NBC News has a piece asking whether the cost of private schooling (K-12) is worth the cost. This part jumped out at me:

Despite a strong résumé that included solid grades and entrance exam scores, and an enviable list of extracurricular activities, Assaf — who attended the private, $29,800-a-year Branson School outside of San Francisco — failed to get accepted to Brown. {…}

“Not getting into Brown was the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” said Assaf, a vice president of sales at S.W. Basics of Brooklyn who ultimately ended up studying at NYU and has been accepted to the Harvard Business School.

The private school environment, according to Assaf, too often tended to engender in her and her classmates “an entitlement mentality.”

“At NYU, in a city like New York, nothing happens for you,” she said. “You have to earn every opportunity.”

When I think of a scrappy, nothing-is-free school, I can’t say that NYU is exactly what comes to mind. Later in the article:

Smith often advises his students to make nontraditional college choices — such as one student he encouraged to attend USC over an Ivy League school. However, he says he’s concerned with the dejection that students like Assaf experience, when the substantial investment in a high-priced secondary school education doesn’t yield the return they expected.

I suppose in one way, any non-Ivy school is a “nontraditional college choice” over any Ivy League school, and while USC is a private school, it’s larger than most state schools. Even so, I can’t help but find it interesting that in an article about the virtues of public versus private, it basically focuses on people looking at top-flight private schools for college.

As for the content of the article, given my aversion to private college, I have a stronger aversion to private school for K-12. At least, sending a kid to private school for the sake of “eliteness” (getting into the best college). I would consider a private school if there was something wrong with the local public school. Ideally, there’d be some measure of school choice where we end up and there would be an alternative public option, or a statewide math & science school as mentioned in the article (and like the one my wife went to).

The League had a symposium on education. I contribute two pieces. Since those racked up dozens of comments, feel free to comment on them here.

The first involved our misguided focus on sending everybody to college:

This country is run by people who have college degrees. It’s run by people where everyone they know has college degrees. It is, then, completely understandable that the solution for those who are not as economically well off as they and their friends are is “Go to college!” The economic melt-down of the latter part of last decade demonstrated that college isn’t even enough, ultimately. And it saddles you with debt. But people are looking at the debt end rather than the college end.

Now, defenders of the supremacy of college point to the fact that even when working in not-college-specific industries, college graduates tend to earn more than non-graduates. But of course they do. They have “Rush” stamped on their forehead. They get to go to the front of the line. That doesn’t mean the solution is to put the Rush stamp on everything. Not that anybody is advocating that, exactly. Not explicitly. Not overtly. And, in their mind, it’s not so much about the stamp on the forehead as it is about what you learn while in college.

I don’t mean to dismiss what we actually do get from college. It’s not insignificant. I learned a lot both from a vocational standpoint and from a personal standpoint. It was a great experience. Or, at least, it was for me. I have a certain temperament and a certain intellectual curiosity that made me suited for college in a way I was never suited for high school. A lot of people, though, don’t really have that. By placing so much emphasis on college, we’re often trying to shoehorn them into our own path. We’re pushing on them what worked for us and universalizing from our own preferences, talents, and experiences.

But college will get you ahead, and so it’s objectively good advice. That brings us back to the Rush stamp. The end result being that we (as students, parents, and taxpayers) are spending tens of thousands of dollars to save employer HR departments the time it takes to go through applications. Why not? Just weed out those without a degree. Too many with a degree? Weed out those with the wrong degree. Then complain about how employees aren’t lining up at your door-step, pre-trained precisely for the job you have an opening for. Or hire someone from India on a visa.

The second involves a potential solution, the implementation of the Federal School:

So what would federal universities provide and accomplish? As with state universities, it would be the federal government’s seal of approval. The government would have a reason to get it right as far as quality goes. Quality, in this case, is defined by graduating only students that are worthy of graduation and not becoming a diploma mill. At the same time, it would have a different mission than most universities. A primarily undergraduate, purely academic-and-teaching institution. The normal rules of prestige wouldn’t apply. Not in the same way. They could even work with other schools that offer their online courses publicly and arrange for “transfer credits” for taking those classes. Or they use the online class in substitute of lectures and Federal U.’s part would be collaboration and grading (or in some cases, just the latter). I mention the online component, but for larger cities it could be integrated with physical instruction the same way that Phoenix does. There are a number of ways to approach it. The key thing would be to make it trim, affordable, and only the frills people want to pay for.

