Kevin Carey on the trouble with good colleges only being good because they select the best students. As he says, there are a lot of good reasons to want to go to a selective college from the standpoint of rational self-interest "they have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of education those colleges provide." This, in turn, is a significant policy problem. We should want our higher education system as a whole to be adding value and not just sorting people. After all we could find much cheaper ways of sorting people than providing them with a four-year college education.
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Quality
27 Feb 2008 11:13 am
Comments (47)
A college education does not add value, unless it is directed toward a trade. It has always been a sorting mechanism, as pointed out long ago by George Akerlof. It's a signal that you think you're worthwhile, worth investing four years of leisure in.
Even much trade-related education doesn't add value. You don't actually learn anything useful when you get an MBA or a masters in education. Narrow professional education, like med school or law school adds value, but the bulk of this stuff is certification rather than education.
yeah, i go to dartmouth, and in retrospect other schools i applied for would've been a better fit, on both personal and academic levels, but i felt strong pressure to go to the school with the most prestigious branding. the problem is that judging the overall quality of a 4-year college or university is, frankly, really hard, and it doesn't help that most of the popular rankings are sorely lacking. dartmouth, for example, has been suffering from poor professor retention, something that definitely ought to be included as an indicator of quality, but judging by dartmouth's frequent rankings on or near the top ten of most such lists, it probably isn't.
I think what this post misses is that, to a significant degree, the "quality of education" at a given university is a function of the "quality" of the students. A stronger student body means that professors can teach more advanced material in greater depth rather than teaching to the lowest common denominator. Carey may be interpreting "quality of education" in broader terms (i.e., the structure of a required core curriculum or something), but even there I feel like this effect would hold to some degree - a better student body means a curriculum targeted a more advanced mean student.
and, yeah, the quality of the student body is definitely essential to a good college experience, but a) isn't guaranteed even at the "best" of schools (dartmouth has more than its share of legacies, athletes, etc) and b) doesn't change the fact that it would be even better to be at a great school with a great body of students, rather than an overrated school with a great body of students.
Carey is making a pretty odd argument. He doesn't question that interaction with your fellow students is an important part of the experience. But he claims that has nothing to do with the institution, and his argument is that all these students could decide to have those interactions anywhere they chose.
To me that is sort of like saying the NYSE isn't adding any value with its services, since after all those securities traders could decide to do their business elsewhere. In other words, Carey seems to be missing the fact that providing an attractive venue in which people can carry out valuable interactions is itself a valuable service.
He also seems to think these interactions are completely unrelated to the classes, and basically thinks they could be duplicated at the equivalent of a four-year summer camp. But of course many of these interactions are centered around what is going on in the classes, and I see no reason to assume the classes are as dispensable as Carey seems to think.
So, I'm not buying it. Of course, to be sure, it could be the case that the difference in value added by universities in these ways is not as much as some people think. But the university model in general has a long and successful track record in building these sorts of communities and encouraging these sorts of interactions, and Carey hasn't convinced me to think these services can be easily duplicated.
What Dan says - having smarter students means the quality of education is likely to improve, all other things being equal.
All other things aren't necessarily equal, of course. In particular, liberal arts colleges arguably have a better model for how to educate, in terms of more focus on teaching and more individual attention, than bigger schools, even if the average SAT score of the bigger school is higher.
"After all we could find much cheaper ways of sorting people than providing them with a four-year college education."
This really isn't fair. People DO go to college to get an education. For many of them (engineers, accountants, computer scientists, math teachers), they use this education immediately upon graduation. For many others (doctors, lawyers, grad students), the education is a prerequisite for the professional/specialized education that they will receive upon graduation. This is all very expensive and very necessary, and my guess is that these two groups encompass the vast majority of students at the very selective schools.
To be sure, you have some people like Matt whose careers are totally unrelated to what they studied in school, but my guess is that they are far outnumbered in the real world.
