education

Batman and Iron Man in Academic Literature

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E. Paul Zehr, a professor of kinesiology and neuroscience at the University of Victoria (Canada), writes how he was able to make scientific concepts accessible through the incorporation of popular characters from the films Batman and Iron Man:

Hugely popular movies like Iron Man, Captain America, The Dark Knight, and its forthcoming sequel, The Dark Knight Rises, illustrate the public interest in participating in the transient experience of being a superhero—at least for the duration of the movie. For scientists, those movies offer a way to communicate with the public about our work. The result for me has been two books: Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero and Inventing Iron Man: The Possibility of a Human Machine.

I settled on Batman and Iron Man because both icons are pitched as real humans who used training (Batman) or technology (Iron Man) to achieve extreme outcomes that seem believable. That part of their mythologies is what makes them attractive and grounded in a reality of hard work, invention, and achievement. In my books I have turned that mythology around and essentially asked: Is it really scientifically possible? And if so, how would it work, and what would it mean?

I settled on Batman and Iron Man because both icons are pitched as real humans who used training (Batman) or technology (Iron Man) to achieve extreme outcomes that seem believable. That part of their mythologies is what makes them attractive and grounded in a reality of hard work, invention, and achievement. In my books I have turned that mythology around and essentially asked: Is it really scientifically possible? And if so, how would it work, and what would it mean?

In both books, I explain neuroscience concepts to the general public, using the physical and technological marvels of the fictional characters to expose the real-life workings of the human body. Those concepts include: the hierarchical organization of the nervous system; supraspinal and spinal reflex control of movement; neural adaptations to skill training and motor learning; the neuropsychology of martial-arts training and combat; pathophysiology of concussion; neural plasticity associated with injury and training; cortical somatosensory and motor maps and phantom limbs; and the concept of neuroprosthetics including brain-machine interface.

My goal in writing this essay is merely to encourage other like-minded academics to understand the value of engaging the public in an accessible way, and to think about integrating pop-culture touchstones into their own outreach and teaching practices.

A natural extension: how (else) could teachers and professors around the country use popular culture to make what they teach more accessible?

Snacks in the Classroom: One Professor’s Method for Students to Work in Teams

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This is an interesting story about one professor who refuses to teach his psychology class (lab) if the students fail to bring snacks to class. It’s a novel way of driving engagement and making students work together for a common goal:

A graduate of Cal State’s Chico campus, [Professor] Parrott said that when he was an undergraduate, courses had 12 to 20 students, and those in a class formed close ties among themselves and with the professor. “Those days are long gone,” Parrott said. The course in question is supposed to have a maximum of 42 students, although this year he has 52 in the section that skipped snack last week. That makes it hard for students to connect. So does the nature of Sacramento State’s student body. “It’s a commuter rat race. Students drive in and go home and never connect with their fellow students,” he said.

Enter the snack requirement: Parrott said that he’s teaching students to work together to set a schedule, to work in teams to get something done, and to check up on one another, since everyone depends on whoever has the duty of bringing snacks on a given week. Typically, no individual should be involved in preparing the snack more than twice a semester, he said.

Parrott said that considerable research shows that students learn more if they develop the skills to work in teams, to assume responsibility for projects, and get to know their fellow students. Team members need to count on one another, he said, and his students learned Thursday that if someone fails at a task for the team, there are consequences. “They need to learn to check on one another and clearly they didn’t get that done,” he said. “This was an important lesson.”

I’m all for this method of teaching. I hope the professor doesn’t get in trouble (the professor recently enforced his rule when the students failed to bring muffins to class). I remember the three hour physics labs in college, and how hungry students would get…

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Hat tip: Tyler Cowen.

China to Cancel College Majors That Don’t Pay

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It appears China, like the United States, is struggling with an increasing population of students who graduate but cannot find jobs. But China’s solution? Slash those majors. Reports the WSJ:

China’s Ministry of Education announced this week plans to phase out majors producing unemployable graduates, according to state-run media Xinhua. The government will soon start evaluating college majors by their employment rates, downsizing or cutting those studies in which less than 60% of graduates fail for two consecutive years to find work.

