Archive for January, 2009

It’s as if my mom suddenly said, “None of this ‘mom’ business. Call me Kathy.”

Some of my professors have started asking the class to call them by their first name. They don’t want to be “professor.” They want to be “Stu” or “Doug.”

But when I e-mail a question to one of those professors, I just can’t bring myself to type, “Hi Dan.” It feels way too familiar. Like I may as well write, “Hey Dan-man, wanna give some tips for assignment number 14?”

Not to mention, it just feels weird. Sort of like if my mom suddenly announced, “None of this ‘mom’ business. Call me Kathy.”

A first-name basis with university professors creates a false sense of equal-ness. “Dan” is an equal. He’s your buddy. Someone you play Xbox with. Someone you can discuss the latest episode of Dexter with. If Dan is being a jerk, you can… well… call him a jerk. Or ignore him. Or sign onto his Xbox profile and change his emblem to a picture of monkey testicles.

But a university professor? They correct your tests. They mark your essays. Or at the very least, they’re in charge of the TA’s that do. They dictate your quality of life for four months. They’re The God of 50 Minutes of Your Life every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Just don’t forget to call them Dan.

After an investigation spanning nearly one year, the Hamilton Police Service announced that no hate crime charges will be laid against pro-Palestine protestors at McMaster University. The protestors were alleged to have chanted “death to Jews” during a rally following a protest against McMaster refusing to allow the display of a provocative banning advertising “Israel [...]

After an investigation spanning nearly one year, the Hamilton Police Service announced that no hate crime charges will be laid against pro-Palestine protestors at McMaster University.

The protestors were alleged to have chanted “death to Jews” during a rally following a protest against McMaster refusing to allow the display of a provocative banning advertising “Israel Apartheid Week.”

The protest followed an event in which both sides were supposed to express their viewpoints on the decision by McMaster to not allow the provocative banner. The primary event was heated as both sides bused in non-students to support their side.

The controversial protest that resulted in the police investigation occurred after the rally and primarily involved pro-Palestine protestors bused in from Toronto.

“Israel Apartheid Week” returns to campuses during the first week of March.

Source: The Hamilton Spectator

SCSU and MSU vote to increase pay; despite poor balance sheets and performance.

A story in The Strand this week reports the undergraduate student union at the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto voted to increase their pay despite financial difficulties facing the Scarborough Campus Students’ Union.

The SCSU voted to increase executive pay by more than 30 per cent earlier this academic year.

Student union president Zuhair Syed told The Strand the student union executive were unable to sustain themselves on a salary of over $20,000 per year. “”We can’t even sustain ourselves. Many executives I know who have to take other jobs, even two part-time jobs, just in order to survive.”

Really? I know people who sustain themselves on less; they’re called students.

The SCSU is not the only group of student politicians increasing their bank balances from a dry well.

The McMaster Students Union executive are receiving a whopping 22 per cent pay raise after student politicians there decided they were underpaid as well.

Much like the SCSU, the student union at McMaster is facing a financial crisis and is making cutbacks to its campus bar.

The MSU’s financial situation is more serious, with student union going from a $615,202 surplus in 2006/07 to a $41,879 deficit in 2007/08, the last year financial audits are available.

The MSU bar, Quarters, recorded a $425,000 lost in 2007/08. Overall, the MSU bar has lost nearly $900,000 dollars in the last six years.

The financial situation didn’t stop student politicians from giving each other pay raises, as reported by The Silhouette.

(Disclosure: I contribute to The Silhouette but was not involved in this article.)

The wage of the McMaster Students Union president increase from $25,699 per year to $31,460 plus benefits and perks. The MSU president’s benefits worth are over $8,000 per year. The MSU president is provided a rent-free apartment, health and dental benefits, and transit passes. The MSU pays $8,000 for the president’s on-campus apartment. With taxable benefits, the MSU president’s compensation tops $40,000 per year.

Vice-presidents are seeing their salary increase from $25,688 per year to $31,460. The MSU also increased compensation for committee chairs from a $750 per year honourium to $2,340.