We should want our higher education system as a whole to be adding value and not just sorting people.
Um, I don't get this.
As I read it, the linked post doesn't say anything about whether the "higher education system as a whole" is "adding value". The point of the post seems to be that the value added by Harvard's education is not necessarily any greater than the value added by UDC's education. In both cases, though, it seems likely that value is added, and that the entire higher education system adds value.
I thought the point was that people are paying the difference between Harvard's cost and UDC's cost merely for the sorting function and not for any difference in education.
How is this a policy problem?
Could you imagine how disastrous any sort of policy change on higher ed could be? The status quo seems pretty amazingly efficient to me.
Just because we don't know why it is so efficient doesn't mean we should just change it.
Overall, I think the people claiming that there is not much extra added value in going to elite schools need to do a better job making their case* before we start taking their arguments seriously. The strong presumption, based on common sense and anecdotal experience, is that it makes a big difference and the statistical evidence arguing otherwise is very weak, indeed.
*This is especially ridiculous coming from the Harvard-educated blogger. How arrogant can you get? "Not only am I extremely successful, but I don't attribute any of my success to my educational experience in college; I'm just better than everyone else"
Until this argument is made better, I'm not paying attention.
Personally, I went to a Big Ten University that was considered to be vastly preferable to most other public schools in the state because it was a major research institution. However, it's not a particularly selective school, and many of the courses were taught by Graduate Students because the faculty were primarily interested in research and viewed undergraduate education as a distraction.
I think if you're looking for "value added," second-tier public schools tend to offer the most hands-on instruction for less advanced students. Otherwise, your education is primarily a matter of paying for a credential. The Ivy League gives you a shiny diploma and a post-graduation network. The Big Ten offers you big-time college sports, discussion courses with hungover frat guys, and a less-impressive degree... at a much lower cost. Choose accordingly.
How does one measure the value added by a college?
I think that the career-success and lifetime income measures are seriously flawed.
For some of those who want an education, as opposed to a degree, the point of college is to make one's own mind a more interesting and useful place to spend the rest of one's life.
And I think that many of the most successfully-educated people I know are the kind that kick the traces once or more than once in their lives -- like the clinical psychologist I know who got more interested in the computer she was using to manipulate data than in the behavioral research she was conducting, and eventually became a BIOS programmer for Phoenix, and then a security consultant for Microsoft. Her income doesn't reflect the breadth and richness of her mental world, nor the value added by her education. She speaks often of the thrill she felt in taking physics classes from Richard Feynman.
On the other hand, some of the most financially-successful people I know seem to have missed almost everything that their higher education offered except the credentials and the connections. As middle-aged men, they golf with the right people, they have all the money they need, but they haven't had an interesting thought in decades.
I can't think of a way to measure this.
dartmouth, for example, has been suffering from poor professor retention, something that definitely ought to be included as an indicator of quality, but judging by dartmouth's frequent rankings on or near the top ten of most such lists, it probably isn't.
Dartmouth alum here ('93). Dartmouth is a great example of the complexity of college rankings and evaluating said education.
Dartmouth is unique among the Ivies in that it places undergraduate education over graduate education in its emphasis. This has several negatives. Top professors who want to maintain strong research programs are more likely to leave because they feel they are not getting the support they need. It also means that top undergraduates do not get to work on the types of research projects that they would at a heavy research institution like Harvard or Princeton, and so you don't have as many "poster children" to show off.
But a lot these effects only help the top 5% students or so. Schools that focus on undergraduate education are concerned about a much larger group. Dartmouth takes a lot of good students, so being in the middle tier is not all that bad. But at a heavy research school, being in the middle tier means you will probably fall through the cracks (I work at an R1 now and see this happen to students all the time). At Dartmouth you will get a lot more attention further down the rung than you will at a larger school.
Now, maybe these types of students should have gone to Williams, which plays the undergraduate game even better. But it is a balancing act of trying to bring in top professors who want to do cutting edge work and making sure that your undergraduate program is strong (which takes time away from research).
