education

What if NFL Players Were Paid Like Teachers?

by Ryan Young on October 3, 2011 · 2 comments

in Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

I’m not a big fan of football analogies in politics (think of former Sen. George Allen absurdly carrying a football wherever he went), but Fran Tarkenton has a good one:

Imagine the National Football League in an alternate reality. Each player’s salary is based on how long he’s been in the league. It’s about tenure, not talent. The same scale is used for every player, no matter whether he’s an All-Pro quarterback or the last man on the roster. For every year a player’s been in this NFL, he gets a bump in pay. The only difference between Tom Brady and the worst player in the league is a few years of step increases. And if a player makes it through his third season, he can never be cut from the roster until he chooses to retire, except in the most extreme cases of misconduct.

This would incentivize mediocrity, not excellence. It is also almost exactly how government-run K-12 schools are structured. Reform ideas that ignore those incentive problems are doomed to fail. Adding some competition to the existing near-monoply would do much to give teachers the same incentive to make the most of their talent that athletes currently enjoy.

Standardized Test Scores Continue to Disappoint

by Ryan Young on June 15, 2011

in Regulation

Post image for Standardized Test Scores Continue to Disappoint

Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that “Fewer than a quarter of American 12th-graders knew China was North Korea’s ally during the Korean War, and only 35% of fourth-graders knew the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, according to national history-test scores released Tuesday.”

Results like these show precisely why education is too important to trust to free markets. Children would be far better served if government were to take a leading role in K-12 education… oh, wait.

Nevermind.

Mind-boggling Increase in Tuition Since 1960 Even as Students Learn Less and Less

by Hans Bader on May 25, 2011

in Deregulate to Stimulate, Economy, Employment, Legal

There has been a truly mind-boggling increase in college tuition since 1960. For example, law school tuition has risen nearly 1,000 percent after adjusting for inflation: around 1960, “median annual tuition and fees at private law schools was $475 … adjusted for inflation, that’s $3,419 in 2011 dollars. The median for public law schools was $204 … or $1,550 in 2011 dollars … in 2009 the private law school median was $36,000; the public (resident) median was $16,546.”

Due to market distortions like the proliferation of unnecessary state licensing requirements that require useless paper credentials, and financial aid that directly encourages colleges to raise tuition, colleges can raise tuition year after year, consuming a larger and larger fraction of the increased lifetime earnings students hope to obtain by going to college. As George Leef notes, “long-term average earnings for individuals with BA degrees have not risen much and in the last few years have dipped.”

Meanwhile, college students learn less and less with each passing year. “Thirty-six percent” of college students learned little in four years of college, and students now spend “50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago, the research shows.” Thirty-two percent never take “a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”

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Obama Administration Understated Deficits by $2.3 Trillion; Resists Spending Cuts Needed to Stem Deficits

by Hans Bader on March 25, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Energy, Environment, Stimulus to Nowhere

The Congressional Budget Office reported last week that the Obama administration understated budget deficits “by more than $2.3 trillion over the upcoming decade,” and that “if Obama’s February budget submission is enacted into law it would produce deficits totaling $9.5 trillion over 10 years — an average of almost $1 trillion a year.” President Obama objects to even a tiny two percent cut in the federal budget, submitting a self-indulgent, smoke-and-mirrors budget that would actually increase spending even faster than previously proposed for 2012.

Obama’s record deficit spending is based on the notion — contrary to all evidence — that if the government increases spending, that spending will more than pay for itself through increased economic growth. (Never mind that Canada’s economy boomed after it slashed government spending in the 1990’s, and America experienced an “economic boom” after our government slashed spending in 1946.)

For example, even though “federal education spending has gone through the roof” in recent years, Obama has called for big increases in education spending, saying that “the best economic policy is one that produces more college graduates.” But dumping more money on colleges won’t spur economic growth.