The move is meant to solve a problem that has surfaced as the number of China’s university educated have jumped to 8,930 people per every 100,000 in 2010, up nearly 150% from 2000, according to China’s 2010 Census. The surge of collge grads, while an accomplishment for the country, has contributed to an overflow of workers whose skillsets don’t match with the needs of the export-led, manufacturing-based economy.

Yet the government’s decision to curb majors is facing resistance. Many university professors in China are unhappy with the Ministry of Education’s move, as it will likely shrink the talent pool needed for various subjects, such as biology, that are critical to the country’s aim of becoming a leader in science and technology but do not currently have a strong market demand, a report in the state-run China Daily report said.

I doubt the move will actually bring about the desired changes. In fact, the opposite effect may emerge: those majors that are currently at the threshold of demand will become the new undesired majors. Of course, one can imagine how institutions will try to pad their numbers with regard to graduation rates, salary levels, etc. It’s all ripe for corruption.

How Elite Firms Hire

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Lauren A. Rivera’s paper “Ivies, Extracurriculars, and Exclusion: Elite Employers’ Use of Educational Credentials” provides unprecented clues about the way elite firms screen resumes, conduct interviews, and hire. The paper is gated, but here is the abstract:

Although a robust literature has demonstrated a positive relationship between education and socio-economic attainment, the processes through which formal schooling yields enhanced economic and social rewards remain less clear. Employers play a crucial role in explaining the returns to formal schooling yet little is known about how employers, particularly elite employers, use and interpret educational credentials. In this article, I analyze how elite professional service employers use and interpret educational credentials in real-life hiring decisions. I find that educational credentials were the most common criteria employers used to solicit and screen resumes. However, it was not the content of education that elite employers valued but rather its prestige. Contrary to common sociological measures of institutional prestige, employers privileged candidates who possessed a super-elite (e.g., top four) rather than selective university affiliation. They restricted competition to students with elite affiliations and attributed superior abilities to candidates who had been admitted to super-elite institutions, regardless of their actual performance once there. However, a super-elite university affiliation was insufficient on its own. Importing the logic of university admissions, firms performed a strong secondary screen on candidates’ extracurricular accomplishments, favoring high status, resource-intensive activities that resonated with white, upper-middle class culture. I discuss these findings in terms of the changing nature of educational credentialism to suggest that (a) extracurricular activities have become credentials of social and moral character that have monetary conversion value in labor markets and (b) the way employers use and interpret educational credentials contributes to a social closure of elite jobs based on socio-economic status.

Bryan Caplan at the Library of Economics and Liberty provides the summary of the paper.

The approach behind the research:

From 2006 to 2008, I conducted 120 interviews with professionals directly involved in undergraduate and graduate hiring decisions in top-tier firms in each of the three industries under study (i.e., 40 per industry).  Participants included hiring partners, managing directors, and mid-level employees who conduct interviews and screen resumes as well as human resource managers.

To supplement interviews with behavioral data, I conducted fieldwork within the recruiting department of one elite professional service firm over a period of nine months. My role was that of a participant observer.  Given my prior professional experience at a peer firm and in event planning, I was brought on as an unpaid “recruiting intern” to help plan and execute recruitment events…  I shadowed recruiters through the recruitment process for full-time and summer associate candidates from a single, elite professional school, debriefed interviewers on job candidates immediately following interviews, and sat in on group deliberations where candidates were discussed and ultimately selected.

And the important results from the research/interviews:

1. Most applications/resumes practically go straight in the trash.  

Because professionals balanced recruitment responsibilities with full-time client work, they often screened resumes while commuting to and from the office and client sites; in trains, planes, and taxis; frequently late at night and over take out… [E]valuators tended to do so very rapidly, typically bypassing cover letters (only about fifteen percent reported even looking at them) and transcripts and reported spending between 10 s to 4 min per resume.

