Check it out: Thinking About Academia Like An Economist

The value of education is not purely as an investment. Education also provides some degree of consumption value.

This observation kind of throws a wrench in human capital theory, because it will be difficult to decide whether certain forms of education spending were worth it in the absence of information about the value that that education had to students in virtue of merely consuming it, apart from any job they subsequently got or whatever. The consumption value of education is subjective, and will vary widely from person to person. But the fact that education’s consumption value is difficult, or impossible, to observe and measure does not give us good reason to ignore it.

The consumption value of education came to my mind frequently as I recently read “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” Throughout the book, the authors stress that college students today emphasize the social value of college to an extreme degree, some of them going so far as to say that the relationships that they form and experience in college are significantly more important than anything they may learn in the classroom. Unfortunately, gaining extensive social experience in college is, to some extent, at odds with performing well academically: for instance the authors show that, while participating in a fraternity or sorority may improve academic performance somewhat, studying in groups is less effective than studying alone. And, because our time is finite, hours spent socializing are mostly hours spent not studying, reading, or writing, activities which occupy less of college students’ time today than in the recent past, apparently to their detriment.

Now, socializing at college may itself have some investment value, particularly at elite colleges (i.e., “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”). But college students engage in many social activities simply because they are enjoyable. As such, social opportunities and experiences constitute much of the consumption value of going to college, and students self-report that this is a very important aspect of college life to them. Yet, practically daily now there is a story in every major news outlet, describing the shock, frustration, anger, and sadness of college graduates upon realizing that they are unable to trade their college credentiala for a high-paying job, or even any job (here’s an example from the NYT).

My assessment of the situation: Stuff doesn’t acquire investment value just because you want it to. Students and parents realize, on some level, that the value of college consists to a large extent in consumption. This is why they speak frequently of the college “experience” and make college decisions taking things like sports, dorms, and dining hall food into account. But then, when it’s time for the degree to hit the fan and for interested parties to see what kind of investment value that expensive education really had, they are unable to bite the bullet and admit that college is greatly about consumption.

Notice that another aspect of the consumption value of education consists in students’ simply enjoying attending classes (your author is the queer sort of creature who often enjoys it immensely) and partaking in other academic experiences available only through institutionalized education. This should be kept in mind when we think about students’ decisions to attend graduate school and pursue careers in academia, despite the dismal job prospects. Many of the requisite educational expenditures should be understood as (maybe) overpaying for educational experiences, rather than as failed investments.

HUDF 5645 Policy seminar I
Conceptualization and identification of social and educational problems that can be subjected to policy interventions. Design and evaluation of alternative policy choices. Effective strategies for presenting policy analysis to multiple audiences.

With Dr. Aaron Pallas, who I really like.

I have no idea of what I expected from a policy course. If you had asked me before the semester started, I probably would have said that I expect it all to be fluffy, commonsense type stuff that a wicked smart philosophy type would either know already or pick up easily.

Wrong.

There are definitely some skills associated with policy work that one does not develop in philosophy courses and that don’t necessarily come naturally. The first of these, of which I am becoming ever more acutely aware, is the ability to sell some particular education condition as an actual policy problem. In philosophy, it’s really not too difficult to motivate a paper; another philosopher’s having said something false or misleading is sufficient for your offering your piece on the matter. This is perhaps part of why academic philosophy has gained a reputation for being irrelevant and mere intellectual masturbation — there isn’t a terribly heavy burden on a philosopher to explain why their work really matters.

This is not the case in ed policy. You need a research question that focuses in on a specific condition in education that is appropriate for government action, indicated by clear and preferably quantitative measures, that experts and authorities care about, that everyone cares about (and is explainable in lay terms), and that is newish and getting worse but is solvable. Of course, not all policy papers live up to these standards, but if you don’t at least try then no one is going to finish reading it and/or invest any time or effort in attending to the condition.