Jacking up college attendance rates further just results in the presence of bored, unmotivated students who are not interested in learning, and only go to college to get a diploma, while spawning an economically-destructive “arms race” over who can acquire the most unnecessary credentials. Already, “36%” of “the nation’s undergraduates” learn “little” or nothing after four years of college, according to a study cited by USA Today. Many of their professors didn’t even try to teach them much: “32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.”

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America Doesn’t Need More College Graduates at Taxpayer Expense

by Hans Bader on March 20, 2011

in Economy, Employment, International

President Obama says that “the best economic policy is one that produces more college graduates.” No doubt this is best for colleges, which have been able to increase tuition faster than inflation, year after year, secure in the knowledge that they can rake in ever-rising government subsidies and skyrocketing tuition. Students have little choice but to pay inflated tuition bills to the education industrial-complex, as they vie with each other for scarce entry-level jobs by acquiring ever more degrees that show their ability to jump through hoops and master difficult (but largely useless) skills.

But is this educational arms race really good for America?

Does America really need 8,000 waiters with doctoral or professional degrees? Do 5,057 janitors really need their advanced degrees? Millions of Americans already have useless college degrees.

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Obama’s Budget Philosophy: Life Is Short, Eat Dessert First

by Hans Bader on February 18, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Energy, Politics as Usual, Stimulus to Nowhere

If a motto summed up the Obama administration, it might be, “Life is short. Eat dessert first.” President Obama’s policies are all about self-indulgence in the present, to be paid for with either long-run economic decline, or painful sacrifices by future generations.

His recent budget proposal, which contains a mix of real spending increases and mostly imaginary “cuts,” is a case in point. It pretends to cut spending and the deficit, but its “cuts” are slated to occur largely in the distant future (and thus may never happen), while its increases kick in almost immediately. It is so dishonest that it has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum.

As former congressional economist Chris Edwards notes, although Obama claims it cuts spending:

His new budget proposes slightly more discretionary and entitlement spending for next year than did his last budget!

  • Last year, Obama planned to spend $1.301 trillion on discretionary programs in FY2012, but now he plans to spend $1.340 trillion.
  • Last year, Obama planned to spend $2,107” billion “on entitlement programs in FY2012, but now he plans to spend $2,140” billion.

Similarly, The Wall Street Journal calls the “White House Budget” proposal “cynical and unrealistic,” since it pretends to cut spending over the long run, but openly “increases deficits above the spending baseline for the next two years.”

(Obama made the same kind of deceptive sales pitch for his $800 billion stimulus package, focusing on immediate gratification and ignoring future costs. In pushing the stimulus, he cited Congressional Budget Office claims that it would save jobs in the short run, while ignoring the CBO’s own finding that the stimulus will actually shrink the economy over the long run, by exploding the national debt and crowding out private investment. Obama also made the apocalyptic claim that the stimulus package was necessary to avert “irreversible decline,” but this claim was so incredible that it was not even peddled by his supporters in the media. The stimulus ended up destroying jobs even in the short run by wiping out jobs in the export sector, and subsidizing foreign green jobs .)

The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle, who voted for Obama in 2008, calls Obama’s budget proposal “disastrous.” She notes that his proposed budget includes phony, “sketchily outlined cuts,” and short-term patches that are “stacked to expire just after Obama (in theory) gets reelected.” Moreover, she points out that the supposedly “‘fiscally responsible’ Democrats have given us the largest peacetime deficit in history, one that keeps growing beyond all expectations.”

Her colleague Andrew Sullivan, who was Obama’s chief cheerleader in the blogosphere until now, finally admits the truth about his idol:

this president is too weak, too cautious, too beholden to politics over policy to lead. In this budget, in his refusal to do anything concrete to tackle the looming entitlement debt, in his failure to address the generational injustice, in his blithe indifference to the increasing danger of default, he has betrayed those of us who took him to be a serious president prepared to put the good of the country before his short term political interests. Like his State of the Union, this budget is good short term politics but such a massive pile of fiscal [male bovine excrement; we like to keep this a family blog if we can--ed.] it makes it perfectly clear that Obama is kicking this vital issue down the road.