Burt Likko wrote an extended series on law school. Since I got a number of my readers from Half Sigma, and he writes about it a lot, I thought I would pass along my coblogger’s essays flowing from the decision to go to law school to what you can expect when you get out:

1. Why are you even thinking about this?
2. Getting in
3. Getting out
4. The unimpressive pot of gold
5. There’s got to be a better way

I am going through some old flagged links. This one is from a couple years ago. The New York Times looks at what might be a better way to teach math:

In particular, math teachers often fail to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything. Children who struggle in math usually have difficulty remembering math facts, handling word problems and doing multi-step arithmetic (pdf). Despite the widespread support for “problem-based” or “discovery-based” learning, studies indicate that current teaching approaches underestimate the amount of explicit guidance, “scaffolding” and practice children need to consolidate new concepts. Asking children to make their own discoveries before they solidify the basics is like asking them to compose songs on guitar before they can form a C chord.

Mighton, who is also an award-winning playwright and author of a fascinating book called “The Myth of Ability,” developed Jump over more than a decade while working as a math tutor in Toronto, where he gained a reputation as a kind of math miracle worker. Many students were sent to him because they had severe learning disabilities (a number have gone on to do university-level math). Mighton found that to be effective he often had to break things down into minute steps and assess each student’s understanding at each micro-level before moving on.

Before having read this, I actually started doing this when I was trying to teach math to sixth graders. I really think that there is something to it. The totality of the problem can be really daunting, especially for those who come into it believing that they are not equipped for it. This is one of the ways that I think computer programming is a helpful tool for life. Computer programming encourages people to break down large problems into much smaller ones and attacking them one at a time until you get there.

The premise of the book behind the article and the book – that anyone can do higher-level math – is likely to be met with some scoffing amongst y’all. And actually, I am inclined to agree. I am not nearly as optimistic as the author of the book. I do think, though, that even within someone’s range of ability, you can get better results or worse results. To some extent, it’s not going to be worth the time and effort to get above a certain level, but I think even those for unfavorable demographics or lineage can get further along than they do. You never know what might produce some pretty incredible results.

The formula I used is pretty simple: The 75th percentile income, plus the 25th percentile income, divided by two, times the employment rate (100% minus unemployment).

The Top Twenty Majors:
Petroleum Engineering ($124)
Mathematics & Computer Science ($99)
Nuclear Engineering ($97)
Pharmacutical Sciences & Administration ($96)
Military Technologies* ($92.2)
Mineral Engineering ($91.8)
Marine Engineering ($87)
Chemical Engineering ($85)
Actuarial Science ($84)
Aerospace Engineering ($82)
Materials Science ($73.4)
Electical Engineering ($72.7)
Mechanical Engineering ($73.5)
Astrophysics ($78.5)
Geological Engineering ($78.5)
Metallurgical Engineering ($70.6)
Materials Engineering Science ($62.3)
Pharmacology ($74.5)
Computer Engineering ($63.2)
Civil Engineering ($66.5)

The Bottom Twenty Majors:
School Student Counseling** ($30.0)
Library Science ($30.6)
Counseling Psychology ($30.8)
Miscellaneous Fine Arts ($31.4)
Visual & Performing Arts ($32.7)
Clinical Psychology ($34.6)
Early Childhood Education ($35.0)
Educational Psychology ($35.2)
Community Organization ($36.8)
Botany ($37.7)
Studio Arts ($37.7)
Social Work ($37.8)
Theology ($37.9)
Interdisciplinary Social Sciences ($37.9)
Teacher Education ($38.6)
Language/Drama Education ($39.0)
Elementary Education ($39.0)
Communication Disorders Sciences ($39.6)
Interdisciplinary Studies ($39.7)
Art & Music Education ($39.8)

* – Military Technologies has a notably high unemployment rate of above 10%. If I factored unemployment in more, it would fall down on the list considerably.

