Higher Education Bubble note

Every now and then we should stop and think about the context of higher education that we mostly hope most of our kids are headed for.... the New York Federal Reserve has come out (November 27, 2012) with a Q3 household financials report, Decrease in Overall Debt Balance Continues Despite Rise in Non-Real Estate Debt - Federal Reserve Bank of New York

in the third quarter, non-real estate household debt jumped 2.3 percent to $2.7 trillion. The increase was due to a boost in student loans ($42 billion), auto loans ($18 billion) and credit card balances ($2 billion). ...The reduction in overall debt is attributed to a decrease in mortgage debt ... and home equity lines of credit...
Outstanding student loan debt now stands at $956 billion, an increase of $42 billion since last quarter. ... $23 billion is new debt ... the percent of student loan balances 90+ days delinquent increased to 11 percent this quarter.²...
² these delinquency rates for student loans are likely to understate actual delinquency rates because almost half of these loans are currently in deferment, in grace periods or in forbearance and therefore temporarily not in the repayment cycle. This implies that among loans in the repayment cycle delinquency rates are roughly twice as high.

These debts, of course, are not discharged in bankruptcy. It's a profoundly immoral system in which our almost-adults are urged to jump into heavy debt with no serious consideration of their long-run finances, and no way out at all. The very useful ZeroHedge finance site emphasizes "The Scariest Graph of the Quarter," being the student-loan line from

A slow multi-year rise to 9%, back to 8.5%, and now a sudden jump to 11% where the new delinquency measure is known to underestimate the real problem quite drastically. So it's worse than that, even though the other loan types are not doing anything of the kind. Looking for something positive to say, we can see this as one source of pressure for online education technology at the college and graduate level; that technology, whether from Coursera or MITx or Western Governors or ...., then becomes available at the KhanAcademy level.
Or then again, maybe not.

Consolidation Location -- Rephrased

We (the "CAC") have been asked to express last week's Consolidation Location choice in terms of the "challenges" and "opportunities" associated with each choice. Okay...
We leave elementary schools where they are, for HCS and for M-ECS. We can merge middle schools into HCS and high schools into M-ECS, as option "C", or merge middle schools into M-ECS and high schools into HCS, as option "D". I group the challenges and opportunities under "Identity", "Distance", "Nearby Places", and "College Courses". There are of course many challenges and many opportunities shared by both of these options, not to be discussed here.

Identity: One village or the other will almost certainly be perceived by some of its residents as "losing the high school" that is part of their personal and community identity. I doubt that the middle school will be thought of the same way.
Challenge for C Loss of identity for Hamilton;
Challenge for D Loss of identity for Morrisville.
These are symmetric, so I don't think it affects this choice.

Distance: Distance increases for both. This is not symmetric, because many Hamilton students walk or bike, which is not practical for Morrisville students; HCS is inside Hamilton, M-ECS (high school) is not inside Morrisville.
Challenge for C Hamilton students stop walking/biking, or ride is longer.
Challenge for D Morrisville students have longer ride.

Nearby Places: My kids all got themselves to music lessons in town, after school; they would also meet friends at local food places, and one had a habit of stopping for coffee while walking to high school. Groups of kids and grownups, e.g. theatrical and athletic groups, have found places to meet. I always thought this convenience was a major advantage; it turns out that some M-ECS parents think that their lack of this convenience is a major advantage, because truancy is harder work when your school is out in the middle of nowhere. That's interesting. It seems there's a tradeoff between making life harder for kids you trust, and making life harder for kids you don't. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here -- I often do. I'm calling this a rather strong H+, but I accept that people with different values may call it an M+, and I accept that different values may provide good reasons not to merge in the first place.
Challenge for C Trusted students lose local-resource options.
Challenge for D Untrusted students have more ways to get in trouble.

Opportunity for C Untrusted students are more under control.
Opportunity for D Trusted students keep/gain local resource options.

College courses: It's common for HCS students to take a few Colgate courses despite schedule mismatches -- at any given moment, a dozen or so students are doing this, with about forty students in each HCS year. (I.e., a dozen or so out of about eighty juniors+seniors.) Some M-ECS students, according to the superintendent, would do the same if they could -- and they will be able to, if the high school location is in Hamilton. If the high school location is in Morrisville, that's probably gone -- add transport to the schedule mismatch and it won't be an option.
Challenge for C Hamilton students lose those options.
Opportunity for D Morrisville students gain those options.

Human Capital?