2. Evaluators have a lot of slack.  

[M]ost firms did not have a standard resume scoring rubric that they used to make interview decisions, evaluators reported “going down the page” from top to bottom, focusing on the pieces of resume data they personally believed were the most important “signals” of candidate quality. 

What’s startling is that evaluators explicitly select candidates similar to themselves in school rank, grades, extracurriculars, and so on.  For example:

[R]oughly one-third of evaluators did not use educational prestige as a signal. One of the
primary differences between these two groups was their own educational history, with those who had attended “top” schools being more likely to use educational prestige as a screen than those who had attended other types of selective institutions.

3. Super-elite credentials matter much more than your academic record:

[E]valuators drew strong distinctions between top four universities, schools that I term the super-elite, and other types of selective colleges and universities. So-called “public Ivies” such as University of Michigan and Berkeley were not considered elite or even prestigious…

4. Super-elite schools matter because they’re strong signals, not because they’re better at building human capital:

Evaluators relied so intensely on “school” as a criterion of evaluation not because they believed that the content of elite curricula better prepared students for life in their firms – in fact, evaluators tended to believe that elite and, in particular, super-elite instruction was “too abstract,” “overly theoretical,” or even “useless” compared to the more “practical” and “relevant” training offered at “lesser” institutions…

[I]t was not the content of an elite education that employers valued but rather the perceived rigor of these institutions’ admissions processes. According to this logic,
the more prestigious a school, the higher its “bar” for admission, and thus the “smarter” its student body.

In addition to being an indicator of potential intellectual deficits, the decision to go to a lesser known school (because it was typically perceived by evaluators as a “choice”) was often perceived to be evidence of moral failings, such as faulty judgment or a lack of foresight on the part of a student.

5. Extracurricular activities matter, but only if they meet a certain threshold — they must appear as passions rather than resume fillers (this is important):

[E]valuators believed that the most attractive and enjoyable coworkers and candidates would be those who had strong extracurricular “passions.” They also believed that involvement in activities outside of the classroom was evidence of superior social
skill; they assumed a lack of involvement was a signal of social deficiencies… By contrast, those without significant extracurricular experiences or those who participated in activities that were primarily academically or pre-professionally oriented were perceived to be “boring,” “tools,” “bookworms,” or “nerds” who might turn out to be “corporate drones” if hired.

But they have to be the right kind of extracurriculars.  

Across the board, they privileged activities that were motivated by “personal” rather than “professional” interest, even when activities were directly related to work within their industry (e.g., investing, consulting, legal clinic clubs) because the latter were believed to serve the instrumental purpose of “looking good” to recruiters and were suspected of being “resume filler” or “padding” rather than evidence of genuine “passion,” “commitment,” and “well-roundedness.” 

Caplan explains: “Don’t imagine, though, that you should merely follow your bliss”

[T]hey differentiated being a varsity college athlete, preferably one that was also a national or Olympic champion, versus playing intramurals; having traveled the globe with a world-renowned orchestra as opposed to playing with a school chamber group; and having reached the summit of Everest or Kilimanjaro versus recreational hiking. The former activities were evidence of “true accomplishment” and dedication, whereas the latter were described as things that “anyone could do.”

6. Grades do matter somewhat, but mostly as a cut-off.  They’re a signal of work ethic more than IQ:

[M]ost evaluators did not believe that grades were an indicator of intelligence. Rather, they provided a straightforward and “fair” way to rank candidates, particularly those within a given school… [G]rades were used to measure a candidate’s moral qualities. An attorney (Asian-American, male), believed that grades were an indication of a candidate’s coping skills, “It tells me how they can handle stress; if they’d had their feet to the flames before. If they’ve gotten good grades at a very competitive school, they’re probably pretty sharp and can take care of themselves.”

I went to Georgia Tech and Caltech — both are excellent schools (especially in engineering), but when applying for jobs not related to my major, I suspect I was always passed upon by those graduating from Harvard, Yale, and the other Ivies. My grades were at the top 5% of my class.

