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Transforming Higher Education?

Monday, May 11, 2009

A college education is many things to many people: a chance to expand the mind, gain employable skills, make the transition to adulthood, have a good time. But let’s abstract for a moment. Taking a college course in subject X is widely considered a way to:

  1. bring to me a certain level of competence in subject X, and
  2. certify this level of competence by assigning me a grade.

So under this simple model, what is the best way to proceed? Some would call it unfortunate, but a great many courses, even at the best and most exclusive institutions in America, are taught with a minimum of interaction between student and professor. Giant lecture halls fill to the brim, teaching assistants do the grading, and students are largely left to their own devices. Some lecturers manage to make the most of this less than propitious set of circumstances, teaching excellent courses that involve and fascinate students. Others fail miserably.

So what of the best professors? If they can inspire a class of 500, why stop there? Why not 1000, 10,000, or even 1 million? There is no appreciable decrease in student interaction once the size of the class passes beyond a few hundred. If we want to bring down the cost of higher education, make it more broadly available, and increase its value-added, these lectures, the best of the best, should be disseminated as widely and cheaply as possible.

And it’s already starting to happen. Consider Academic Earth, a combination of RateYourProfessor and Youtube, that freely distributes college lectures from some of America’s best universities. If you want to learn multivariable calculus on your own time and your own terms from a top mathematician, provided you have an internet connection there is nothing stopping you. A traditional college education isn’t for everyone, and neither, for that matter, is a model based on limited interaction as outlined above. But why shouldn’t a new, open university be made available to those it would benefit?

The only remaining obstacle is certification. You can attend, via your internet connection, the same lecture as sophomores at Berkeley, but you don’t get a degree for your trouble. But why not? Here’s a radical idea: don’t sell instruction; sell certification.

What is to stop me from assembling, at private expense, a team of experts in, say medieval history, to design a top-notch syllabus, write and deliver a series of excellent video lectures, and devise rigorous examinations to measure student performance? Now suppose I were to give away all of the instructional content, charging only for the right to sit the final examination in a designated examination center (c.f. the way the ETS administers the GRE exam) and receive a grade. Students could prepare for the examination in any way they see fit: by watching the free video lectures, reading books, hiring a private tutor, or even attending a traditional college course in the subject. Provided my start-up could establish a reputation for rigorous testing I could have a very profitable venture on my hands. The marginal cost of administering and grading one more exam is very low indeed. The rest is pure profit. Even charging $200 per exam, I could corner the market on education.

So what’s the big hold-up? Why hasn’t someone tried this already? I suspect the main reason is that it’s difficult to establish a reputation in a setting as opaque and confusing as the market for higher education. But it shouldn’t be impossible. I could even poach the reputation of renowned institutions by employing their professors as consultants. If I were to pay Greg Mankiw $100,000 to design my introduction to economics course I’m sure he’d take the job, and I would need only 500 students at $200 per exam to cover the cost. My courses wouldn’t have the imprimatur of a renowned university, but they’d have the imprimatur of a top economist. Which is truly more valuable?

For now, this is, of course, only speculation. But if this whole grad school thing doesn’t work out, I may have a money-making opportunity on my hands.

Update: After running this past my bad idea filter, Charles, I think this actually is feasible, although Charles and I agree that the two aspects of the project (instruction and certification) should be separate. Otherwise, if I design a curriculum and give it away, someone else can simply swoop in, design an exam only and free-ride off of my instructional content.

It seems that there would even be a market for a great number of alternative exams on a given subject. As long as there was some way to measure the difficulty of the exams and accurately track their pass rates, employers could simply choose which exam to require as a condition of employment. Employees, on the other hand, would take the hardest exam they thought they could pass. In one fell swoop we have a mechanism for objectively measuring ability.

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Some Highlights from Plutarch’s Life of Caesar

Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Caesar and the pirates (Plutarch’s Caesar [1] and [2]):

[Caesar] stayed for a short time with the king and then on his voyage back was captured near the island of Pharmacusa by some of the pirates who even at that time controlled the seas with their larges fleets of ships and innumerable smaller craft.