Following 2300 students over four years, we find that Study: Many college students not learning to think critically | McClatchy

Forty-five percent of students made no significant improvement in their critical thinking, reasoning or writing skills during the first two years of college, according to the study. After four years, 36 percent showed no significant gains in these so-called "higher order" thinking skills.

Note that this is not "compared to a control group who didn't go to college"; this is simply lack of improvement. In a control group, some would have developed the critical thinking skills being tested here, and some would not. To continue:

The study marks one of the first times a cohort of undergraduates has been followed over four years to examine whether they're learning specific skills. It provides a portrait of the complex set of factors, from the quality of secondary school preparation to the academic demands on campus, which determine learning. It comes amid President Barack Obama's call for more college graduates by 2020 and is likely to shine a spotlight on the quality of the education they receive.

Arum concluded that while students at highly selective schools made more gains than those at less selective schools, there are even greater disparities within institutions.
Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.
Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning. However, the authors note that their findings don't preclude the possibility that such students "are developing subject-specific or occupationally relevant skills."

Hmm.....education students at the bottom. However you interpret it, that's not good news for future K-12 students. Those are tomorrow's teachers.
Or then again, maybe not.

Star Academies?

"Welcome to Star Scholar U, where professors are the credential".
Professors deliver self-service online courses | The Daily Caller

Founding a university may sound dramatic, but in an era of easy-to-use online tools it can be done as a side project—akin to blogging or writing a textbook. Soon there could be hundreds of Star Scholar U’s.
Two recent examples are Marginal Revolution University, started by two economics professors at George Mason University, and Rheingold U, run by the author and Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold. To be clear, these professors are using the word “university” loosely—they award no credit and claim no spot on any college ranking. And they probably won’t become rich through their teaching. But the gambit gives them full control over the content and delivery methods. And it offers their personal brands as a kind of credential.

Rheingold U is new to me:

Rheingold U. is a totally online learning community, offering courses that usually run for five weeks, with five live sessions and ongoing asynchronous discussions through forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, and social bookmarks. In my thirty years of experience online and my eight years teaching students face to face and online at University of California, Berkeley and Stanford University, I've learned that magic can happen when a skilled facilitator works collaboratively with a group of motivated students. Live sessions include...

I dunno. The idea of the star as teacher is at least partly a matter of student incentives...of generated focus. Maybe we can have an actual profession which is "course designer", and an actual profession of course certification/evaluation, and a star lecturer can do the actual mini-lecture deliveries...how about real stars? Patrick Stewart as a physics lecturer? Does it really matter if he understands what he's saying? (Taylor Swift as a psychology lecturer?) Extend the mini-lectures with mini-dialogues, in which an actor/student takes a role with which the actual student can identify -- in fact each mini-lecture becomes multiple online mini-dialogues, so you can follow along with the education of the fictional character you most identify with, interacting with, well, with the
"Second star to the right, and straight on till morning."
Or then again, maybe not, except in Neverland.

Focus

A professorial note on MOOCs develops a view of their limits, which is a familiar view but I'm not sure it's correct. The Year of the MOOC? — Crooked Timber

MOOC’s have to be the new frontier of social networking. Some kind of peer-to-peer bootstrapping, with lots of students helping each other help themselves, because there’s no way one instructor (or just a few) can individually help every student, once you scale up past a certain point. But this still requires the students to be mature and self-motivated, as learners, to start with.

This is such a huge number of people – especially globally – that it’s great news, all in all. But it leaves a lot of people behind...(Poor kid, he has to go to Harvard because he’s not ready for Coursera!) College is for students who can’t yet help themselves, don’t know how to study, don’t know enough to know what they want, or what they should want, to learn. They need to be more or less locked into an environment where they will be induced to learn how to learn. Which is, after all, what college is supposed to teach.

That's what (some say) college is supposed to teach...but does it? Take a bunch of kids with comparable SAT scores, high school grades, socio-economic background and so forth as well as comparable "grit" and most of all, comparable ability-to-learn. Now put some of them randomly into college, some into the military, some into jobs. Five years later, six years later...test their ability-to-learn again. Will the ones who went to college stand out, as having learned how to learn? Will they be more mature? More self-motivated? I have no confidence in this claim. I would want to see some data before taking it seriously.