The elephant in the room here is social networking. As Vonnegut put it, going to Harvard or Yale is like joining the most exclusive social club on the planet. You get jobs through people you know. For the most part, in reality the value of the "education" is secondary. Smart people who are interested in getting an education generally do it themselves anyway, no matter where they end up going to college.
I attended a pretty selective liberal arts college (not Ivy League) and was mostly disappointed in the quality of the teaching; I was able to skate through and get decent grades without much exertion. I could have done better grade-wise if I hadn't found that interacting with the other students was more rewarding than the academic work, leading me to neglect studying (and even cut classes on occasion) in favor of the extracurricular activities.
Jar Jar: I think most people would agree this is not a major policy problem, but there are some government solutions that can help the problem. First, better assessment methods (based on input/output outcomes) supported by the department of ed. Second, just encouraging more transparency into what schools are actually offering.
I find the USNews Rankings a bit insipid myself, but they at least offer real information to high school students and their parents. The schools' glossy brochures really fall flat on this front. Not a call for more ranking hysteria, but simply better ranking methodology...
joel,
It is indeed very difficult to measure what you are talking about. But, like John Stuart Mill, I happen to think what you are talking about is what really matters when it comes to human happiness.
In one sense, the university is a business. It sells certification. But that certification is worthless if people don't perceive the certification to mean anything. From the first in class to the last in class at College Tech, everybody who gets that diploma is supposed to meet certain criteria. Their customers (students) use that criteria to make themselves more attractive to employers.
If the student doesn't actually meet those criteria - if the employer pays more for the student than the student is worth - then that's a problem for College Tech. If employers don't trust the certification, students derive less benefit from their certification, and College Tech can't demand as much tuition money for the certification. College Tech can deal with this by recruiting better students, by adding more value to the students, or both.
If College Tech actually did already have most of the best students, there might be a temptation to forego the "adding value" because it's fairly resource-intensive. But there is competition - University A&M is second-place, and adding more value than College Tech. College Tech has to do at least something to add value, too; or its certification isn't going to mean as much. Which would you rather have as an employer: a super-smart but lazy person, or a very smart hardworking person? So all universities have to do something for both sides of the issue.
I run a small professional graduate program. Our ability to add value depends on the quality of students we can attract. That depends on convincing potential students we are elite and that they will get a good job when they finish, which depends on getting good people, etc.
Sorting goes together with adding value, you can't do either without the other.
Well, hang on a second. Why would it be a problem if better-regarded colleges don't provide more education? What is so odious about people at unsung schools getting as good an education as people who attend the fancy pants schools? Personally, I think it would be great if the playing field were that level.
That said, I do think the fancier schools differ from the more pedestrian schools in terms of education. I went to college at a middle class school in NYC. I also took college classes at Columbia University and at a poorly regarded school on Long Island. I was also the only student from my humble college accepted to the fancy pants ivy league law school I attended. So I saw it from both sides of the fence at multiple educational levels. And I can tell you that education differs from institution to institution-- in style, substance, quality, quantity, etc.
As an example of no value added, I offer the example of the man who currently occupies the White House, who attended prestigious schools at great expense while managing to remain an ignoramus. He's rich; he's at the top of society's power-and-influence pecking order, but as nearly as I can tell he learned nothing at Yale or at Harvard. He has gained the world but failed to locate his own soul.
"After all we could find much cheaper ways of sorting people than providing them with a four-year college education."
You could, but then you might run afoul of the law. See, for example, Griggs v. Duke Power. Since companies are largely restricted from actually testing how intelligent their applicants are (because underachieving minorities will do worse on average on these tests), they often rely on the prestigiousness of the applicants' schools as a rough proxy for their intelligence.