First, when the pirates demanded a ransom of twenty talents, Caesar burst out laughing. They did not know, he said, who it was they had captured, and he volunteered to pay fifty. Then, when he had sent his followers to the various cities in order to raise the money and was left with one friend and two servants among these Cilicians, the most bloodthirsty people in the world, he treated them so highhandedly that, whenever he wanted to sleep, he would send to them and tell them to stop talking. For thirty-eight days, with the greatest unconcern, he joined in all their games and exercises, just as if he was their leader instead of their prisoner. He also wrote poems and speeches, and if they failed to admire his work, he would call them to their faces illiterate savages, and would often laughingly threaten to have them all hanged. They were much taken with this and attributed his freedom of speech to a kind of simplicity in his character or boyish playfulness. However, the ransom arrived from Miletus and, as soon as he and paid it and been set free, he immediately manned some ships and set sail from the harbor of Miletus against the pirates. He found them still there, lying at anchor off the island, and he captured nearly all of them. He took their property as spoils of war and put the men themselves into prison in Pergamum. He then went in person to Junius, the governor of Asia, thinking it proper that he, as praetor in charge of the province, should see to the punishment of the prisoners. Junius, however, cast longing eyes at the money, which came to a considerable sum, and kept saying that he needed time to look into the case. Caesar paid no further attention to him. He went to Pergamum, took the pirates out of prison and crucified the lot of them, just as he had often told them he would do when he was on the island and they imagined he was joking.

Caesar and the Asparagus (Plutarch’s Caesar [17]):

He was not the least bit fussy about his food, as is shown by the following story. When Valerius Leo was entertaining him to dinner at Milan, he served up asparagus dressed with myrrh instead of with olive oil. Caesar ate this quite calmly himself and reprimanded his friends when they objected to the dish. ‘If you didn’t like it,’ he said, ‘there was no need to have eaten it. But if one reflects on one’s host’s lack of breeding it merely shows that one is ill-bred oneself.’

The real story behind Pompey’s defeat at Pharsalus (Plutarch’s Caesar [45]):

So the two infanty armies joined battle and fought hand to hand. And now Pompey’s cavalry rode up on the flank in a proud array and deployed their squadrons in order to encircle Caesar’s right wing. Before they could charge, the cohorts which Caesar had posted behind him ran forward and, instead of hurling their javelins, as they usually did, or even thrusting at the thighs and legs of the enemy, aimed at their eyes and stabbed upwards at their faces. Caesar had instructed them to do this because he believed that these young men who had not had much experience of battle and the wounds of battle but who particularly plumed themselves on their good looks, would dislike more than anything the idea of being attacked in this way and, fearing both the danger of the moment and the possibility of disfigurement in the future, would not be able to stand up to it. And in fact this was exactly what happened. They could not face the upward thrusts of the javelins or even the sight of the iron points; they turned their heads away and covered them up in their anxiety to keep their faces unscarred. Soon they were in complete disorder, and finally, in a most disgraceful way, they turned and fled, thereby ruining everything since the cohorts who had defeated the cavalry at once swept round behind the infantry, fell on their rear, and began to cut them to pieces.

(All quotations from the Penguin Classics translation by Rex Warner)

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What I was reading…

Friday, May 1, 2009

One of my resolutions was to keep track of my reading on this blog, but I let things lapse for a while.

During this period of radio silence, I finished McCloskey’s Rhetoric of Economics. It was a really fun book, well-written and entertaining. To be honest, nothing she said struck me as especially heretical. I’ve heard some very respected mainstream economists make similar points in class. It’s a pity the book was recalled from me; I would have read it again.

I also read Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, a semi-biographical novel whose main character is a stand-in for Allan Bloom, a close friend of Bellow’s and author of the controversial The Closing of the American Mind. Bellow’s style takes a bit of getting used to, with its free-wheeling intellectual energy, but I really enjoy it. This book is far more introspective than Humbolt’s Gift, but manages to stay fairly light-hearted in spite of its heavy subject matter (it’s really a book about death).

At the moment I’ve decided to read Plutarch. Sadly I still don’t know Greek, so the Penguin Classics translation will have to suffice. I’m reading the life of Caesar right now, which seems to be the source of that famous anecdote about his being captured by pirates and offering them more ransom than they asked.

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Can’t we all just get along?

Friday, May 1, 2009

A recent New York Times Op-Ed suggested a radical integration of academic departments. This seems a touch excessive to me, but I agree that there’s too much compartmentalization in academia today.

That being the case, I was excited to hear about a new book entitled Quantitative Models And Methods: A Tour of the Social Sciences. It’s edited by Andrew Gelman, and purports to offer “a set of in-depth examples and discussions of social science research from a variety of perspectives.” This sounds like a pretty good idea to me. I know next to nothing about how empirical research in psychology and sociology are carried out, even though they overlap substantially with economics. Economists usually make fun of sociologists, but I’m not convinced that the caricature of that discipline is any better informed than the naive depictions of economists one encounters so often in the popular press.