So I find myself with many education-related interests — character education, school choice, homeschooling/unschooling, etc — but with no topic for the first assignment, a memo. In philosophy, it would have been ok to just kind of talk about character education — like I have a pretty good paper which lays out the features I take to be central to an Aristotelian-style virtue-based program of character education. But that paper couldn’t really morph into a decent policy paper, because there’s no real condition in there that is appropriate for government action and indicated by clear (preferably quantitative) data. Even if I could massage some aspect of character education in public schools to fit those criteria, the policy paper would probably still remain uncompelling to education policy actors, who would surely find many more conditions in education deserving of government attention and resources than a theoretical bone I have to pick with an inexpensive and generally uncontroversial character education program.

I have decided not to let the sun set on tomorrow without having committed to a topic. I need something kind of philosophical and interestingly off the beaten path, but also with great practical import and accessibility to non-philosophy people. Oh, and it has to be at the local level, and I have a budget of $1 million. Hmmm.

To conclude: I thought I knew stuff about ed policy just from reading the blogs, but actually I don’t, and it’s not going to cut it just to do philosophy and say it’s policy because it has policy implications. le sigh.

• Economics of Education: This was a fantastic class. We learned about human capital theory, the costs and benefits of education, teacher labor markets, school choice, and more. Professor Levin really lived up to his reputation as an excellent lecturer, and the material balanced breadth and depth nicely.
• School Change: This was a depressing class. We learned all about the obstacles facing school reform and why it so rarely works. Main texts were Tyack & Cuban’s classic Tinkering Toward Utopia and Managing to Change by our outstanding professor, Tom Hatch. I was already pessimistic about school change, so the course basically confirmed and informed my pre-existing conclusions. But I think it crushed the souls of some other students, actual teachers and principals whose identities are tied up in improving public education on the ground.
• School & Society: The alternate title for this course was something like “Educating for Social Justice,” so I was moderately concerned about potential political issues. Fortunately, though, I didn’t really encounter any problems in this regard, and actually wrote some fairly libertarianesque stuff without incident. A major course text was Yehuda Bar Shalom’s Educating Israel (chosen by our visiting professor who does philosophy of education in Israel), which I wasn’t expecting to find interesting. However, as it turns out, the book provides great evidence for the power of decentralization and social entrepreneurship in education. I ended up writing a paper about the importance of resisting the technocratic urge to try scaling up the successful school models portrayed in the book, in a vaguely Hayekian vein.
• Doctoral Proseminar: We hit Plato hard: Alcibiades, Protagoras, Meno, Gorgias, Apology, Phaedo. In the spring, we will continue with The Republic. I am exhausted just thinking about it.
• Research Assistantship: I was tasked with selecting and preparing some texts for a possible future interdisciplinary course in Ed Policy & Philosophy. I chose Brighouse’s On Education, Nussbaum’s Not For Profit, and Swift’s How Not to be a Hypocrite. I am still wrapping up my outlining and annotating of these, and will some parts of them when they’re finished.
• Volunteering: I taught two courses at Columbia Secondary School through Columbia University & Teachers College’s Philosophy Outreach Program: intro to philosophy for seventh graders and bioethics for ninth graders. It was a challenging yet rewarding experience; teaching kids is quite different from teaching undergrads.
• Other Academic: I presented an extremely tentative dissertation proposal at an IHS workshop in Arlington in October; as always it was a valuable and educational event. Also, I got a proposal accepted to the Middle Atlantic States Philosophy of Education Society’s upcoming conference at NYU in February. The paper is tentatively titled: “Are We All Political Animals?: A Criticism of Educating for Political Participation.”
• Extracurricular Reading: Academic-ish: Tooley’s The Beautiful Tree, Illich’s Deschooling Society, and Moe and Chubb’s Liberating Learning. For pleasure: de Botton’s On Love and Nabokov’s Lolita.

All in all, a pretty good semester. Here’s to even better productivity in 2011.