My observation is that the top tier schools, more often than not, are no more challenging than many of the middle tier schools. They're accepting smarter more accomplished students, but these very driven students aren't exactly getting their asses kicked (that's saved for grad school). They're being more or less coddled, grade inflation, etc. And a WHOLE lotta partying. Princeton? Party school.
When my sister applied to law school, she got into pretty much everywhere, Yale on down. The only difference was the scholarships she was offered. So she went to Michigan, which had offered her a full ride (as opposed to Yale's big fat nothing), and asked why choose Michigan over Yale, considering Yale Law is, well, Yale Law?
The professor answered that in the top ten, or even the whole top tier, of law schools, the calibur of the professors was going to be pretty much the same. Some might have a better guy for your specialization, but overall, all first-rate. The only difference will be the calibur of the students. What my sister and I took away from this was that the real advantage to a place like Yale is that your peers will engage you at that higher level, even if your peers at Michigan will still be high. And the professors will be about the same.
She went to Yale.
"What my sister and I took away from this was that the real advantage to a place like Yale is that your peers will engage you at that higher level, even if your peers at Michigan will still be high."
Your undergrad peers will probably be high at either Michigan or Yale. But in law school, they'll probably limit their intake to the weekends.
"They're accepting smarter more accomplished students, but these very driven students aren't exactly getting their asses kicked (that's saved for grad school)."
Or for big state schools. When I went to Rutgers U., there was student who transfered in as a junior from an elite private liberal arts college. Not an Ivy, but one that was known for providing an expensive and tasteful education to its students. His first semester at a big state school as a pre-med student was an eye-opener for him. The professors in his giant lecture hall classes didn't care how much money his father could donate to the school. His GPA dropped sharply, and he had to work a lot harder to get through. He eventually got accepted to a solid med school, but only after using the excuse of an ancestor who had been a wealthy land owner in Latin America to get away with classifying himself as Latino. He may have had more Grey Poupon running through his veins than salsa, but he was a pragmatist.
"I run a small professional graduate program. Our ability to add value depends on the quality of students we can attract"
I think the situation is different at the graduate level. Students are a much greater part of the program there. A professor's ability to get grant money will depend on the quality of his students. The student's education will depend on the quantity of the professor's grant money. In that case, the quality of the other students is improving the education opportunity that I would get if I joined that program.
At the undergraduate level, the quality of the other students has only a small effect. Anything I learn from them is probably small compared to the competition effect. If they are smart and hard working, I will need to work hard to get a good grade, or even avoid flunking out.
Why exactly is a Big Ten degree less impressive than an Ivy Degree? I don't buy the "grad students teaching because faulty care about research" argument. When I got my AMEP degree at Wisco 10 years ago I didn't have a TA lead any course, and I didn't have a TA for any discussion section in a core class after intro Physics. Furthermore, I'm working at an Ivy now and I see non faculty members leading courses all over. My boss spends all her time on research and grant proposals with only one class on her schedule. So what's the difference? Fewer hungover frat boys? Hardly.
I should also add that I'd prefer a top 20 public school engineering degree over one from any of the Ivies. At least in terms of pure educational experience.
Since the passing of the Morrill Act in 1862 -- which has probably done more to educate more people than any other law anywhere -- no Land Grant school ugrad alumnus has been elected president. And it can't be for lack of talented alumni.
Or for big state schools. When I went to Rutgers U., there was student who transfered in as a junior from an elite private liberal arts college. Not an Ivy, but one that was known for providing an expensive and tasteful education to its students. His first semester at a big state school as a pre-med student was an eye-opener for him. The professors in his giant lecture hall classes didn't care how much money his father could donate to the school.
I think you're overinterpreting an idiosyncratic experience. I went to an elite private liberal arts college, and I'm quite sure that my professors didn't care how much money my father could donate to the school, which, in any event, was zero dollars. That held true for most of my peers.