To all those under 30 who worked so hard to get this man elected, know this: he just screwed you over. He thinks you’re fools. Either the US will go into default because of Obama’s cowardice, or you will be paying far far more for far far less because this president has no courage when it counts. He let you down. On the critical issue of America’s fiscal crisis, he represents no hope and no change. Just the same old Washington politics he once promised to end.

AOL News notes that  for all the talk of cuts, “President Barack Obama’s 2012 budget proposes to spend $3.48 trillion on everything except interest on the national debt. That’s a 7 percent increase over what the government spent in 2010. And keep in mind that in 2010, there was a lot of stimulus money flying out the door.”

Even The Washington Post, which endorsed Obama in 2008 and has not supported a Republican for president since 1952, said Obama’s budget was full of “gimmickry,” and called Obama the “Punter-in-Chief” for failing to address America’s looming budget problems.

Obama would increase wasteful education and transportation spending by billions more. The Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson gave a thumbs down to the Obama administration’s anachronistic focus on rail boondoggles that few people will use. The Cato Institute’s Neal McCluskey debunked the bogus offsets Obama is using to pretend to pay for his budget-busting and wasteful education proposals. We earlier explained why Obama should have cut rather than increased education spending at this link.

Education Cuts Needed; Massive Spending Fuels Waste, Deficits

by Hans Bader on February 14, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

Education expert Neal McCluskey earlier lamented the failure of House Republicans to propose meaningful cuts in education spending, “despite the fact that the ivory tower is soaking in putrid, taxpayer-funded waste. Quite simply, the federal government pours hundreds of billions of dollars into our ivy-ensconced institutions every year, but what that has largely produced is atrociously low graduation rates; at-best dubious amounts of learning for those who do graduate; ever-fancier facilities; and rampant tuition inflation that renders a higher education no more affordable to students but keeps colleges fat and happy.” Shortly thereafter, in an effort to trim the deficit, House Republicans came out with some additional cuts, proposing the elimination of some wasteful education programs.

If the GOP is reluctant to make cuts, Obama is much, much worse: he earlier sought to double education spending, and Obama’s recent State of the Union called for more increases in education spending (and other wasteful boondoggles at taxpayer expense), even though many students learn little in college. As we noted earlier, half “the nation’s undergraduates show almost no gains in learning in their first two years of college,” according to a study cited in USA Today. “36% showed little change” even after four years. Although education spending has exploded, students “spent 50% less time studying compared with students a few decades ago.” “32% never took a course in a typical semester where they read more than 40 pages per week.” States spend hundreds of millions of dollars operating colleges that are worthless diploma mills, yet manage to graduate almost no one — like Chicago State, “which has just a 12.8 percent six-year graduation rate.”

College degrees are delivering less and less, even as students graduate massively in debt. Law schools deceptively claim that virtually all their graduates get jobs. But they inflate their jobs figures by treating as success stories even students who end up working in low-paying non-legal jobs like “waiting tables at Applebees,” “stocking aisles at Home Depot,” or babysitting — or in part-time temporary jobs. And they sometimes hide joblessness by “losing track” of easy-to-locate nearby graduates who are jobless.  ”‘Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,’ says William Henderson of Indiana University, one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves.”

America already produces so many more liberal-arts graduates than it needs that 5,057 janitors have Ph.D’s or other advanced degrees. People who went to college due to rising college attendance rates mostly ended up in low-skilled jobs, even as their tuitions soared to pay for growing educational bureaucracies. Education spending in America is huge compared to most countries.

Image credit: Honeywell-Nobel Initiative’s flickr photostream.

Obama State of the Union Flunks Fact Check; More Wasteful Spending and “A Million Points of Trite”

by Hans Bader on January 26, 2011

in Economy, Employment, Politics as Usual

The Associated Press fact-checked Obama’s State of the Union address last night, and found it to be misleading in many ways: “The ledger did not appear to be adding up Tuesday night when President Barack Obama urged more spending on one hand and a spending freeze on the other.” Michelle Malkin panned Obama’s call for even more rapid increases in education spending, calling it “Cash for Education Clunkers.” Neil McCluskey responded with an op-ed entitled, “For the Nation’s Sake, Cut Education Spending.” I earlier discussed the President’s proposed spending increases, noting that learning and studying have declined in America’s universities even as education spending has exploded, and that ever-more costly college educations aren’t yielding better jobs or economic growth.