Actually, I'm not at all sure what ability-to-learn is, though I believe it involves being "mature and self-motivated, as learners" just as stated above; I just think that definition's probably pretty much circular. If you focus on what's in front of you then you're going to be described as mature and self-motivated and as having developed the ability to learn (although you might be very slow at it.) Of course learning-how-to-learn also involves the mechanics of taking notes and looking stuff up and trying things out, i.e. experimentation, but that ought to come in elementary school, and if elementary school comes to involve MOOCs then maybe that's all that's required... Your first grade class, or more likely pre-Kindergarten, puts you in a couple of actual physical play-groups with physical friends (some of whom are animals, and some are robots?) and also a couple of virtual groups where you do Google Hangouts (or the equivalent) with virtual friends, some of whom are cartoons and others are kids that you might meet someday. Later you take notes (to send to each other) and you look stuff up (with Google, and Wikipedia!) and you experiment (with a hammer, but preferably not Maxwell's. ) And a situation in which the "bright" kids and the "slow" kids are not waiting for each other, in which each kid has the habit of making progress at his or her own pace...hmmm. It might do.

A large part of self-motivation is habit. Indeed, a large part of maturity is habit. Hey, you know what? Almost everything is habit. William James on Habit

"Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night."

"The teacher's prime concern should be to ingrain into the pupil that assortment of habits that shall be most useful to him throughout life. Education is for behavior, and habits are the stuff of which behavior consists."

"We must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can."

"Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain."

"Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state."

Or then again, maybe they wouldn't at all, not nohow. And anyway it's much much much too late for me.

Education Election

A Time Magazine "ViewPoint" says that The Election Has Compromised Education Reform

The 2012 presidential election sidestepped the issue of school reform. Neither candidate spent much time laying out, let alone talking up, an education policy agenda. But around the country, there were ballot referendums and state and local races with big implications for schools. Teachers’ unions had a good night, but so did charter schools....

We don't know the right answer... we muddle on.
Until we can't, of course.

Consolidation Location

I want to think about several issues of school consolidation location selection, and focus on what for us may be a central issue -- the college connections. But first I'll consider some others, and (as an update) at the end I'll add some context.

Split Elementary If two declining-enrollment school systems consolidate to save money, they can often leave their elementary schools in place, and that seems like a good idea -- I suspect that most parents will agree that distance matters more for the very young (and their parents) and I'm not going to argue it here.

Merged High The high schools, however, must actually merge: if no new building is contemplated, then one set of students (and teachers) has to go to the buildings formerly occupied only by the other. In this case, we actually expect a merge to result in all middle-school students at one location, high school at the other, but it seems that high school is the focus of discussion.

Identity It's an emotional issue for many, which I think has to do with a sense of identity, and is likely to be strongest for those who grew up in one place and still live near their old high school; in rural communities that's common. I suppose I'm not the best person to address that sort of connection; I am at this moment close to 2627 miles almost due north of my old high school, which was my fourth high school (counting correspondence school but not counting junior high, or the other way around), and anyway senior year I spent more time doing freshman math and physics at a local university...the yearbook had a blank where my picture should have gone, and I've never gone back. So I should probably leave that issue alone. In any case, it's neutral -- except as a reason not to merge in the first place. Community identity is presumably always damaged in consolidation. (Or is it?)

Practicalities Apart from emotional ties, we have several possible concerns:

• Distance If A is much larger than B, then making A's students go to B is worse than the other way around -- but that's really an annexation, not a merger. In any case it doesn't seem to apply to us. If many of A's students walk or bicycle and only a few of B's, then it might again be less disruptive to bring B to A (they were on the road anyway.) That seems to apply -- I think that HCS students are more likely to walk (mine did) and M-ECS students have to drive or bus (it's far out from the village). Indeed, M-ECS seems to do more than double the bus transport of HCS, reinforcing the notion that the HCS student population is more concentrated. Call it a moderate H+, which will become more important in future if fuel costs rise.
• Facilities If one building is much newer than the other, or has a much better physical plant, then of course we use that one -- but both HCS and M-ECS have been recently upgraded and are probably comparable. (Except elementary, which is not in question here; see below.) I'd call it a wash, except that the HCS facility will soon be heated less expensively, by natural gas; I don't know how M-ECS is heated or what the relative costs are. So it might be a weak H+, or neutral.
• Outdoor Spaces Comparing upstate schools should involve not only athletic fields but woods and trails; apparently these are comparable.
• Nearby Places My kids all got themselves to music lessons in town, after school; they would also meet friends at local food places, and one had a habit of stopping for coffee while walking to high school. Groups of kids and grownups, e.g. theatrical and athletic groups, have found places to meet. I always thought this convenience was a major advantage; it turns out that some M-ECS parents think that their lack of this convenience is a major advantage, because truancy is harder work when your school is out in the middle of nowhere. That's interesting. It seems there's a tradeoff between making life harder for kids you trust, and making life harder for kids you don't. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something here -- I often do. I'm calling this a rather strong H+, but I accept that people with different values may call it an M+, and I accept that different values may provide good reasons not to merge in the first place.