1. More reading! — This has two parts. First, I resolve never to attend a class meeting this semester without having read the assigned material in its entirety. We’ve all failed to do so before, for whatever reason — we’re too busy, it’s too many pages or too boring, or whatever. But now I’m in a program that I am totally interested in, and without teaching responsibilities on top of my coursework. As such, there is really no excuse for not doing the assigned reading. Which brings us to the second part of the reading resolution: I should also have plenty of time to read at least two books per month (either fiction or nonfiction) in addition to the assigned reading for courses. I’d really like to increase that to one extra book per week, but I guess I’ll work up to it. Will be tracking this with Goodreads.
2. More writing! — I’ve heard it time and time again: to become a good writer, you must write regularly and copiously, even if noncommittally. I believe that this is good advice, and yet I have never taken it… until this semester. From now on, I’m going to write blog posts of ideas as I have them, instead of stashing them away in Evernote, never to see the light of day. Or, if I have a term paper idea, I plan to test it out with a few pages instead of with a few sentences. It’s not as if I’m going to run out of ink or something.
3. Less internet! — I’m mildly concerned with the possibility that the internet is decreasing our attention spans, and so on. More importantly, though, it sucks up too much of my time and, although I learn some stuff from surfing around and reading blogs, it never gives me a sense of accomplishment. So Google Reader needs to shift from being my main source of reading to a minor one. And I will use it at night, instead of in the morning when catching up on the blogs can easily derail my plans for the entire day.
4. More socializing! — I am kind of a loner, especially academically. I basically avoid engaging with my colleagues outside of class, hate sharing papers in progress, and have begun even to avoid discussing academic stuff on social sites. But to be an academic loner is bad for you  - it deprives you of exposure to new ideas, practice in critiquing and being critiqued, and networking opportunities. So, I plan to stop being so academically antisocial.

Best wishes for a successful school year to all my fellow students. Or, enjoy not being in school, as the case may be :-)

Columbia University’s Teachers College requires students to demonstrate a “commitment to social justice” and  employs “dispositions,” which it defines as “observable behaviors that fall within the law and involve the use of certain skills,” to evaluate students. These dispositions, “expected of Teachers College candidates and graduates” and “assessed at each transition point,” include “Respect for Diversity and Commitment to Social Justice.”

Basically I agree with FIRE’s assessment of the situation. Teachers College would not necessarily be wrong to require students’ “commitment to social justice” *if* “social justice” were not an ideologically loaded term. I can at least imagine a community of inquiry approaching topics relating to social justice without any preconceived notions about what social justice requires. But that is surely not the case. Rather, “social justice” is often used as the not-so-secret term for a very liberal/progressive/redistributive/egalitarian-ish perspective on the role of the state. Since the TC documents do not go on to specify what the mysterious “social justice” requirement really consists in, we have to assume the worst — that it is indeed an ideological litmus test, or could function as one in the hands of the administration. And, this social justice requirement will have potentially pervasive effects because education policy is seen as one important way of furthering “social justice” so conceived (e.g., closing the achievement gap, equitably funding schools, providing social services to schoolchildren, discouraging or disallowing the privatization of education, etc).

So, there is reason to object to the document on principle. Free speech is of the utmost importance (don’t hold me to this, but I am even inclined towards a totally exceptionless reading of the first amendment). Institutions of higher education are supposed to serve as marketplaces for ideas. They should promote, not stifle, intellectual discourse — regarding what constitutes social justice in education, and anything else. Official positions on what academics can and cannot say have an undesirable chilling effect (academic social norms, such as “political correctness” for instance, restrain discourse enough as it is). Ideas should win intellectual wars by being good, not by being privileged within the academy. I agree with FIRE that it is objectionable for private universities to advertise themselves as being bastions of free thought while maintaining policies of this kind (see a relevant article from FIRE here). If colleges and universities would prefer to change their institutional objectives (e.g., towards ideological teacher training, towards fundamentalist religious education, or whatever), they should be upfront about this, and not keep talking the talk of intellectual activity for its own sake.

More importantly, though, I have prudential concerns about TC’s policy because (as Mr. Kissel probably saw) I am about to begin a PhD program there. Although I am something of a leftish libertarian, I have no doubt that my political views will differ radically from those of most of my classmates and professors. I knew that this was bound to be the case at almost any school of education that I chose to attend, and am prepared for the (hopefully minimal) conflicts that will ensue. However, there is a big difference between having one’s political beliefs scrutinized by one’s classmates and having them scrutinized by the administration. My classmates can’t keep me from graduating or from receiving awards and scholarships, while the administration definitely can. This extreme imbalance of power, combined with the Conceptual Framework tenets in question, is threatening.