The difference between career prospects for a Yale of Michigan law grad are immense. To make a long story short, you'd have to graduate in the top 10-15% of the class at Michigan to have the same job prospects as the average student at Yale (i.e., work for virtually any firm in the country, clerk for any district court judge and most circuit court judges). And you'd have to be in the top 5 or so students to have the opportunities open to the top quarter of Yale's class.
Shortly after Gutenberg waved his magic leveling wand, all colleges and universities became of marginal value to a person's education. In our own day, Tim Berners-Lee finished off the leveling process.
I've thought of a flawed but possibly useful measure of the value added by a particular college education.
I claim without evidence that people who received more value from their education will on average have children with higher SAT scores.
If you control for the obvious comfounding independent variables, I think that you might find that well-educated people tend to transmit to their children a breadth intellectual scope and intellectual habits of mind. Admitted, that's not really what the SAT measures, but it's the best nationally-uniform proxy I can think of at the moment.
Re Dan's comment "I think what this post misses is that, to a significant degree, the "quality of education" at a given university is a function of the "quality" of the students "
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Not necessarily. Maybe at a small liberals arts college but not at a large University.
Penn State, for example, is large enough to offer a wide range of courses for a diverse student body with a wide range in expertise in a subject. Some are for the average student --but those more prepared can also find some very demanding , more advanced courses as well. Plus well-prepared undergrads can take graduate courses as well in their upper years.
And its not a matter of a state school having to support the education of X percentage of students who are semi-prepared -- although I think Great Value is added by that.
It's also a matter of providing courses to specialists in areas outside their specialty.
ALthough I majored in engineering, two of the most valuable courses I took were electives in the liberal arts school -- Chinese philosophy and economics. That's a judgment from looking back over several decades.
Maybe Harvard could add value by conferring on its students a basic command of spelling and grammar. Perhaps that's asking too much...
"I think you're overinterpreting an idiosyncratic experience. I went to an elite private liberal arts college, and I'm quite sure that my professors didn't care how much money my father could donate to the school, which, in any event, was zero dollars. That held true for most of my peers."
Perhaps elite liberal arts schools aren't as influenced by potential donors in their grading policy as my last comment implied, but my sense is that they tend to grade easier, have smaller class sizes, and generally offer a more supportive experience for students than large state schools. Do you disagree with this?
Re Joe's comment "The difference between career prospects for a Yale of Michigan law grad are immense."
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0) The value-added of education is not addressed because certification in the education profession is governed by the profession itself -- and it has always believed -- out of self-interest -- that if a little education is good, then a shitload is even better. Hence, endless featherbedding.
1)Consider the Schools of Law. It's used to be possible in Virginia -- and may still be the case -- for one to "Read the Law" while working for a certified lawyer, to take the law exam, and to be admitted to the Bar without ever having gone to Law School.
2) More to the point, one could go to the Appalachia School of Law in Grundy Virginia and learn from law professors from Harvard and Duke.
(Well -- at least you could until they were killed by a deranged student.)
3) But It seems to me that the legal profession is lucrative only if you get a job helping large, wealthy corporations fuck over the common citizen. (The big paychecks help you buy enough Scotch to subdue that feeling of nausea that normal people feel. )
In contrast, providing Legal Aid for the common citizen doesn't pay shit.
4) So the demand for Yale Law arises from the fact that a Fortune 500 with its ass on the line feels more confident that it will be fractionally better represented by a Yale Law grad than one from the Appalachia School of Law -- and is willing to pay a lot for that marginal improvement (or ,more specificly, for the illusion that it will be fractionally better represented.)
In one sense, the university is a business. It sells certification.
Yes, universities are businesses. Tel's characterization is exactly right: how many resources must you expend in order to achieve the quality necessary to make your certification worthwhile? Universities understand these issues and they address them all them time when they decide things like class sizes. But the problem is more complicated that that. The university is not a single business, and some of its business models are at odds with one another.
