Is college worth the cost?

The question, from the Honorable Mr. Phillips [Freakonomics blog]: "Is college worth the cost?"

The answer: I do not know, but I have some ideas about how to answer the question.

The first point is that we should begin by disaggregating whether all college diplomas are worth the same. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think that we agree that degrees differ at the broadest level first by subject area (mathematics probably the most challenging, fashion design probably the least) and then by university quality (Harvard probably the best, Fort Snot Mid-State University and Cooking College probably the worst).

The second is that we should realize that college degrees are, at least to some degree (so to speak), positional goods even beyond rankings and subject. That is, the classic economist's signalling argument--that mere completion of a (say) University of Southern Indiana degree may signal something more valuable than dropping out of Cornell a year early--does hold. One of my favorite examples of this is a job posting (long since closed) from Penny Arcade, which included the following lines:

"And here are some other things we’re using to weed people out. It’s
not fair. I know. Life’s not fair.

- A Bachelor’s degree is preferred. I don’t care what it’s in.
- 2-3 years experience in a professional workplace as a designer
- You should probably be a fan of Penny Arcade. Probably. Yeah. "

PA, of course, was founded by two guys who never completed any post-secondary education. (Note: Actually, one of them may have, but I'm a thousand miles away from my reference books here.) And not that there's anything wrong with it! There are different standards for "talent" and "entrepreneurs" than for the people they employ, and that is how it should be. The point, however, is precisely that even Holkins and Krahulik (and Robert Khoo, in this case) are insisting on the credential as a credential and not for its "value." Cornell and USI are indeed equivalent here.

How would you disentangle these different strands? I'm not going to post the different empirical research here, both for reasons of time and also for reasons of not being at an IP address with clean access to JSTOR, but I think the readership knows that the arguments are actually a little bit more nuanced than the normal ones we hear thrown around. Suffice it to say that estimating the causal effect of attendance at Harvard versus Michigan is a little bit easier than estimating the causal effect of attending Wayne State versus not attending at all. Some clever empirical estimations have been done, but they are necessarily long-term (e.g., the ones exploiting the Vietnam draft lottery) and not necessarily relevant to today's marketplace.

That's important, because the fundamental driver for this question is now frankly financial. As it should be. In no other field of our normal experience, even including medicine, do we throw around so much money with so little idea of the benefit. When it comes to medicine, at least we have some confidence that more money may equal more life. For the Harvard/Michigan question, though, I'm not sure that we know how to answer that -- or whether the answer for someone at the 99th percentile is different for someone at the 99.99th percentile, or whether the economic benefits from attending Harvard have more to do with the social status of going to Natalie Portman's alma mater or more to do with the fine faculty. I mean, I think we all have private theories, but we don't really have any proof.

And that is the biggest problem here. The social scientific data is at least ambiguous about the effect of attending for most people, and certainly offers no direct advice about what people should major in. And yet the voices of authority that parents and their college-bound offspring listen to are uniform in their encouraging people go to college immediately and rarely draw a distinction between high- and low-quality schools (as opposed to high- and low-cost schools).

My caveats above aside, I am certain that a degree from the University of Oklahoma is better than one from Oklahoma State, and that one from Oklahoma State will travel better than one from Southwestern Kentucky Bible College. (I apologize if there is a SKBC.)

The data may be ambiguous, after all, but the costs are not. In the era of non-dischargeable student debt, that should be a real concern.

(There is a post that readers should read, and which I am including here so I don't lose it: Andrew Gelman offers some observations on the state of our knowledge about college degrees and how not to conduct a quantitative counterfactual.)

To be selfish for a moment: Most troubling, however, for a graduate student is this bullet point from Phillips's post:

Only a quarter (24%) of college presidents say that, if given a choice, they would prefer that most faculty at their institution be tenured. About seven-in-ten say they would prefer that faculty be employed on annual or long-term contracts.

Are we really moving toward a world in which public school teachers are going to have more job security and better pay than college faculty? I don't mean to be peevish, but this certainly triggers some destructive and non-productive feelings--like the feeling that if university faculty, for whom tenure was designed and for whom tenure has a real academic purpose, are going to be denied tenure while kindergarten teachers enjoy it, then maybe I'll just take a job at McKinsey after all.