** – School Student Counseling has a listed uneployment rate of 0.0%. If I factored unemployment in more, it would fall down (or is that up?) on this list.

I ran three calculations, weighing employment/unemployment more in each one. I decided to go with the first listing because it was the most straightforward. The pattern holds regardless. You can access the spreadsheet here. It uses the ODS file format. OpenOffice and LibreOffice can read it. GoogleDocs inexplicably cannot. I am not sure where Microsoft Office stands on it at the moment.

Megan McArdle wonders:

These days, a nearly-perfect GPA is the barest requisite for an elite institution. You’re also supposed to be a top notch athlete and/or musician, the master of multiple extracurriculars. Summers should preferably be spent doing charitable work, hopefully in a foreign country, or failing that, at least attending some sort of advanced academic or athletic program.

Naturally, this selects for kids who are extremely affluent, with extremely motivated parents who will steer them through the process of “founding a charity” and other artificial activities. Kids who have to spend their summer doing some boring menial labor in order to buy clothes have a hard time amassing that kind of enrichment experience. […]

This entire thing is absurd. I understand why kids engage in this ridiculous arms race. What I don’t understand is why admissions officers, who have presumably met some teenagers, and used to be one, actually reward it. Why not give kids a bonus for showing up to a routine job during high school, like real people, instead of for having wealthy parents who can help you tap their affluent social network for charitable donations? Why have we conflated “excellence” with affluence, driven parents, and a relentless will to conform on the part of the kids?

The “why” is, of course, quite self-explanatory from my perspective. That the advantage goes to the affluent is not a byproduct. It’s the point. Who is more likely to be in a future position to do good by the university? Someone who comes from an affluent background or someone who works a routine job? In a world where students are penalized for the wrong extracurriculars, like the FFA or 4H Club, why in the world would we expect them to value someone who takes a job anybody could have?

You have to be special. It takes money to be special. That’s not totally fair. Private schools have been taking admirable steps to allow those whose parents make less money to get into these schools on grants instead of loans. So, while money does play a role, I would expect that it’s culture that plays a larger one. Some kid whose father is the Used Car King of Northern Idaho may have money, but it’s not necessarily the right kind of money. I mean, you can picture it, right? His father’s dealership with some huge, gaudy American flag. And hokey commercials. Fortunately, that guy is going to have very little clue how to get his kid into the Ivies. He probably thinks membership in the 4H club might help. He might think it’s a good idea for his son to actually work at the dealership to learn responsibility and work ethic. Such pedestrian values mean little compared to the enrichment of well-placed charity work.

Of course, coming from the background that I do, the entire notion of aspiring to go to a private school is a little bit weird. I was told from pretty early on that private school was an unlikely option. I got to see my brother admitted into a very exclusive school on the west coast only to be told “You can’t go. There is nothing that they have to offer that the flagship state can’t.” So in one sense I am sympathetic to the son of the car king, though on the other, there are more important things to life. Unless, of course, you want to actually run things. People from certain colleges get to do that, and they are particular about who they let in. Not just any smart kid, or rich kid, will do. So I do at times wonder about the cost of society.

Some of my parents’ values rubbed off on me. I, too, will be reluctant to bankroll my kid going to private school. Clancy feels even more strongly about this. I might actually make an exception for a school like Harvard. Fortunately for the top Ivies, I don’t have much idea of the hoops they would need to jump through and I am not sure how on-board I would be with doing what would be required for them to get in anyway. So they probably needn’t worry about the likes of the Trumans showing up.

Back when I was in high school, I used to carry a massively heavy bookbag. I can’t remember how much it weighed, but it had the books for all of my classes in it. I never used my locker. It was a pain, but no less a pain than having to make trips to my locker in our sprawling high school.

It wasn’t until I saw myself on campus news that I saw the problem. I looked terrible carrying it. I loved the utility of it, but I was wading through the hallway hunched over in a way that accentuated my weight (which, by that point, wasn’t all that bad, but made all the worse by my posture). I bought a reasonably-sized bookbag the following week. I immediately started getting compliments. Only some actually pointed to the bag. With a couple of girls (and this was important), it was “You look different, Will.”