Research is a business. For every grant I receive, the university gets a 50% take. It's called "overhead" and supposedly goes for things like office space, administrative support, electricity, chalk, etc. This is real money. It is one of many reasons why universities like cutting edge research -- this is the research more likely to get grants. But grants are an arms race that can seriously cut into teaching.
Furthermore, when you evaluate a professor for tenure, on what grounds does that professor get tenure? If the professor is both a world class researcher and an amazing teacher, the choice is not so clear. But what if, as is often the case, the professor is mediocre at one of those two? What do you do? The business model of many large universities is such that they can afford a mediocre (but not a horrible) teacher, but that they cannot afford a mediocre researcher.
In unrelated news, go read abovethelaw.com on how the post-tax takehome salary for fifth-year lawyers at big firms will average $160k under Obama versus $180k under McCain and realize why America hates their profession:
http://www.abovethelaw.com/2008/02/obama_biglaw_and_taxesor_obama_1.php
The comments section makes me more fucking sick than the most insane freerepulic thread.
I've thought of another proxy measure for value added by education.
- I think that interesting ideas well-expressed are a sign of having received a real education.
- the blogtopia is a written marketplace of ideas
- blogs get linked to at least partially on the basis of the quality of ideas and the quality of language
- therefore, comparing the pagerank scores of the blogs of graduates is a way of ranking the educational value added by their colleges.
Tongue only partly in cheek.
If it turned out that digby, Avedon, Duncan, Glenn Greenwald, hilzoy, Steve Benen, and Marcy Wheeler all attended the same school, I'd be fighting to get my kids and grandkids into that institution.
Matt wants to deregul;ate every industry, wants unrestricted free trade, and Thinks college for everyone is a bad thing.
Shocking that people like me think he's a classist scumbag.
Mike, to a lot of us Matt's comment threads on Free trade sound about the same.
Mike,
FYI, the people at Above the Law are hardly representative of the profession, and many of them are in "character" anyway (dating back to when David Lat was running the blog Underneath Their Robes and posting as a shoe-loving female associate called Article III Groupie).
This post is spot-on. This is a public policy problem becuase while attending the most selective school is rational for the individual, if it's only doing sorting, why should enjoy the status of a non-profit worthy of government investment and tax breaks?
It's also a problem that goes down the line. With all due respect to the posters here, the comparative merits of Dartmouth and Williams are of no interested beyond the personal. But for strapped public institutions, being effective with the students we have, rather than rushing to join the race to attract 'better ones' really matters.
Washington Mothly's alternative ratings - looking at the contribution to the public - are not perfect but a start at addressing this.
Re Don Williams
To put it more bluntly, if a pre-law student wants to get a job at a top law firm, he/she had better consider Harvard or Yale law schools, which is where those top law firms do most of their recruiting.
Re SLC: You'd think the top firms would perform some arbitrage, get non Harvard/Yale at a modest discount and pocket the savings. But if the clients demand Harvard JDs, then I guess that's a no-go.
After all we could find much cheaper ways of sorting people than providing them with a four-year college education.
Who is this 'we' and what if someone doesn't want to be sorted by it?
Elite colleges sort people, as does much of the rest of our society, largely by income.
Al was spot on when he said:
I thought the point was that people are paying the difference between Harvard's cost and UDC's cost merely for the sorting function and not for any difference in education.
This whole question of how good the education is at elite colleges or how smart the student body is misses just how large and complex modern universities. University X might be a great place to study the humanities and a lousy place to study particle physics. And all large universities these days offer honors programs so if you don't want to mix with the plebes, you could still go to Oklahoma State and just take all honors classes and get an excellent education.
And a question for Max B: At Dartmouth, do they teach you about the capitalization of words in the English language? I'm just wondering what all that education is buying you.
Comments closed March 12, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
Okay, but how do you measure the quality of education an institution provides? I'd argue that your peer group has a significant impact on the quality of your education, all other things constant.
Posted by RS | February 27, 2008 11:20 AM