And then there are the college connections which are my main focus here. Colgate has a history of supporting HCS, and of course SUNY Morrisville has supported M-ECS. It's my understanding that the level of support is not really comparable, simply because Colgate has a lot more resources. Some of these resources are straightforwardly financial -- Colgate gives a substantial voluntary contribution each year (there is no formal PILOT (Payment-In-Lieu-Of-Taxes) agreement, it's just voluntary.) Some apply at the elementary level. Some have to do with faculty volunteers. The connection that's most visibly endangered, though, applies to HCS juniors and seniors. It's common for HCS students to take a few Colgate courses despite schedule mismatches -- at any given moment, a dozen or so students are doing this, with about forty students in each HCS year. (I.e., a dozen or so out of about eighty juniors+seniors.) Some M-ECS students, according to the superintendent, would do the same if they could -- and they will be able to, if the high school location is in Hamilton. If the high school location is in Morrisville, that's probably gone -- add transport to the schedule mismatch and it won't be an option.

Is this a big deal? It is for the kids who sign up for it, and it is for those who would if they could, but can't yet do so. If the function of school is to serve kids' developmental needs, I'm calling that a strong H+.

And that's all I can think of....

Or then again, maybe not.

Context (update): This post is basically about two possibilities, but others exist. The elementary issue mentioned above is the possibility that Andrews Elementary, the separate and older elementary school for M-ECS, might close, with those students going to the M-ECS high school building, and M-ECS high schoolers coming to HCS. If enrolment is high and we stop using BOCES, this risks overcrowding. On the other hand, if later on we learn that we have a safety margin, this would save a good deal of money, about $300-350K/year in addition to any gain from sale or lease, and avoiding the likelihood that as the oldest building it might need repair sooner than the others. Even apart from consideration of Morrisville's heavier debt and heavier dependence on state aid, it may be worth keeping this option open. (Whenever I say "state aid" I think "New York, like most states, is in trouble...and there are lots of reasons why the financial district that's providing this aid might not do as well in years to come.")

Just by taking...

I feel aggravated. I just read High school rigor and good advice: Setting up students to succeed (At a glance)

Our analysis found that a student with above average SES and achievement had a 10 percent better chance of persisting in a four-year institution if that student had taken Pre-calculus or Calculus or math above Algebra II. Low SES/achievement students with high-level math were 22 percent more likely to persist.

That looks like a perfectly reasonable statement about the data. Then it continues with a statement about (cause and) effect:

Advanced Placement/International Baccalaureate courses: Taking an AP/IB course had a dramatic effect on students’ chance of persisting even when students fail the end-of-course test. Low achieving and low SES students who took an AP/IB course were 17 percent more likely to persist in four-year colleges and 30 percent more likely to persist in two-year institutions. The more of these courses a student took, the higher their persistence rates were.

And in the illustration's caption, I see a flat-out causal claim:

Just by taking these high-level courses, low-income, low-achieving students improved their college persistence rates close to their high-income, high-achieving peers.

Well, that's certainly one possibility. Another is that taking the high-level courses had some effect, partly explaining the improvement; a third possibility is that taking the high-level courses had no effect whatever.
Why do I say that? Because signaling is a factor here. Put it this way; some low-achieving students in high school will grow up a bit and start working harder in college. How can you tell in advance which ones? Well, the ones who sign up for hard courses, even if they don't do well and if the courses have no effect on them whatsoever, even if the courses themselves are a total waste of time for all concerned, might be the ones who are going to keep trying until they find something they can do well.
The researchers, it appears, never do group-by-group (e.g. school-by-school) comparisons, or if they did those comparisons are left out of the report. It would be nice to have a state pick two comparable schools lacking in these "tough courses" and offer funding for those courses to one of them, then compare outcomes ten years later (to let 9th graders go through the system and then six years to get through college). Short of that, you might get similar confidence by weighting the results for group comparisons, but the summary here looks pretty close to useless.
Or then again, I might be totally wrong.

Online Smicha

A different note on online (higher) education at Using latest technology to train rabbis - Israel Jewish Scene, Ynetnews

Employing the use of cutting edge video conferencing, online forums, and a private discussion board, onlinesmicha.com in the past two years has ordained doctors, lawyers, chaplains, and other working professionals....
To receive smicha, students must pass written and oral tests covering the laws of Shabbat and Isur V'Heter in-depth, and must participate in a final test administered in person.
The rigorous, yet flexible program offers students of varying backgrounds with a Standard track and an Accelerated track both covering the laws of Basar B’Chalav (Meat with Dairy), Ta’aruvos (Mixtures), Melicha (Salting), Shabbat, and more.