I bring that up as a reference point. I’m big on big bags, by nature. Even if it’s forty pounds and I can’t carry it upright. I overpack on trips. It’s a character flaw trait.

Shortly before Lain was born, I purchased a new dufflebag to replace the one I had recently purchased where the shoulder strap had snapped (because, ta-da, I was putting too much in it). Anyhow, I had purchased the wrong size of bag. It wasn’t nearly big enough. Then Lain was born and I looked at it and saw “Hey, this is the perfect diaper bag. It has pockets for everything and I can fit sooooo much inside it. Diapers. Clancy’s breastfeeding stuff. Bum cream. A changing pad. With room to spare!

Clancy and I have been playing tug-of-war ever since. She keeps taking what little we need and putting it in a smaller bag. Then, when I am taking Lain somewhere, I move it all to the bigger bag. I think her bag is too small and not nearly comprehensive enough. She thinks my bag is cumbersome and overkill whenever something smaller would do.

But seriously, why go smaller when you can have something bigger? It’s not even affecting my posture!

An assistant football coach of the Texas Longhorns had sex with a UT student at the 2009 Fiesta Bowl:

In separate statements released Friday night, Dodds and Applewhite called the incident a one-time occurrence. [UT Athletic Director Deloss] Dodds said it happened during activities related to the 2009 Fiesta Bowl, when [UT Offensive Coordinator] Applewhite was UT’s assistant head coach and running backs coach.

Dodds said he learned of the incident later that month, and that Applewhite admitted his “inappropriate conduct.” Applewhite “fully accepted his discipline, including counseling,” Dodds said.

“Several years ago, I made a regretful decision resulting in behavior that was totally inappropriate,” Applewhite said in his statement. “It was a one-time occurrence and was a personal matter. Shortly after it occurred, I discussed the situation with DeLoss Dodds. I was upfront and took full responsibility for my actions. This is and was resolved four years ago with the university.

The university may have had reason to make this belated disclosure:

Last month, Bev Kearney, the women’s track coach at the University of Texas, resigned over an affair with “an adult student-athlete” in 2002. Was the African-American, gay, woman forced out over a consensual affair while the white male football coach (who was also a star football player at the school) received preferential treatment? In Applewhite’s case, the affair was not with an athlete, but there may have still been a supervisory role. It will be interesting to see how Texas spins this.

It seems to me the central question is whether or not there was a supervisory role (and if there was, what was the nature of it). That, to my mind, is a critical difference between the two incidents. I could be convinced that Applewhite should have been fired for his transgression (UT is reviewing the policy). The case that Kearney shouldn’t have been fired is much more difficult to make. Even at the professional level, where there is a much more ambiguous power relationship between coach and player and the players are older, that is a fireable offense under any reasonable handbook. Such things are almost certain to cause instability within the team the coach was hired to lead.

In the Applewhite case, I can really see it going either way. It seems inappropriate for anybody who is even technically a sorta-member of faculty to be sleeping with students. It also sets a bad standard for the student athletes and their conduct (how they handle the attention and adulation they receive, if of course we care about such things). It can be hard enough to get coaches to crack down on inappropriate (or illegal) personal conduct without coaches having inappropriate relations with students ten years their junior. On the other hand, it’s consensual and there is very little to indicate that their was sufficient power differential to cause concern for coercion.

One suspects that the Applewhite case is one of those things that is going to depend heavily on factors unrelated to the allegation. Which means that someone more prominent like Applewhite stays, while a lesser-known figure would be quietly dispatched.

Though most of my substitute teaching was at the grade school level and comparatively little at the high school level, when I did get high school it was often towards the end of the year for a variety of reasons. As such, I got a glimpse into what many of the Redstone students’ post-secondary plans were. A number of them were planning to go to college. Others, however, were planning to go to eastern Montana and North Dakota. There’s jobs in them there plains. The New York Times recently published an article about it:

Less than a year after proms and homecoming games, teenagers like Mr. Sivertson now wake at 4 a.m. to make the three-hour trek to remote oil rigs. They fish busted machinery out of two-mile-deep hydraulic fracturing wells and repair safety devices that keep the wells from rupturing, often working alongside men old enough to be their fathers. Some live at home; others drive back on weekends to eat their mothers’ food, do loads of laundry and go to high school basketball games, still straddling the blurred border between childhood and adulthood.

