that a big problem in music is that a lot of players aren’t very coachable, and a lot of music “coaches” aren’t very constructive.

FWIW: He loves VV, the professor he’s worked with for 2 years.

† The video comes from an ABC show I’ve never heard of from 2009-10, Shaq vs.

Go SUU, Sort Of???

My school, Southern Utah University, was just ranked the 6th most conservative public college in the country.

I wouldn’t disagree. We had a sexuality class taught by biologists discontinued a few years ago due to complaints. And our last president and provost had us designated as Utah’s liberal arts university … and had to backtrack because locals didn’t understand the usage of the word liberal in that context.

Having said that, I wonder what other places are like: we had progressive student protesters saying bigoted things about economists last month.

It’s Divorce, Not Lower Income, That Hurts Teenagers

Kids are hurt by the divorce, not by the change in parental income.

New research separates the effects of divorce on teenagers into non-monetary and monetary components (e.g., different income due to divorce).

At least on the dimension of going to college, divorce has a big negative effect. Change in income (usually a loss) due to divorce seems to have little effect. 

Via Marginal Revolution.

When the Editors Don’t Read

For many years, people speculated about what journalism would look like when the kids who weren’t taught to write well grew up.

I’ve noticed a few times over the last 5 years that we seem to have reached that point. Consider:

How did an editor miss a word that is wrong outright, and a word deletion that’s merely kludgy in “… on score three points in first quarter …”?

This is from an unattributed Associated Press piece entitled "Fred Cox, former Vikings kicker, dies at age 80" on Foxnews.com.

FWIW: I remember watching Fred Cox play when I was little, and once upon a time owned his Topps card:

It’s worth $10 now. Thanks for throwing that out around 1977 mom. I was an investor with a plan. Promise.

FOH for FMOOWMP (Office Hours)

Students have big trouble with this … especially early in their college careers.

Hat tip to these two pieces from NPR on how to overcome your fear of office hours, and how office hours are particularly foreign to students from rural areas.

Cross-posted from SUU Macroblog, which is required reading for my macroeconomics classes.

The Insanity of High School Class Scheduling

Does it seem like your kid’s class schedule for high school was designed by monkeys?

I am in my 7th and last year of dealing with this. I put everything into Google Calendar so the family has access to the whole thing if they need it. It takes over 2 hours to do this. Here’s why.

The school has A and B days. Fair enough. That would be easy to enter into a schedule.

But … those alternate days of the week: so A days are MWF one week, and TT the next. So that doubles the amount of data entry.

But … … the beloved American 3 day weekend makes that worse. Someone requires that those days off be evenly split between A and B days. Practically, this means that several times during the year an ABABA is followed by an ABABA instead of a BABAB. That adds several special cases that have to be fixed individually.

But … … … our schools came up with the wonderful idea of late-in Wednesdays — because — you know — kids and teachers go to school too much. So there’s a different schedule for those days too, and they’re A’s and B’s too. Let’s use lower case letters for those. So, the basic week is either ABaBA or BAbAB.

But … … … … that’s not the end either. We have two teacher conference weeks each year. These are done on a short day schedule, but not the same short day schedule that they use for Wednesdays all year long. Some dim bulb decided it had to be a different one. So now we have the possibility of not ABaBA or BAbAB but the somewhat shortened ABaBA or BAbAB.

But … … … … … it still gets worse, because during those conference weeks, when they do a short A and B day, they also do Wednesdays that are both short and different. Let’s call those α and ß, so really we have ABαBA or BAßAB.

So, a student or parent, for each week, if it happens to be a full 5 day week, still needs to know if it’s an ABaBA or BAbAB or ABaBA or BAbAB. Google has the ability to repeat those, but because there are so many special cases, the longest pattern in the entire year is 8 instances, which occurs for MF and TT schedules for 4 pairs of consecutive weeks in early spring. Here’s what it ends up looking like over the 37 week school year:

AbAB (School starts on Tuesday, rather than Monday)

ABaBA

BAbAB

AbAB (Same pattern repeated, but Monday off)

ABaBA

BAbAB

ABαBA (Shorter days this week, with a different Wednesday)

BAbAB

ABaBA

BAbAB

AbAB (Same pattern repeated, but Monday off)