I wonder if this one is in the library…

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R Task Packages

Thursday, April 30, 2009

I found something new and interesting on the Comprehensive R Network (CRAN) today: task views. It’s a list of short articles outlining collections of R packages available for certain tasks. For example, there is an Econometrics task view, a Bayesian task view, a Time Series task view, and so on. This seems much more convenient than searching for packages one by one.

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Is Our Children Learning?

Thursday, March 5, 2009

TA evaluations came out today, and I can’t resist a few quotes. Overall I was shocked by how few students actually completed the evaluation forms. I suppose this is an indication of how few attend class. First, the most negative review:

The TA’s review session was useless, he had no idea what was going to be on the midterm. [sic]

Sadly, they do always ask me which questions will appear on the exam and I respond truthfully with: “I don’t know because I don’t write the exams.” Of course the full answer is more like “I wouldn’t tell you even if I did know you little snot,” but I think it best not to alienate my audience.

Here’s another good one:

Frank shows concerns for students’ learning. He is audible, knows the subject very well [sic]

I’ve never been called audible before! I suppose it can be a problem in these big lecture halls. Oh for the small, east coast, liberal arts college…

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I Forgot about Sweave!

Saturday, February 21, 2009

Another useful R-related website is the Sweave Homepage, where you can learn about a cool software package that combines R and LaTeX. Using Sweave, you can, for example, embed an R plot in your LaTeX document in such a way that when you change the plot in your R source code, the image changes in your LaTeX document.

I haven’t gotten around to working with Sweave yet, but it seems like a good idea.

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The Answer to My R Graphics Prayers

Friday, February 20, 2009

This is a simply amazing collection of R graphics examples with full source code: I’ll never go hungry again! This should be enough to convince almost anyone to use R. And did I mention it’s free? (hat tip: Andrew Gelman)

In celebration of this momentous discovery, here are some of my favorite R-related links:

  1. CRAN: the Comprehensive R Network. This is where you can download the latest version of R, packages that might interest you, and all the documentation you could ever want. My favorite feature is the Google search tool. If you type “R” into Google, you’ll get a list of hits with nothing to do with the software package. This tool filters out the unrelated pages.
  2. Econometrics in R: Very few econometricians and economics students seem to use R. This is a shame — R is free, easy to use, and makes an excellent substitute for commercial packages like STATA, SAS, and even Matlab. This document shows how all of the techniques in your econometrics textbook can be implemented in R. It also serves as a good introduction to R for non-econometricians.
  3. Matlab / R Reference: R has many of the same features of Matlab for statistical and matrix computations. In my own work, there’s almost nothing I know how to do in R that I can’t do in Matlab, or vice-versa. But sometimes switching back and forth can get confusing. Fortunately, David Hiebeler of the University of Maine has produced this bi-lingual Matlab-R dictionary.
  4. R Reference Card: This isn’t the best for learning R, but it’s a good cheat sheet if you’re already familiar with the language.
  5. The R Guide: W.J. Owen of the University of Richmond has written the best introduction to R that I’ve encountered. It isn’t the most comprehensive reference, but gets you started quickly and provides a good foundation.
  6. Revolution R: These guys have produced a faster version of R that looks and feels exactly like the standard edition. Supposedly they’ve compiled the underlying source code on more efficient commercial compilers. This version is free, but they also offer a commercial version for multiple-processor systems. I haven’t had time to test this extensively, but it might be helpful for some projects.

In case I didn’t make myself clear enough: use R!

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Some Initial Thoughts on Methodology in Economics

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

After my recent philosophy of science kick, I’ve been taking a look at some (slightly heretical) views of economic methodology:

  1. The Rhetoric of Economics, by Deirdre McCloskey
  2. Knowledge and Persuasion in economics, by Deirdre McCloskey
  3. McCloskey’s Rhetoric: Discourse Ethics in Economics, by Benjamin Balak
  4. Economics and Reality, by Tony Lawson
  5. Reorienting Economics, by Tony Lawson
  6. Beyond Positivism: Economic Methodology in the 20th Century, by Bruce Caldwell
  7. Beyond Rhetoric and Realism in Economics, by Boylan and O’Gorman

I haven’t started reading 2 or 6 yet, and I still have much farther to go with the others, but a few things have really struck me so far.