Just as gold rushes and silver booms once brought opera houses and armies of prospectors to rugged corners of the West, today’s headlong race for oil and gas is reshaping staid communities in the northern Plains, bringing once untold floods of cash and job prospects, but also deep anxieties about crime, growth and a future newly vulnerable to cycles of boom and bust.

Even gas stations are enticing students away from college. Katorina Pippenger, a high school senior in the tiny town of Bainville, Mont., said she makes $24 an hour as a cashier in nearby Williston, N.D., the epicenter of the boom. Her plan is to work for a few years after she graduates this spring, save up and flee. She likes the look of Denver. “I just want to make money and get out,” she said.

Some people have picked up a sense of concern from the NYT articles, though I think it’s a fairly good write-up without too much coloring one way or the other. (Or, at least, I’d give them the benefit of the doubt if this weren’t an installment of a series of articles poo-pooing the oil boomtowns.)

For those expressing concern, I think this is actually a generally quite positive development. In a time where we are worried about a generation of graduates becoming unemployable, these kids are going to get jobs, work experience, and skills. Might it be better in the long term if they went to college? Well, that depends in good part on who “they” are along with a few other things. To the extent that college degrees are in good part about getting people in front of the employment line, then it might be good for any individual one of them to go to college, but as a group it would be an example of running in place. Those that think that college should be the norm are likely going to disagree.

I honestly don’t know what the appropriate number of kids going to college is. Back when I was living in Deseret, I knew a number of people that I felt should have gone to college but had roadblocks that prevented them from trying. Back when I was in college, I knew a number of people that really shouldn’t have been there. Whether the ideal number is somewhere above or below the number of kids currently attending, I consider it a necessity to have a path for those that really aren’t college material. I think it’s fantastic that they have this sort of opportunity.

And for those that are going to college? More opportunities still (well, in resource exploitation more generally), at least for the right kind of college student. Graduates of the South Dakota School of Mines are outearning graduates of Harvard. Which touches back a little bit on something that doesn’t get enough press: white collar jobs in blue collar fields. One of the reasons that mining engineers are able to demand such a mint is that most people don’t think they are going to college to work in such a field. The same applies to industrial production. Writes The New Republic:

The country’s business schools tended to reflect and reinforce these trends. By the late 1970s, top business schools began admitting much higher-caliber students than they had in previous decades. This might seem like a good thing. The problem is that these students tended to be overachiever types motivated primarily by salary rather than some lifelong ambition to run a steel mill. And there was a lot more money to be made in finance than manufacturing. A recent paper by economists Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef shows that compensation in the finance sector began a sharp, upward trajectory around 1980.

The business schools had their own incentives to channel students into high-paying fields like finance, thanks to the rising importance of school rankings, which heavily weighted starting salaries. The career offices at places like Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago institutionalized the process—for example, by making it easier for Wall Street outfits and consulting firms to recruit on campus. A recent Harvard Business School case study about General Electric shows that the company had so much trouble competing for MBAs that it decided to woo top graduates from non-elite schools rather than settle for elite-school graduates in the bottom half or bottom quarter of their classes.

No surprise then that, over time, the faculty and curriculum at the Harvards and Stanfords of the world began to evolve. “If you look at the distribution of faculty at leading business schools,” says Khurana, “they’re mostly in finance. … Business schools are responsive to changes in the external environment.” Which meant that, even if a student aspired to become a top operations man (or woman) at a big industrial company, the infrastructure to teach him didn’t really exist.

I think this mentality extends beyond “top business schools” and some degree down the chain. My own school and the college within it was more vocational in nature. But I did minor in industrial supervision and my first job out of college was being the IT guy at a fabrication plant (in the industry of resource exploitation, actually). How I got into it was entirely an accident. Of course, there are a number of engineers who specifically go into this sort of thing (and that’s responsible for at least some of the South Dakota Mines statistic). But comparatively little on the business side. My college had a major that was, at the time, commanding really good salaries even for the 90’s. But who was going to go into something that included the word “industrial” in it? They’ve since changed the major’s name in part to reduce the stigma. That such a stigma exists, of course, is interesting in itself.