ABaBA (Repeating last week’s schedule over 5 days)

BAbAB

ABaBA

BAbAB

AB    (Three days off for Thanksgiving)

ABaBA (Repeating last week’s schedule over 5 days)

BAbAB

ABaBA (Followed by 2 weeks off for Christmas)

BAbAB

ABaBA

AbAB (same pattern repeated, but Monday off)

BAbAB

ABαBA (Shorter days this week, with a different Wednesday)

BAbAB

AbAB (same pattern repeated, but Monday off)

ABaBA (Repeating last week’s schedule over 5 days)

BAbAB

ABaBA

  bAB (Two random days off for the teachers)

ABaBA (But not repeating the last week on a 5 day schedule)

BAbAB

ABaBA (followed by a week of vacation)

BAbAB

ABaBA

BAbAB

ABaBA

BAbAB

The school has problems with attendance. I wonder if it has anything to do with the students not knowing where they’re supposed to be?

BTW: I need to know the schedule so I can manage rides (our school has not buses at our distance). I have 3 different pick-up times, and 3 different drop-off times. That’s an improvement over last year.

It gets worse. Our local school district does zero coordination with the universities within the state. We are mostly on MWF and TT teaching schedules. Also, while our Christmas breaks overlap, as well as our three day weekends, Spring Break does not, nor do the 2 shorter vacations the kids get off for no reason I can think of.

*************************

I strongly suspect almost all of this is a problem created by legislators and accreditors who require a fixed number of class periods or hours (rather than a more flexible range), and by unions that tweak the schedule to create more time off for members.

Research Productivity: Your Grad School vs. Your Job School

Publish or perish: but do you publish because of where you were trained or where you work?

This paper does a matched pair analysis (yeah for that technique) on science Ph.D.’s from 1970 to 2011. Here’s what they found:

For two people who land jobs at the same place:

• The one from the more prestigious graduate school gets more cites
• But neither publishes significantly more papers.

For two people who come from the same graduate school:

• The one who lands the job at the more prestigious school gets more cites, and
• Publishes more papers.

In short, it’s where you work that counts, not where you went to school. Of course, the problem is how to land that plumb job when they seem to go mostly to the people from the better schools.

The authors then eliminate pre-hire productivity, departmental expectations, and retention as explanations. This leaves facilitation of research by departments as the prime explainer of productivity differences.

What they find there (in their Model 1) is that departmental prestige, faculty size, and number of Ph.D. students per faculty member are the big factors in explaining productivity of the faculty.

The message for young faculty is get to the best department you can, and stay there. In the longer term, you probably can’t do much to make it more prestigious, but bigger is better.

N.B. Yep, pretty much the opposite of what I did.

Hat tip to Cold Spring Shops.

When They Can’t Read or Count

In academics, publishing is a big deal. There’s an aphorism about administrators though: they can’t read, but they can count. What this means is the quantity of your research often outweighs the quality (this is very true inside most institutions, but less true when looking across institutions for a new job).

Anyway, I just saw something I’ve never seen before. This was in an authors’ footnote of a paper that recently came out:

Joshua B. Miller is Associate Professor of Economics, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. Adam Sanjurjo is Associate Professor of Economics, University of Alicante, Spain. Both authors contributed equally, with names listed in alphabetical order. Their email addresses are Joshua.Benjamin.Miller@gmail.com and sanjurjo@ua.es. [emphasis added]

An authors’ footnote typically appears on the first page of the paper. I have never seen the emphasized text appear in print.

It points to a further problem of academic administrators. I was taught that, except for rare exceptions, authors should be listed alphabetically by last name. Unfortunately, some administrators default to giving more weight to authors listed earlier.

(On a personal note, I had a dean who did this. It was a constant struggle, and honestly, I think he devalued all my work because with the last name Tufte my name was always near the end).

I suspect that these authors face the same problem. So they are wasting a little bit of journal space and a little bit of the reader’s attention.

I hope this non-Coasian solution works.

The paper is:

Miller, Joshua B., and Sanjurjo, Adam, “A Bridge from Monty Hall to the Hot Hand: The Principle of Restricted Choice,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2019, 33, 144-162.