Category: Politics: Economics

DonorsChoose 2010: The Final Days

I haven’t been flogging it as hard as in some past years, but the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge is still going on, though it wraps up on Tuesday. To date, we’ve raised just over $1,300 to support education in needy schools, which is great, and thanks to all those who have donated. If you haven’t donated… Continue reading DonorsChoose 2010: The Final Days

Should We Want Students to Go into Finance?

Via Steve Hsu, a GNXP post about the benefits of elite college educations, based largely on a graph of income vs. US News ranking. While the post text shows some of the dangers of taking social-science data too literally (the points on the graph in question are clearly binned, so I would not attribute too… Continue reading Should We Want Students to Go into Finance?

Worst. Evaluation Scheme. EVER.

Speaking of teacher evaluation schemes, as we were, Doug Natelson draws my attention to a new proposal from Texas A&M: [Frank] Ashley, the vice chancellor for academic affairs for the A&M System, has been put in charge of creating such a measure that he says would help administrators and the public better understand who, from… Continue reading Worst. Evaluation Scheme. EVER.

Teacher Evaluation and Test Scores, aleph-nought in a series

There’s been a lot of energy expended blogging and writing about the LA Times’s investigation of teacher performance in Los Angeles, using “Value Added Modeling,” which basically looks at how much a student’s scores improved during a year with a given teacher. Slate rounds up a lot of reactions, in a slightly snarky form, and… Continue reading Teacher Evaluation and Test Scores, aleph-nought in a series

The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the ______

Kevin Drum posts about the latest outrage from the airline industry: To summarize, then: (1) Airlines spent years hassling customers about their carry-on bags and persuading them to check their luggage instead. (2) After that finally started to work, they suddenly began charging for checked luggage. (3) As customers scurried to adapt once again, overhead… Continue reading The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill All the ______

Synchronicity and “Administrative Bloat”

At Inside Higher Ed this morning, they have a news squib about a new report blaming the high cost of college on “administrative bloat.” Coincidentally, the Dean Dad has a post pre-emptively responding to this in the course of arguing with a different group: In terms of administration, what would you cut? Should we stop… Continue reading Synchronicity and “Administrative Bloat”

Two Americas in Recovery

First Matt Yglesias and then Kevin Drum nail the current source of my occasional spasms of liberal guilt, namely the unequal distribution of the current economic troubles. They both note that the unemployment rate for college graduates is less than half that for folks without college degrees (Matt looks at total unemployment, Kevin at long-term… Continue reading Two Americas in Recovery

Distilled Faculty Outrage

Via Inside Higher Ed this YouTube video is pretty much a distillation of faculty reaction nationwide to higher education’s response to the world economic crisis: The IHE link gives a little more context to the video, and some of the reaction to it. The arguments here are not all well-founded– science and engineering will necessarily… Continue reading Distilled Faculty Outrage

Correlation, Causation, and Belief in Creation

Thinking from Kansas, Josh Rosenau notices a correlation in data from a Daily Kos poll question on the origin of the universe: Saints be praised, 62% of the public accepts the Big Bang and a 13.7 billion year old universe. Democrats are the most positive, with 71% accepting that, while only 44% of Republicans agree… Continue reading Correlation, Causation, and Belief in Creation