Number One for 27 May 2011

I picked you up, I shook you up and turned you around:

• If you're not cynical, you don't have all the data [Diesel Sweeties]
  
• Do presidents have to be our consolers-in-chief? [Thought News]
  
• What is the economic value of the Internet? Such a typically economistic question. Shouldn't we also be interested in answering what the distributional effects of the Internet are? [Marginal Revolution]
  
• Exciting news in beer [BeerNews.Org]
  
• What will colleges look like when college presidents come from the ranks of the support staff? [Confessions of a Community College Dean]
  

The Human League, "Don't You Want Me" (a song my iTunes Genius is particularly fond of)

Today's post

can be found at the Duck of Minerva.

It's a commentary on the new Coburn report recommending cutting NSF funding for political science. I humbly claim that it (well, both the post and the report) has must-read status for academics and the interested public.

Number One for 26 May 2011

Then kick me once again / And say we'll never part:

• A very young Bibi Netanyahu puts the Israeli side of the debate [YouTube]
  
• UCSD starts closing libraries [Prospect]
  
• Chilling: 2.5m Americans hold security clearances. At this rate, by 2100, none of us will be able to talk to anyone about what we do for a living. From the Jane Mayer article in The New Yorker [The New Yorker]
  

Tom Lehrer, "The Masochism Tango"

Who was the greatest American president?

The question, from a backbencher: "Who was the greatest American president?"

The answer: Abraham Lincoln. There can be no serious dispute.

I begin by noting that this is an obviously old-fashioned and unscientific sort of question, the kind that admits of no empirical answer. Consequently, answering it reveals more about the respondent than about the topic supposedly under discussion. Nevertheless, I think there are common enough views about what makes a successful president, and I think the reasoning here is important enough to publicize, that I will answer it anyhow.

Who are the other contenders? I assume the list is short. Only the top ten percent should be seriously considered for the title; rounding up to the next whole president, that gives us five: Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Washington.

I am aware that I am ranking Eisenhower much higher than his consensus position at something like 10th. But on the other hand, can we really accept Kennedy, shorn of his mystique, as being at the 90th percentile or above? As for Truman, the gap between contemporary and contemporaneous judgment is so wide as to suggest that one or the other camp has got him completely wrong, and although there is much to be said on Truman's behalf I am privately convinced that Trumania is a product of the fact that he has had a very good book written about him from which practically everyone is drawing their opinion. Eisenhower, by contrast, scores low because few people appreciate his particular genius--Fred Greenstein seems to have gotten it mostly right, as did Steven Amrbose's sources--for making far-reaching moves while appearing all but tranquil. I think the present situation in Washington, with our modern-day Birchers and Brickers, suggests that Eisenhower, although "conservative," had a special obligation and a special talent for keeping nuttery out of the GOP. Moreover, any right-wing president who opposes military (although, alas, not covert) solutions for everything and takes care to ensure that the writ of the Supreme Court runs everywhere, including in Orval Faubus' state, is doing something that left-wing scholars may not be able to fully appreciate.

Theodore Roosevelt is an obvious candidate for the top five, but he lacks the crowning accomplishment--or, what is more accurate, the supreme test--that would allow us to discern exactly what fraction of his talents he exercised in office and whether they would have matched the time. Despite his evident appetite for adventurism and statecraft in the Machtpolitik sense, Roosevelt was also the most sensible and even-handed Progressive president a Republican could dream of; the perversions of power embraced by the Wilson presidency--the fondness for racism, the flirtations with dictatorship, the obsession with moral purity--only serve to highlight how effective the first Roosevelt's approach to power was.

The case for Washington as one of the greatest--although, I think, not the greatest--Americans is easy to make. The case for Washington as a great president is surprisingly hard, and in the end it rests on much the same foundation as the case for Lincoln: He upheld the rule of the federal government. Yet Washington's presidency was too concerned with precedent-setting to make it the greatest presidency; and, after all, the scope of the presidency in those early days of the Federal Republic was simply too small to allow for anyone to ascend to real executive greatness, except maybe for Alexander Hamilton. In fact, it says something about Washington that, save Lincoln, he is the only president before 1900 whom you could even consider for the top five without blushing. (I leave the scholars' rankings of Jefferson as a consensus number four pick as a weird, and rare, example of left-wing Founding fetishism.)