How to Have Smarter Kids

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A new study (PDF of the study here) by University of Notre Dame economist Kasey Buckles and graduate student Elizabeth Munnich finds that siblings spaced at least two years apart have higher reading and math scores than children born closer together. The caveat is that this positive effect wasseen only in older siblings, not in younger ones.

The abstract from the paper:

This paper investigates the effect of the age difference between siblings (spacing) on  educational achievement. We use a sample of women from the 1979 NLSY, matched to reading  and math scores for their children from the NLSY79 Children and Young Adults Survey. OLS  results suggest that greater spacing is positively associated with test scores for older siblings, but not for younger siblings.  However, because we are concerned that spacing may be correlated  with unobservable characteristics, we also use an instrumental variables strategy that exploits  variation in spacing driven by miscarriages that occur between two live births. The IV results  indicate that a one-year increase in spacing increases test scores for older siblings by about 0.17  standard deviations—an effect comparable to estimates of the effect of birth order.  Especially close spacing (less than two years) decreases scores by 0.65 SD.  These results are larger than the OLS estimates, suggesting that estimates that fail to account for the endogeneity of spacing may understate its benefits.  For younger siblings, there appears to be no causal impact of spacing on test scores.

Now you know…

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(via Freakonomics)

Why Are American Universities Failing?

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There’s no easy answer. Unmotivated students. High student debt. Too much emphasis on athletics versus academics. Declining emphasis on teaching (versus doing research). And so on. In this post in New York Review of Books, Anthony Grafton cites eight different sources (books and papers) and provides some clues:

Vast numbers of students come to university with no particular interest in their courses and no sense of how these might prepare them for future careers. The desire they cherish, Arum and Roksa write, is to act out “cultural scripts of college life depicted in popular movies such as Animal House(1978) and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002).” Academic studies don’t loom large on their mental maps of the university. Even at the elite University of California, students report that on average they spend “twelve hours [a week] socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies”—and thirteen hours a week studying.

For most of them, in the end, what the university offers is not skills or knowledge but credentials: a diploma that signals employability and basic work discipline. Those who manage to learn a lot often—though happily not always—come from highly educated families and attend highly selective colleges and universities. They are already members of an economic and cultural elite. Our great, democratic university system has become a pillar of social stability—a broken community many of whose members drift through, learning little, only to return to the economic and social box that they were born into.

This paragraph sounds more depressing than what my first year in college was actually like (there was no Facebook yet):

Is the higher education bubble about to pop? I don’t know. The more thoughtful writers warn against monocausal explanations. Bowen and his colleagues, for example, test the effects of student loans on attrition rates. They conclude that it is not clear that debt is a primary cause of student failure. Still, these developments are interwoven, in the experience of many students if not in the intentions of legislators. Imagine what it’s like to be a normal student nowadays. You did well—even very well—in high school. But you arrive at university with little experience in research and writing and little sense of what your classes have to do with your life plans. You start your first year deep in debt, with more in prospect. You work at Target or a fast-food outlet to pay for your living expenses. You live in a vast, shabby dorm or a huge, flimsy off-campus apartment complex, where your single with bath provides both privacy and isolation. And you see professors from a great distance, in space as well as culture: from the back of a vast dark auditorium, full of your peers checking Facebook on their laptops.

The summarizing piece is worth reading. I just wish the author made some effort to break down graduation rates, debt levels, etc. by public/private universities, household income, and race.

Are Law Schools and Bar Exams Necessary?

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I’m all for democratization of knowledge and seeing fewer barriers to entry for business, but I found this op-ed by Clifford Winston totally off-base. Winston argues that law schools and bar exams are unnecessary and should be done away with:

What if the barriers to entry were simply done away with?