Obama talked a lot about the need for more government “investment,” a euphemism for spending on pet projects favored by liberals. Professor Jacobson called Obama’s address “a million points of trite” for all the recycled talking points it contained. Even the liberal Robert Scheer called the speech “platitudinous hogwash.”

Image credit: Robert Couse-Baker’s flickr photostream.

17 Million Unnecessary College Degrees; Obama Administration Seeks to Increase the Number

by Hans Bader on December 9, 2010 · 6 comments

in Economy, Employment, Politics as Usual, Zeitgeist

In America today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.  Over 18,000 parking lot attendants have college degrees.  So do thousands of janitors.

As Richard Vedder notes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.”  This fact is “incompatible” with “the relentless claims of the Obama administration and others that having more college graduates is necessary for continued economic leadership . . . . Putting issues of student abilities aside, the growing disconnect between labor market realities and the propaganda of higher-education apologists is causing more and more people to graduate and take menial jobs or no job at all. This is even true at the doctoral and professional level—there are 5,057 janitors in the U.S. with Ph.D.’s, other doctorates, or professional degrees.”  These depressing statistics are also discussed at The Economic Collapse Blog.

We wrote earlier about the college debt bubble, and how greedy, government-subsidized college administrators are charging obscene amounts of money for largely useless and ideologically-slanted “educations.”  (100 colleges now charge $50,000 or more in tuition, compared to just 5 colleges in 2008-09, and federal financial-aid subsidies effectively reward colleges for increasing tuition to levels that would evoke outrage in other civilized countries.)

Image credit: Honeywell-Nobel Initiative’s flickr photostream.

The Case for Private School Vouchers

by Alex Schibuola on November 23, 2010 · 3 comments

in Odds & Ends

If you had a choice between two identical cars, would you choose one that costs $7,500 or one that cost $15,000? The $7,500 one would be a better value, of course. Now, if you had to pay $15,000 for a car because an organization lobbied Congress to force you to do so, would you be angry? Yes, of course.

What if I replaced every instance of the word “car” in that last paragraph with “schools,” would you still have the same reaction? This is what we face in America’s education system. Which organization imposes this forced purchase? Teachers unions—the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—which adamantly oppose school choice and other substantive reforms that could help struggling schools improve, and get kids out of failing ones.

The NEA likes to quote studies showing that public schools have comparable academic achievements to private ones. While that strikes me as unlikely, let’s just say it’s true. Even then, the costs per student at public schools are twice that of some private schools! Once again, given two identical products, with one being half the cost, which would you choose?

Monopolies are undesirable. In addition to charging high prices, they produce inferior products. Why then are we so willing to accept the monopoly of government schools? The opposite of monopoly is a competitive industry. Competition means choices. And choices mean that competitors have to provide a superior product at the lowest price possible.

Ever notice how our university system is world-class, but our primary and secondary schools are considered second-rate among developed nations? What is the primary difference between the universities and the primary and secondary schools? Choice. When competition prevails, society wins. When monopoly exists, society suffers.

A monopoly controls the supply of its products. This allows them to charge a higher price and to produce lower quality goods. Unions are the labor market’s equivalent to monopolies. Unions control the supply of labor, which allows them to charge a higher price for labor, i.e., wages.

Quality in teaching is compromised by the lack of incentives that unionization engenders—outstanding teachers do not get additional compensation, while subpar teachers face little chance of dismissal.

That is why teachers unions fear school choice so much. If most public schools were truly comparable to private schools, then why would parents ever choose to use voucher programs to send their children to private schools? Public schools need to compete. The private school voucher system would allow us to reinvigorate our educational system and cut government spending simultaneously.

Photo Credit: Tncountryfan’s Flickr Photostream

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