By elimination, then, we have FDR and Lincoln. And FDR has a very strong claim. First, of course, he is the most successful American politician ever: five national tickets, four wins. Only one other president (Nixon) comes close (five national tickets and four wins)--but two of Nixon's victories were as vice president, while all of Roosevelt's wins were as president. Furthermore, FDR has both the most impressive domestic policy record and the most immediately globally consequential foreign policy of any president. So, that's something, too.

But FDR's weaknesses are the key. The familiar distinction between the fox and the hedgehog misses out on the crucial point that a great leader must have both tendencies. The fox and the hedgehog themselves, of course, are only concerned with survival, and their differing strategies are geared to that single goal. Yet if there is to be a case that leaders are at all transformative, then survival is not enough. They must be hedgehog-like in knowing One Big Thing to which they move forward, and yet fox-like in moving toward that goal.

In the end, it is not clear that FDR had a well-worked out vision of what he wanted the world to look like. The inclusion of France and China on the Four Five Policemen is a pretty bad knock against his strategic genius; the retreat from the New Deal toward the latter part of his first term is another one. Indeed, FDR always seemed depressingly ready to treat settlements as temporary. What he seemed to want, more than anything, was a world in which America was like America, but more so--fairer to the working man, nicer to the farmer, and stronger in the world.

None of this, for Roosevelt, seemed to require going any further in moral or political thought than the cliches of the sermons in the Groton Chapel. There was nothing particularly radical in Roosevelt's thought, even though he was quite often daring in his deeds. Unlike Churchill or Stalin, his great contemporaries, Roosevelt did not know what he wanted the postwar world to be like, which is why he could be played by each of them in turn. It is this failure of the imagination that played at least a role in making the years after the cessation of hostilities so perilous.

The contrast with Lincoln could not, in the end, be greater. Roosevelt inherited a state already willing to respond to a strong-willed executive; even Herbert Hooever, albeit as Secretary of Commerce, had discovered that. Roosevelt moved in a world in which mass media allowed the incumbent in the White House to shape public opinion in a new way, as even Calvin Coolidge had understood. And, most of all, the revolutionary situation Roosevelt encountered could be ameliorated through existing constitutional channels--although it is to FDR's everlasting credit that he understood that there was a crisis that had to be addressed.

Lincoln could rely on none of these advantages. The White House staff did not exist, and the federal government was not much more muscular; the press was partisan and local; and the constitutional machinery had been broken from the moment of his election. Lincoln, then, had to both fix the situation at hand but also do so in a way that would serve a greater vision of what the Union had to be, and what a commitment to political liberalism meant. For, in the end, Lincoln is the closest that the United States (indeed, perhaps any major democracy) has had to a moral philosopher in high office. He was radical, for his vision of the obligations of democracy cut to the literal root of what self-governance by free people meant.

And Lincoln is personally greater than FDR, too. FDR was a traitor to his class, but Lincoln rose above his roots. FDR could condescend to understand the sharecropper and the day laborer; Lincoln had, in essence, been both. It is not sufficient for a good president--or any other leader--to have empathy for the "common man," but it is probably necessary for a great leader to do so.

Thus, Lincoln. It is a provincial choice, in the sense that I would wager that Lincoln is probably the American political figure least understood outside of the United States (what foreign policy accomplishments did he have? and how can a non-American really understand our continuing fascination with the Civil War?), but nonetheless he remains a singularly consequential figure.

Number One for 25 May 2011

"All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence."

• "My wedding to Captain Von Trapp has been canceled" [McSweeneys]
  
• Fox after Ailes [New York]
  

Yukio Mishima, as interpreted by Philip Glass:

Number One for 24 May 2011

I think it's time to blow this scene:

• Yep, I'm repeating GOP talking points by linking to this, but Jimmy Carter is just like that [RealClearPolitics]
  
• More civics education doesn't make people "better" citizens. Gasp! [The Monkey Cage]
  
• Georgetown degrees should be worth a little less after this. [DCist]
  
• Being mocked by a blog for your spelling is ... pretty bad!
  
• I've seen this research presented in talks and it is pretty hard to argue against it. G&T may not do much for students after all. [Worthwhile Canadian Initiative]
  
• On the other hand, Bryan Caplan makes a good go at it. [EconLog]
  

Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts, "Tank!"

Are tornadoes scary?

The question, from a backbencher: Are tornadoes frightening?

The answer: I used to say "no." But this summer has me reconsidering my answer.