Legal costs would be reduced because non-lawyers, who have not had to make a costly investment in a three-year legal education, would compete with lawyers, who in many states are the only options for basic services like drafting wills. Because they will have incurred much lower costs to enter the field — like taking an online course or attending a vocational school — and can operate as solo practitioners with minimal overhead, these non-lawyers would force prices to fall. The poor would benefit from the lower prices for non-criminal matters, and poor litigants, who might be unrepresented in criminal matters like hearings because they could not afford a lawyer and because of dwindling state legal aid, would be better off.

As a counter-argument, Jeoffrey Stone writes:

[L]egal education exposes would-be lawyers to a wide range of legal subjects — procedure, contracts, torts, criminal law, evidence, constitutional law, corporate law, property law, administrative law, jurisdiction, labor law, commercial law and on and on and on. This, too, is essential for the intelligent practice of law.

I would like to add one other important item: networking. By going to law school, you are exposed to the community of professors, lawyers, and other professionals in the field. As you start to get into the practice, this reach becomes invaluable.

Another scenario to imagine: suppose you hired a self-taught lawyer who bombs your case. You want to sue. So you end up hiring another lawyer who turns out to have insignificant experience (he was also self-taught). The whole situation could easily spiral out of control, with number of litigations skyrocketing. Sure, overall costs per case might decrease with self-taught lawyers. But do we really want to see the number of cases litigations rise (as they surely would) as a side effect? I surely don’t.

And a final food for thought: if we say that law schools are useless and that people could gain entry by being self-taught, what’s to prevent others clamoring for the barriers to entry to be disbarred in other professions? Would you want to go on an operating table with a doctor who didn’t go to medical school?

Surely I haven’t thought about all the implications here, but Winston’s idea seems short-sighted to me.

What are your thoughts?

Peter Thiel on Technology, Science, Politics

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Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, in his piece, “The End of the Future,” offers excellent food-for-thought regarding technology, science, innovation, politics, and the economy.

The state of true science is the key to knowing whether something is truly rotten in the United States. But any such assessment encounters an immediate and almost insuperable challenge. Who can speak about the true health of the ever-expanding universe of human knowledge, given how complex, esoteric, and specialized the many scientific and technological fields have become? When any given field takes half a lifetime of study to master, who can compare and contrast and properly weight the rate of progress in nanotechnology and cryptography and superstring theory and 610 other disciplines? Indeed, how do we even know whether the so-called scientists are not just lawmakers and politicians in disguise, as some conservatives suspect in fields as disparate as climate change, evolutionary biology, and embryonic-stem-cell research, and as I have come to suspect in almost all fields?

Not so sure about this statement. Nuclear engineering remains a strong major at Georgia Tech, for example:

 One cannot in good conscience encourage an undergraduate in 2011 to study nuclear engineering as a career. 

On the big pharmaceutical companies today:

In the next three years, the large pharmaceutical companies will lose approximately one-third of their current revenue stream as patents expire, so, in a perverse yet understandable response, they have begun the wholesale liquidation of the research departments that have borne so little fruit in the last decade and a half.

I think this is Thiel’s most important point in the piece.  Read it carefully:

If meaningful scientific and technological progress occurs, then we reasonably would expect greater economic prosperity (though this may be offset by other factors). And also in reverse: If economic gains, as measured by certain key indicators, have been limited or nonexistent, then perhaps so has scientific and technological progress. Therefore, to the extent that economic growth is easier to quantify than scientific or technological progress, economic numbers will contain indirect but important clues to our larger investigation.

The single most important economic development in recent times has been the broad stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973, the year when oil prices quadrupled. To a first approximation, the progress in computers and the failure in energy appear to have roughly canceled each other out. Like Alice in the Red Queen’s race, we (and our computers) have been forced to run faster and faster to stay in the same place.

One interesting anecdote, in which Thiel quotes from the 1967 bestseller The American Challenge by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber:

In 30 years America will be a post-industrial society. . . . There will be only four work days a week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation. With weekends and holidays this makes 147 work days a year and 218 free days a year. All this within a single generation.

And what does Thiel really think of John Maynard Keynes?