Sure, the student unions’ bank balances may be decreasing; but that’s no reason for student union politicians to forgo increasing their own balances. After all, they are only acting like “real world” politicians.

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A question to the readers: does anyone know of a student union compensating its president more than $40,000? Do you know the compensation rate at your student union? If so, please email me; I’m going to create a chart for public reference. Email: joey@joeycoleman.ca

Is education a right or an investment? The debate continues here

Firstly, I apologize for not getting involved in the comments last time around. Blog posting involves a responsibility to engage in the resultant debate, but jumping into the pond would have been much too haphazard, particularly given that I wasn’t expecting that volume of response and got to it late. So I’m going to try and address some of the points I feel aren’t being fully understood while trying to cover a lot of ground with respect to how economists typically think about educational issues. There are responses to some of the previous comments at the end of this post.
The decision to attend any postsecondary institution revolves around a basic choice: preferences over potential lifetime income streams. The idea, for most, is that by sacrificing a bunch of weekends and the chance to earn a salary for a few years to read textbooks and write exams, we can emerge from university with expanded labour market opportunities. There are very, very few people who can be credibly told that regardless of whether they attend university or not, they’ll never earn more than minimum wage – and who still choose university. Similarly, there are not many people who’d pay the full costs of university simply for the pleasure of it.

Since different people have different abilities and different feelings toward being stuck in lecture halls for years on end, not everyone makes the same decision to attend university or not. It’s entirely possible the story could end there. The oldest university still operating today was founded as a private charitable religious endeavor. Yet in most countries throughout the world, government has decided to intervene and distort the incentives facing those people making the choice whether to invest in PSE.

Why? Most economists (if they had no idea what university education consisted of) would first ask whether PSE is a public good, i.e. something that can only be realistically provided by government. The leading example is national defense – it’s very hard to imagine all Canadians teaming up to collect the money and fund a military force without some sort of a central body to oversee things. Public goods are characterized by being (a) unexcludable and (b) nonrivalrous. If I’m scared of the Americans invading and I buy a military to defend the country, I can’t decide to not provide military protection to my neighbour; I cannot exclude him. It is nonrival because we can both consume it simultaneously, unlike a hamburger.

However, education is certainly excludable – the professor can close the door – and at least somewhat rival. Lecture seats cannot be filled by an infinite number of people. Instructors do not have infinite time. Lab space in the hard sciences. The straightforward case is therefore very weak for direct public provision of educational services, so it’s incumbent on us to start being cautious about whether the government has a legitimate role.

Let me throw out some reasons from economics textbooks why governments might get involved. Democratic values rely upon an educated populace. Citizens could be boundedly rational or misinformed about the impact of education. Private markets could be flawed and unwilling to extend loans to those wanting to borrow against their future high income to attend university – this is the consumption smoothing argument I advanced the other day. People who earn more will remit more taxes. (For the record, each year of PSE confers about a 5% annual wage premia and an 8% total return, though that’s only one estimate, there remains much uncertainty about the true numbers; there are some tricky statistical issues.) Providing a home for academics to work might result in favourable conditions for other enterprises – this happens a lot in biosciences. Etc.

Since most of us can probably agree these are good things, not as many people will attend university as is socially optimal without government intervention. For example, suppose the benefits to me of getting a degree are $150,000, with an additional $25,000 in benefits to society, for some combination of the reasons listed above. (Just because these numbers are in dollars doesn’t mean they only include monetary benefits. If the student receives pleasure from learning, it’s included in the benefits. This way, I don’t have to introduce utils. Any cost-benefit study will monetize nonmonetary benefits in this way.) If the degree costs me $160,000 (including things like the income I choose to forego by working less), then I won’t attend. But if the government gave me $15,000 to attend university, then I would be better off by $5,000, and society would be better off by $10,000. Actually, more like $8,000 – raising $1.00 in taxes costs about $1.20 in wealth – at least, that’s the figure I used in cost-benefit class – in what is called the marginal excess burden of taxation. But the important point is that there’s scope for win-win here.