One of the nice things about growing up in the Midwest/Mid-South region is that you are inured to the idea that tornadoes are scary. Hurricanes are frightening. Earthquakes are terrifying. City buses are the worst--just ask the kids in Adventures in Babysitting. But tornadoes? Nah. It's fun watching out-of-towners freak out about tornado watches. I don't even notice until there's a warning, and even then not until they actually interrupt a live program.

I understand that this is not how other people see it. And I am beginning to understand why.

There are unspoken rules. Tornadoes kill people in trailer parks, not people in hospitals. Tornadoes hit farms, not airports. And tornadoes are expected to keep the death toll in the high single digits, maximum.

So the tornadoes are breaking all of the rules this week.

These past few weeks have pushed 2011 into the realm of genuine statistical anomaly. The long-term trend for tornado fatalities over the past several decades has been for tornado-related deaths to gently, gently trend toward zero; I even recall reading a NOAA or an NWS report some time ago that argued, in essence, that at current rates we might more or less "solve" tornado-related deaths by 2030 or thereabouts.

Why? Because natural disasters aren't so natural, after all. Although the cause of the "disaster" might appear to be natural--e.g., the cyclonic winds, the hail, lightning, excessive rain, or what have you--the process of turning that exogenous shock into a disaster requires a society to either be poor or backward. I use those terms in their precise sense. "Poor," in the sense that if you don't have well-built buildings or a well-organized state to begin with, that there is simply very little to shelter you from the storm (sometimes literally) and nothing to help you cope with the aftermath. "Backward," in the sense that since about 1950, and really since 1980 or so, there have been almost no states that have failed to stock up on weather radars, public announcement systems, and so forth except as a failure of policy or a success of a diabolical policy. (One of the most fun and most frightening papers I've ever read was an entirely persuasive formal model showing exactly how an authoritarian but perverse government would use a disaster as a way to extort revenues from aid NGOs.)

In other words, given constant weather conditions, increasing prevention and response management should really make most disasters manageable. And, largely, in the developed world, they do. The Japanese earthquake is mostly notable for how few people died, and most of those who did die perished in the tsunami, which is rather harder to stop. My semi-informed guess is that a similar seismic event in, say, California, would easily top the death toll from the Japanese quake by mid-morning--before we found out that all the beach communities were floating in the middle of the Pacific.

The question, then, is whether 2011 is an outlier or the beginning of a new trend. The data are not clear, although the trend lines are way up--indeed, running ahead of what NOAA's model calls the "maximum" number that we should be expecting. Maybe it is a coincidence. Maybe there has been some sort of a change in the underlying weather-generating mechanism. But I am now actually a little afraid that these past few weeks could be the new normal. And if so, that would make the Midwest rather less tame and less placid. And what the region would gain in excitement it would more than lose in actual danger.

Number One for 23 May 2011

Everyone gather 'round now, sing us a song, just in case by tomorrow, it happens he's gone:

• Santorum for Grand Inquisitor [In the Agora]
• Caplan for Socialism [Yglesias]
• Spolsky for Duct Tape [Spolsky]
• Voeten for Labor-Saving Software [Monkey Cage]
• Los Angeles for The Rich and Famous [Kevin Drum]
• Two-by-twos for the GOP [Kevin Drum]
• Honesty for Social Science [IQSS]
• My favorite ANOVA multiple comparison procedure [Wikipedia]

For the now exceptionally depressing GOP field: Ben Folds, "Steven's Last Night in Town"

Honors List, Week of 5/21

Books I have read in the past week. Books are either Recommended or Not Recommended, and they appeal to either Specialists or Generalists. (*) is emphatic; (**) is doubly so.

Our aspirations are wrapped up in books:

• Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner-Take-All Politics.  Recommended. (*) Polemical. Should be read as a supplement to Larry Bartels, Unequal Democracy, which is Recommended (**).
• Dilip Hiro, After Empire. Terrible. Not Recommended (**). Left-deviationist.
  
• David Kang, China Rising. Good. Recommended for specialists.
  
• Susan Shirk, China: Fragile Superpower. Recommended (*). Generalist.
  
• Andrew Coe, Chop Suey: a Cultural History of Chinese Food in the United States. Generalist. A good accompaniment to Jennifer 8. Lee's Fortune Cookie Chronicles, but definitely a supplement, not a replacement.
  

Belle and Sebastian, "Wrapped Up In Books"