The most common name for a misplaced emphasis on macroeconomic policy is “Keynesianism.” Despite his brilliance, John Maynard Keynes was always a bit of a fraud, and there is always a bit of clever trickery in massive fiscal stimulus and the related printing of paper money. 

And I strongly agree with Thiel here. It’s a shame how science and engineering get passed over by our politicians:

Most of our political leaders are not engineers or scientists and do not listen to engineers or scientists. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years. I am not aware of a single political leader in the U.S., either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research — or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects.

Where will the United States be in a year? In five years? In ten?

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(via Tyler Cowen)

Law Schools: A Rip-Off?

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In a troubling New York Times piece, we learn how profitable law schools really are. They make graduate school look great by comparsion…

Legal diplomas have such allure that law schools have been able to jack up tuition four times faster than the soaring cost of college. And many law schools have added students to their incoming classes — a step that, for them, means almost pure profits — even during the worst recession in the legal profession’s history.

Whereas some departments are struggling to hire more professors, in law school it is a different story:

It is one of the academy’s open secrets: law schools toss off so much cash they are sometimes required to hand over as much as 30 percent of their revenue to universities, to subsidize less profitable fields.

In short, law schools have the power to raise prices and expand in ways that would make any company drool. And when a business has that power, it is apparently difficult to resist.

And a striking example from New York Law School (N.Y.L.S.):

N.Y.L.S. is ranked in the bottom third of all law schools in the country, but with tuition and fees now set at $47,800 a year, it charges more than Harvard. It increased the size of the class that arrived in the fall of 2009 by an astounding 30 percent, even as hiring in the legal profession imploded. It reported in the most recent US News & World Report rankings that the median starting salary of its graduates was the same as for those of the best schools in the nation — even though most of its graduates, in fact, find work at less than half that amount…

And the most damning fact in the piece:

From 1989 to 2009, when college tuition rose by 71 percent, law school tuition shot up 317 percent.

Run, don’t walk, away from law schools.

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Related: Is getting a PhD worth it?

You Are the Victims of This Enormous Cheat…

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The other day, I finished reading this powerful, moving letter from Michael O’Hare, addressed to his students at University of California, Berkeley. I think it’s a must-read, even if you don’t care about politics or education.

Immediately into the essay, I was taken aback:

Welcome to Berkeley, probably still the best public university in the world. Meet your classmates, the best group of partners you can find anywhere. The percentages for grades on exams, papers, etc. in my courses always add up to 110% because that’s what I’ve learned to expect from you, over twenty years in the best job in the world.

I have never taken any course where a professor was so forthcoming and expected so much. Of course, I’ve never taken a college course where we were graded on a 110% scale.

And then Professor O’Hare goes for the gut:

The bad news is that you have been the victims of a terrible swindle, denied an inheritance you deserve by contract and by your merits. And you aren’t the only ones; victims of this ripoff include the students who were on your left and on your right in high school but didn’t get into Cal, a whole generation stiffed by mine. This letter is an apology, and more usefully, perhaps a signal to start demanding what’s been taken from you so you can pass it on with interest.

And what is wrong with their world? Succinctly, O’Hare explains:

I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat (though your children will be even worse off if you don’t take charge of this ship and steer it). Your education was trashed as California fell to the bottom of US states in school spending, and the art classes, AP courses, physical education, working toilets, and teaching generally went by the board. Every year I come upon more and more of you who have obviously never had the chance to learn to write plain, clear, English.  Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively!  You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.

I can’t comment on the students at Berkeley, but I do think this effect is prevalent all across America. The education budget keeps getting slashed and the students aren’t learning as much as they used to. But I don’t think that’s the entire story either…

What I loved about the letter was a challenge at the end:

You need to have a very tough talk with your parents, who are still voting; you can’t save your children by yourselves.  Equally important, you need to start talking to each other…

I can only hope the students in Professor O’Hare’s class(es) heed his advice and do something about it. Today is the day.

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Professor O’Hare also blogs at www.samefacts.com, and you can find that letter here. Do read through the comments, as there is a healthy discussion there as well.