I'm not certain that the "written and oral tests" are online, but of course they could be; the oral would presumably be handled via videoconference.

School Consolidation Saves Money?

As of 2009, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association wrote that

The merger/consolidation research shows:

• There are no documented cases of financial savings from merger/consolidation.
• Merger/consolidation has had a negative impact on student achievement.
• The potential for adverse economic impact on smaller communities that lose facilities exists.

and last February in Maine, the Bangor Daily News said

Dale Douglass, executive director of the Maine School Management Association, which oversees statewide superintendent and school board associations, has been watching how consolidation has played out for the last three years.
“I’m not able with any certainty to tell you that consolidation has been a success or not. You have to examine it with verifiable data about what schools [used to] cost and what they cost now and if people are paying more or less than they are now,” Douglass said.
Because there is no information like this, “I think this is individual based and they’re not easily categorized. I won’t generalize. There are success stories out there and there are elements that people have questions about it.”

But personally I don't think "people are paying more or less than they are now." I think they're paying exactly what they are now. Right NOW!
Or then again, maybe not.

The Value of School -- STEM training?

For me, as an advocate of STEM schooling (actually STEAM schooling because I think the arts should stay in), this is an uncomfortable argument... Advocating More STEM Training Misses the Point

You report that Mexico is now successful at producing lots of engineering graduates, but so far unsuccessful at employing this talent in ways that unleash substantial economic growth (“Mexico is now a top producer of engineers, but where are jobs?” Oct. 29). Herein lies an important economic lesson: those who wish to promote genuine economic growth must more carefully distinguish cause from effect.

Well, actually I'd say that to have a successful market in engineering skills, you have to have both supply and demand, and it would be a good idea to know which is the limiting factor at any given moment. I do believe that the US and the world could do better with a whole lot more technical people, but that doesn't mean that the US or the world would be better off if we simply did a whole lot more technical training. "Would you like fries with that?" is often described as the key question resulting from a liberal arts education, but it could also come out of a technical education if it's the wrong technical education for the social and economic (and government) environment. STEM training may not be valuable in itself -- like anything else, it's valuable in the right context.

So, maybe the crucial education which is now missing is in fact economics. Yesterday I drove four hundred miles, going to and from the George Washington Bridge Plaza in Fort Lee to collect my son, who walked across the bridge. His friend who would have brought him half-way would not have been allowed back in without getting more passengers, which he wasn't sure he could do -- so he considered having a couple of more friends just go for a ride out and back, which is an amusing incentives puzzle, but it wasn't necessary. For the last hundred miles, gas shortages were obvious, and when I stopped at the Plaza two girls asked me if I knew where they could get gas -- we were almost right across from a gas station which had a "No Gas" sign but people waiting anyway. Here's the situation: Gasoline Runs Short, Adding Woes to Storm Recovery - NYTimes.com

The ports and refineries that supply much of the region’s gas had been shut down in advance of the storm and were damaged by it. That disrupted deliveries to gas stations that had power to pump the fuel. But the bigger problem was that many stations and storage facilities remained without power.
Politicians were scrambling Thursday to increase the supply of fuel — the Port of New York and New Jersey opened just enough to allow boats carrying gas to move, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey waived restrictions that make it harder for stations to buy gas from out-of-state suppliers. Mr. Christie’s office had warned that price gougers would be prosecuted, but drivers were reporting that some stations were charging more than $4 a gallon, even though the state had set gas prices at $3.59 on the highways last week.

In other words, the shortage was generated (as shortages usually are) by price controls. In MyersWorld, the initial hurricane warnings would have mentioned "In the event of storm damage, gas prices will probably rise astronomically" so people would have filled up, just in case, and companies would have brought trucks full of gas (and generators capable of running a gas station) fairly close, just in case -- and the "No Gas" signs would have been signs saying "$10/gallon", or even more, until the supply rose, thus providing incentives for conservation and for re-supply.... There would not have been any shortage. Nobody would have been short of gas....of course some people would be short of money and it might be government policy to help some of them out. (Markets are good at resource allocation, but not at income redistribution, and sometimes redistribution is a good thing.) But as Wikipedia puts it Economic shortage

Economic shortages are related to price—when the price of an item is set below the going rate determined by supply and demand, there will be a shortage.

Maybe we have a shortage of STEM/STEAM graduates...
Or then again, maybe not.