The problem arises in that the government is not all-knowing. If I value the degree at $200,000, then the $15,000 from government is free money in my pocket and a waste of resources in generating the funds and transferring them to me. Bigger problems arise as the subsidy increases, say with the same costs and societal benefits as before, but with the government subsidizing the cost down to $50,000. Then someone who only values the education at $60,000 could enroll, be personally better off by $10,000, but cost everyone else collectively $65,000 (or $87,000, counting that 20%)! But clearly it’s impossible to get everyone (anyone?) to accurately state their valuation of the degree before they even start classes. It’s equally impossible to accurately measure the benefits to society from one more person having letters after their name.

This brings us to student loans. Since large subsidies have the potential to generate these losses, which economists would term “deadweight losses,” other methods of reaping the ‘positive externalities’ of education might be worthwhile. Credit markets are imperfect, as illustrated over the last year. If the majority of the benefits of education accrue to the individual, rather than society, then student loans become a very effective tool for achieving the win-win described above: if I value my degree at $300,000, it costs $150,000, but I cannot raise the money as an 18-year-old, the government can step in with a loan to cover the discrepancy, enhance my welfare by the $150,000 and grant society the $25,000 in externalities. Even better, by placing the choice of whether to accept the loan or not on the student, the government implicitly learns the worth they place on their education, thereby significantly reducing the chance of spending a lot of money on someone who doesn’t value the service.

Intentionally or not, the combination of subsidies and student loans both serve different purposes: to tip people over the edge and rake in the social benefits, and to fix credit markets, respectively. Whether you think subsidies should be larger or smaller depends on your assessment of the magnitude of the externalities, but the dominance of student loans over grants/subsidies/etc. makes much more sense from an efficiency criterion. Both, yes, but loans should be first. Given that many Canadians have willingly – willingly! – shouldered billions in student debt, I cannot say that the government offering this choice has proved anything but a benefit to most (obviously, university provides no future earnings guarantees, some do lose out on this lottery, see my response to Joey below). If student debt was such a horrible thing, people would avoid it accordingly. Conclusion, as before: student loan debt is a good thing.

I’m not saying students are better off because they have to pay tuition. But if we decided to implement free tuition, that would basically be making a large transfer of funds from society to (a) students and (b) an incinerator – unless you think that someone else attending university is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the rest of society, above and beyond what the individual earns from their degree. I don’t think the numbers add up that high and cannot find any references that would support such a magnitude of externalities.

Beyond this framework, most points raised about how much the individual should be expected to pay are not economics but religion. “Social justice”, “equality of opportunity”, and so forth are termed normative statements. These arguments are ultimately subjective judgments about how an individual believes society should operate, and as such are removed from the microscope of scientific analysis, which is only equipped to discuss how society does operate. Some people may be willing to sacrifice large amounts of resources to ensure that tuition is free to all comers, which is fine in the context of one’s moral viewpoint. All economics can do is compute the likely effects. Now, I’ll try to address some of the specific points raised in the comments.

Joey: I agree in that nobody – or at least very few people – want(s) to default. Maybe, maybe there are one or two people who attend university and plan a personal bankruptcy the week they get out the door. Student loan debt is difficult to erase from the books, harms the credit rating and so on. I agree. There is a fine line between being too harsh on those who didn’t realize dreams through university – particularly since the government subsidies prodded them into taking the risk in the first place – and being too generous and opening the door to large-scale losses. Without the numbers, it’s difficult to judge. As Bob Whitney points out two comments down, there’s no guarantees here, but there’s no coercion, either. University is a risk that people take willingly.