First, McCloskey is hilarious, and I mean that in a good way. Her writing is witty, sophisticated, and highly readable. I only wish that more scholars wrote like this. The only other piece of McCloskey’s work I’d seen before was her style guide The Writing of Economics which I believe has been republished (and revised?) under the title Economical Writing. It’s well worth a look. Lawson’s writing is much more staid and traditional, and boy does he love the word ontology!

McCloskey, and Lawson to a lesser extent, has me convinced that the way we claim to practice economics and the way we actually practice it are often two very different things. I like McCloskey’s analogy to rhetoric, although I’m not yet sure how far it should be taken. I completely agree with her that philosophy of science as professed within the economics profession is quite ignorant of the developments of the field over the 20th century. I’ve had professors tell me that logical positivism or Popperian falsification are where it’s at, but no one much mentions Kuhn or that fact that Popper claims to have killed Positivism (with his “little chopper”). Falsification too has its problems as we now know.

Lawson worries me a bit. He claims that (a) 20th century economics has been highly unsuccessful at on its own terms (i.e. at prediction) and (b) the increasing mathematization of the field is folly because social reality does not entail the kinds of regularities that can be studied in this way. He coins the term “demi-regularities” or “demi-regs” to describe his weakened notion of “laws” of human behavior. It seems to me that these ideas fit rather well with Popper’s view of the social sciences (from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry Karl Popper):

These beliefs lead to what Popper calls ‘The Historicist Doctrine of the Social Sciences’, the views (a) that the principal task of the social sciences is to make predictions about the social and political development of man, and (b) that the task of politics, once the key predictions have been made, is, in Marx’s words, to lessen the ‘birth pangs’ of future social and political developments. Popper thinks that this view of the social sciences is both theoretically misconceived (in the sense of being based upon a view of natural science and its methodology which is totally wrong), and socially dangerous, as it leads inevitably to totalitarianism and authoritarianism—to centralised governmental control of the individual and the attempted imposition of large-scale social planning. Against this Popper strongly advances the view that any human social grouping is no more (or less) than the sum of its individual members, that what happens in history is the (largely unplanned and unforeseeable) result of the actions of such individuals, and that large scale social planning to an antecedently conceived blueprint is inherently misconceived—and inevitably disastrous—precisely because human actions have consequences which cannot be foreseen. Popper, then, is an historical indeterminist, insofar as he holds that history does not evolve in accordance with intrinsic laws or principles, that in the absence of such laws and principles unconditional prediction in the social sciences is an impossibility, and that there is no such thing as historical necessity.

Of course, if you take Lawson seriously, then the entire field of economics as it if practiced is essentially a sham. But I’m not sure that he’s made his case for (a) as it leads on to (b). Yes, our theories of macroeconomics seem poor, but aren’t many ideas about markets to a certain degree confirmed in the laboratory? And even if we have not found social regularities that are subject to mathematization, it certainly doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Perhaps the present state of economics is like alchemy was to chemisty: the tools of today, although perhaps misapplied or lacking in some sense, will eventually lead to a better science of tomorrow. I’m not certain that believing (a) requires you to believe (b).

Of course a hard core determinist will say “of course there are mathematical regularities governing social behavior: we are made of quarks!” At one point, Lawson mentions free will as an important obstacle to economic prediction. I suppose if one rejects free will, any kind of prediction is only a matter of having big enough computers.

As a final note, I think some people contrast Lawson (a realist because of his demi-regs) with McCloskey (a relativist because of her conception of economics as rhetoric). It’s true that McCloskey quotes Nelson Goodman a fair amount (see his Ways of Worldmaking), but so far at least she has not rejected a notion or reality, but merely stated that the “big-T” truths about it may not be accessible.

I suppose what I should say is that I’m confused, fascinated, and terrified by these ideas. That’s a sure sign I’m learning something.

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How to Split Equations in LaTeX

Sunday, February 15, 2009

This happens to me all the time: I have a really long equation and need to split it over several lines. My crappy solution to this problem so far has been to use eqnarray. It’s clumsy and the alignment doesn’t work out properly.

So here’s the solution! Use the ams packages, and the commands \begin{split} and \end{split}. These needs to be placed within another environment, like an equation. You can align with &, slightly different from the usual && in equation arrays, and \\ breaks the lines. One caveat: if you use something like \left( YOUR MATH HERE \right), each line needs to be self-contained. For example:

\begin{equation}
\begin{split}
\left( YOUR MATH HERE \right. \\
\left. YOUR MATH HERE \right)
\end{split}
\end{equation}

Success!

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