I neither concealed nor advertised my political beliefs on my admissions application, but my writing sample was somewhat sympathetic to school choice. My future adviser knows that I have received a Humane Studies Fellowship from the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies; although he is supportive and pleased I am not sure whether everyone in a position of power at TC would feel the same way. In any case, there probably won’t be a whole lot of evidence in my academic work that I am committed to social justice in the way that the Conceptual Framework suggests that I ought to be. Although I remain cautiously optimistic that this will not become a problem during my time at TC (I haven’t heard of any attempts to enforce the requirements), it would of course be better if the suspect requirements were eliminated altogether.

To that end, I have recently begun reading a LOT more education stuff — probably quadrupled the number of blogs, and I have a number of education-related books on deck. One thing that has become immediately apparent to me is that education, particularly ed policy, is crazy complicated and very highly interdisciplinary. It involves psychology, sociology, history, economics, statistics, etc.

While I’ll be doing a concentration in ed policy, my work will have a more overtly philosophical orientation than other policy people’s. I’m interested in distinctively moral questions surrounding education. Answers to moral questions are informed by empirical information, but not always straightforwardly. As such, and as I’ve written before, I don’t see this move as leaving philosophy at all. It’s just a strategic move that is likely to be more rewarding personally, and possibly professionally.

Even so, I want always to know exactly what’s going on in education today. Most of my colleagues at Teachers College will *not* be philosophers, and most of the professors and guest speakers will be more on-the-ground in education. I can’t demand that they all become interested in philosophy on my terms, but I can try to make myself a very interesting philosopher who speaks to them and their interests. I don’t like the idea of spending a lifetime doing philosophy that no one outside of philosophy really cares about, so achieving this is important to me.

So, you’ll see my Google Reader sharing, tweets, and blogging turn substantially in this direction. Please pass along any education-related items of interest (book recommendations, news articles, etc.) that you think I should know about. I look forward to being that friend of yours who fills the education niche in your life.

Very shortly after I began a PhD program in philosophy in the fall of 2007, my research interests rapidly started shifting towards topics in education. First I got interested in moral character and moral education, then arguments for and against school choice, then the relationship between feminism and education, and most recently, I’ve started studying alternative forms of education such as unschooling.

Because not many people in departments of philosophy focus on education, and because the job market for professors of education seems rather better than that for philosophers, I have decided to move to a school of education to complete my graduate studies. I have ten applications under consideration in US News & World Reports top 25 schools of education, all of which have programs in the philosophy of education or something similar (most PhD, one EdD). With any luck, I will be accepted to one or more of them with funding, and will be making the move for the fall of 2010.

Some philosophers with whom I have discussed this have expressed their regret that I am leaving philosophy. However, I don’t see myself as leaving the field at all. In fact, I will be pursuing exactly the same research projects as I would have pursued had I stayed in philosophy, only with the more useful guidance of experts in education. So, it is more of a strategic move than anything else, and will likely benefit me career-wise in the long run.

So keep your fingers crossed for me, and look for updates on this over the next few months :-)

Do you ever get the feeling that, for every new topic in which you develop interests, you later find that it’s all been done by someone else?

It’s happened to me at least twice in the recent past. First, I got really interested in Aristotelian virtue-based character education.Surprise! It’s been done, in book form no less. Aristotle, Emotions, and Education. And, from the looks of it, it’s been done well, even.

Then, I became interested in whether home schooling is consistent with or contrary to feminism, which I thought would be a new issue on the radar. Ta-da! An article by Wendy McElroy, one of my favorite feminists, in a publication by the reputable Foundation for Economic Education. She beat me to it by 7 years. And she is so prolific, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was more where that came from.

Of course, it’s only one book and one article, but I really liked the thought of exploring totally uncharted academic territory. When this happens, you can either:

1. Try to catch up on all the relevant literature and respond to it before you write something original.
2. Pretend you don’t know about it, and proceed in ignorance.
3. Some combination of 1 & 2.

But, the more I try to catch up, the more morale I lose, and the more I feel like I could spend a lifetime just reading other people’s work without ever stopping to produce my own.

Thoughts or advice, anyone?