Dale: I’m not presenting a single argument that cannot be found in an introductory microeconomics textbook anywhere in the country. I have probably moderated my points here a little bit relative to last time, but I don’t think anything fundamental has changed. It is ideological only in the sense that evolution is ideological: what I’ve said above enjoys virtually as strong a consensus among economists as evolution does among biologists, except none of us are sure of the numbers and thus have accordingly different responses. As I said, an individual may have moral judgments as to what policies should be pursued – economists like to maximize net benefits – but if one does not accept that social goal, then we enter a philosophical sphere. With respect to your first citation, it is misleading. Here is chapter 7 of the first reference, for example. Every nonmonetary benefit they quote accrues to the individual, not society, so free tuition is not justified no matter how large the nonmonetary benefit is. In fact, if the benefits were only monetary and nonmonetary – but both reaped by the individual – there would be zero case for government. The only way to justify free tuition is the belief that benefits accruing to the rest of society, not the individual, are larger than the costs of education, which I find very difficult to argue and cannot find any evidence to support. I seriously doubt you’ve read any part of either book.

Jeff: I do believe that people who are paying $10,000 to sneak across from Mexico to the U.S. illegally are doing it because it’s a good deal. For them. It may not be good in our eyes – anyone reading this article probably has better options than cramped factory hours at sub-minimum wage, but they wouldn’t do it if they had better options. Or do they just like to torture themselves? Similarly, sweatshops are a dream in some places. Certainly, the career and lifestyle that many Canadians desire are probably only obtainable from university education, barring exceptional cases. But we can’t promise everyone a good job just because they want it. I would still like an explanation for why people shoulder student loan debt if it’s against their best interests. Are they simply stupid? No. They’re taking a calculated risk to improve their lives. They expect that they will be better off with the loan and the degree than without either. On average, thanks to the student loan, they become better off. The government does not force anyone into student loans. As I said previously, how can “no university” be better than the choice between “no university” and “university plus loan”?

jessica: I agree entirely, you’re right, that’s a problem. Assuming that all parents are willing to fork out for their kids education is inaccurate. The education is an investment for the individual, not their parents, and should be calibrated as such. The intent of such legislation is to prevent rich families from using the student loan money – which comes at low, low interest rates – to buy a summer home or play the stock market with, but that doesn’t mean it’s blameless. Once anyone can vote, they should be free to conduct any financial arrangement without the status of their parents being factored in.

Chris: In my eyes, there is a difference. A graduated income tax has nothing to do with education. It is purely an issue of income equality. I think a progressive income tax is a good thing. But it’s got nothing to do with education. Why is paying back a student debt after graduation worse than paying an equivalent amount of higher taxes after graduation? The only difference I see is the former reflects how the individual gets most of the benefits of education and takes responsibility for that, while the tax and transfer invokes all sorts of bad incentives that I’ve talked about at length.

Josh: I cannot find “poverty” in my article, so I can’t respond there. But unequivocally, raising taxes reduces the incentive to work. Repudiating that is equivalent to a book-burning of every economics text on the planet. Like I said, education isn’t free, someone has to pay for it. Again, consider the extreme case: 100% tax rate. Why would anyone bother working? Number of professors = number of universities = 0.

patrick: ‘Default’ does not mean that the student still owes money. I am unsure where you got that impression, but you have it completely wrong. To quote, page three, last paragraph: “default (loans that are deemed uncollectible and lost)”.

Finally, I think it’s also important to note that anyone reading this, by virtue of visiting the oncampus site, is considerably more tied up in academic life than most. Whether a professor or a debt-ridden student, priors on these issues, mine included, are probably biased from the national mean, which is why I think it’s necessary to be objective, rather than advance policies that ‘would be nice’ or ‘sound good’.

Addendum: Fiscal policy, since it’s a hot topic. Whether you believe fiscal policy is effective or not is not the point. The idea is that the government can spend today in order to raise the aggregate demand for goods and services in the economy, which requires employment to produce those goods, etc. From first principles, direct spending is more effective than tax cuts: the idea is to get more money into the economy, so spending a dollar certainly does more than handing someone a dollar (say through tax cuts) and letting them decide how much to save and spend. Conversely, forgiving student loan debt is starting off by dedicating all the money to savings, so you have to count on the second-order effect of the individual to spend out of the payments they would have otherwise made on their debt, so it gets the least money moving of all per dollar of government spending. I won’t make claims about consensus here, because right not the profession doesn’t have any real consensus about whether fiscal policy is a sound idea; though probably the majority are in favour, there is certainly not a hint of agreement on what the proper spending targets could be.