My Linkluster post last week to Matt Yglesias’s comments seemed to get the most attention. So I’ve been doing some more thinking on it. I also read an article that he linked to:

According to the Institute of International Education and U.S. Dept. of State, there now there were around 720,000 international students at U.S. colleges in the 2011 academic year. They estimate that these students contribute $21 billion to the economy through tuition and spending. I don’t know where they get their estimate, but this is around $30,000 per student and that sounds like a sensible enough number for a back-of-the-envelope estimate.

So how many international students could we handle? There are currently around 21 million college students in the U.S., with around 18 million in undergrad and 3 million in graduate. If we increased the number of international students by 5 million then around 1-in-5 college students would be international. Is this unthinkably high? Well it’s still below the ratio at the colleges in this country with the most international student enrollment. At the New School, for example, about 1-in-4 students is international. Given that Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and MIT have 10% or more international students, it doesn’t appear that a high ratio holds a university back academically.

Ozimek addresses my primary concern, which is that increasing the number of foreign students would have the end result of crowding out American students. Not crowding out American students from college generally, but rather shuffling them off directional schools due to enrollment caps and the like.

There is no reason that there would have to be enrollment caps, of course. And Ozimek could just as easily reply that if there were, then that wouldn’t actually be his plan in action and so perhaps I shouldn’t criticize the plan on that basis.

I do harbor the fear, though, because enrollment caps do exist. They exist in universities that could expand if they were so inclined. They exist precisely to tighten entrance requirements and propel schools up the USNWR list and others.

My alma mater, Southern Tech, is one such school. Sotech is not exactly in the upper echelon of universities, but presently rejects over a third of its applicants and that number is climbing. Purposefully so. The problem that Sotech faces is that when it admits more students, it gets hit twice by the various rankings. First, because it’s admission profile is lower than it otherwise would be. Second, because some higher percentage of students will fail out.

The main reason that the university doesn’t limit expansion more is… money. Recruiting more international students could be a nice way around this.

There is the argument that if students are failing out then perhaps it is best not to admit them in the first place. This is often used as a knock against for-profit schools. The students are failing and therefore it’s an indication that they are being taken advantage of. Is Sotech doing the same? Maybe. On the other hand, both for-profits and Sotech are arguably doing a disservice to those who would graduate by keeping those who wouldn’t out. (Beyond which, it’s often external circumstances rather than academic profile that makes students hit graduation benchmarks).

On the other side of things, if there is so much money to be made here, why aren’t more schools already doing it? The US apparently doesn’t limit the number of student visas it gives out (this suggests we don’t). Why are schools and states leaving this money on the table?

I particularly think of some of the schools in lower population states. The University of Wyoming and the University of North Dakota – to name two – aggressively recruit out-of-state students because without them, their schools would look like the University of South Dakota (half the size of the other two).

It’s also the case that some of these states could use people. There’d be no way to necessarily hold on to them after graduation, but there is at least some degree of inertia involved. You go somewhere and you leave if you’re uncomfortable but stay if you are and if you don’t go there to begin with it would never occur to you that you would be comfortable staying. That sort of thing.

I might expect one of them to be fear of becoming an “Asian school” (not that all International students would be coming from Asia, but a significant number would).

I am also reminded on this piece about former Boston University president John Silber. Silber sought to limit enrollment to the University of Texas (where he was a high-ranking dean) because he feared what would be lost along the way towards a mega-university. It should come as no surprise that I am glad he lost that particular battle, but it would help explain why at least the more prestigious large schools might be antsy.

None of this would explain why schools like DeVry wouldn’t do it. I mean, every student is another ounce of profit for them, isn’t it? I doubt they’re worried much about student composition.

I assume that there is something holding this back. I just can’t figure out what. Despite my above-mentioned concerns, I see significant room for opportunity here. Not just as a money-making venture, but as general policy as well. If handled right. I’m not sure how much confidence I have of that.http://www.texasexes.org/alcalde/feature.asp?p=2240