Anyway, there. Way too much text, but I wanted to be as clear as possible. I’ll respond to comments in the morning and at least a few times after that, between bouts of tackling a problem set.

I posted the following on a McMaster student forum in regards to CMS platforms for student papers. A McMaster student suggested The Silhoutte should look at College Publisher for web publishing the paper. I responded with the following: The Brock Press uses College Publisher for their website. I would not advise The Silhouette to use [...]

I posted the following on a McMaster student forum in regards to CMS platforms for student papers. A McMaster student suggested The Silhoutte should look at College Publisher for web publishing the paper. I responded with the following:

The Brock Press uses College Publisher for their website. I would not advise The Silhouette to use this third-party system.

The Varsity, University of Toronto, uses the Canadian University Press MassAudience system. It’s not a bad system and it is getting better.

The Ubyssey, the student paper at University of British Columbia, powers their website using WordPress (the same software that is used by The Sillhouette).

The Silhouette is using WordPress to power the current website. This a step in the right direction. I’m a strong believer that WordPress will become the leading application for student newspaper websites. There is a group called CoPress in the United States which is building a cooperative network of student papers using WordPress. Eventually, they will start building strong plugins and custom templates for student papers. This will make WP the best platform for student papers.

Expenditures would be largest increase in federal aid for education since WWII

The New York Times is reporting that the economic stimulus package that passed Wednesday in Congress will “shower” the nation’s school districts, child care centers and university campuses with $150 billion in new federal spending, a vast two-year investment that will more than double the U.S. Department of Education’s current budget.

According to the Times, the “emergency expenditures” would touch nearly every aspect of education, including school renovations, special education, and grants for needy students, and amounts to the largest increase in federal aid since the end of the Second World War.

“Critics and supporters alike said that by its sheer scope, the measure could profoundly change the federal government’s role in education, which has traditionally been the responsibility of state and local government,” reads the story.

“Obama administration officials, teachers unions and associations representing school boards, colleges and other institutions in American education said the aid would bring crucial financial relief to the nation’s 15,000 school districts and to thousands of campuses otherwise threatened with severe cutbacks.”

“This is going to avert literally hundreds of thousands of teacher layoffs,” said Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

More from The New York Times:

…Republicans strongly criticized some of the proposals as wasteful spending and an ill-considered expansion of the federal government’s role, traditionally centered on aid to needy students, into new realms like local school construction.

And they were joined by some education experts from across the political spectrum in wondering how school districts could spend so many new billions so fast, whether such an outpouring of dollars would lead to higher student achievement, and what might happen in two years when the stimulus money ends….

….One provision, which was sought by the student lending industry and went unmentioned in early Congressional summaries of the stimulus package, would temporarily increase subsidies to banks in the guaranteed student loan program by tying them to a new index, partly because recent federal intervention in the credit markets has invalidated the previous index. A spokesman for Sallie Mae, one of the largest student lenders, said the change was needed to keep student loan markets fluid. Critics said it represented a potential new windfall for lenders.

“This just continues the well-established tradition of welfare for the student loan industry,” said Barmak Nassirian, an expert in student lending.

The Department of Education’s discretionary budget for the 2008 fiscal year was about $60 billion. The stimulus bill would raise that to about $135 billion this year, and to about $146 billion in 2010. Other federal agencies would administer about $20 billion in additional education-related spending.

“This really marks a new era in federal education spending,” said Edward Kealy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a coalition of 90 education groups.

The bill would increase 2009 fiscal year spending on Title I, a program of specialized classroom efforts to help educate poor children, to $20 billion from about $14.5 billion, and raise spending on education for disabled children to $17 billion from $11 billion.

Those increases respond to longtime demands by teachers unions, school boards and others that Washington fully finance the mandates laid out for states and districts in the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law, and in the main federal law regulating special education.

“We’ve been arguing that the federal government hasn’t been living up to its commitments, but these increases go a substantial way toward meeting them,” said Joel Packer, a lobbyist for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union.

End to two-month-long strike could depend on Liberal support

The federal government is prepared to end the continuing misery of Ottawa commuters by legislating striking transit drivers back to work, Labour Minister Rona Ambrose said Wednesday.

Although she cautioned that a speedy end to the nearly two-month-long dispute, which at times has paralyzed the city, will depend on co-operation with the opposition Liberals.

“When the government sees a situation where there is clearly no compromise or no flexibility being shown by either side to reach an agreement, it is our obligation to act,” she said. “I’m prepared to introduce back-to-work legislation. However, I do need the support of the opposition.”

Ambrose said there were overtures made to the Liberals about supporting back-to-work legislation. But it was unclear late Wednesday whether they would support the measure. The NDP have said they will not.

Earlier in the day, Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty pressed the federal government to end the labour dispute, which comes under Ottawa’s jurisdiction because the bus routes cross the Ontario-Quebec border, into Gatineau, Quebec.

“It’s dramatically affecting our economy at a time when we can’t afford to have these kind of things get in the way,” said McGuinty, who represents an Ottawa riding in the legislature.

McGuinty’s comments came as the Amalgamated Transit Union rejected the City of Ottawa’s “revised bargaining strategy,” saying the city has failed to significantly alter its position.

They also follow attempts by McGuinty’s own government to force striking faculty at York University in Toronto back to work after an 83-day strike that locked out thousands of students.

In Ottawa, the union representing OC Transpo drivers, dispatchers and mechanics had returned to the bargaining table with city negotiators and a federal mediator Monday after city council changed its contract proposal.

But ATU International vice-president Randy Graham later said the city’s new contract offer was “show,” and the talks broke down yet again.

The city remains “entrenched” on the issues of wages and work schedules, Graham said.

Genome Canada shut out of 2009 budget; thousands of jobs and medical research at risk

From The Globe and Mail:

The only agency that regularly finances large-scale science in Canada was shut out of Tuesday’s federal budget, putting at risk thousands of jobs and some of the most promising medical research, and forcing the country to pull out of key international projects.

For the first time in nine years, Genome Canada, a non-profit non-governmental funding organization, was not mentioned in the federal budget and saw its annual cash injection from Ottawa – $140-million last year – disappear.

“We got nothing, nothing, and we don’t know why,” said a stunned Martin Godbout, Genome Canada president and CEO. “We’re devastated.”

Last night, Steve Scherer, a world-renowned geneticist with the University of Toronto and the Hospital for Sick Children, whose Genome Canada grant helps support 70 employees, said he was “still hoping that someone just forgot to put it in [the budget].

“If this is indeed true, this is a very dark day for big science, not only in Canada but also worldwide, because of the many leadership roles our country’s scientists have assumed in groundbreaking projects over the past few years. It’s definitely two steps back with no shoes on.”

Union can only launch suit once government back-to-work bill passes

The union representing striking workers at York University says it’s preparing a legal challenge of provincial legislation that would force teachers back to work.

CUPE Ontario president Sid Ryan says the government-backed bill, which is expected to pass Thursday, won’t make the issues at the heart of the strike go away.

He says union lawyers are prepping their case, which can only be launched after the bill is passed.

Premier Dalton McGuinty wouldn’t say whether the government has a plan to deal with the potential roadblock.

Outside the provincial legislature, about 100 students and half-a-dozen parents held a rally calling on the province to get classes resumed quickly.

The spectre of court action didn’t seem to faze the students, many who said they’re confident they’ll be back in class Monday.

- The Canadian Press

What are you eating? Fill out the form below, and remember to include: – Your full name – Name of your school and the cafeteria/restaurant – Up to 500 words on food quality, value, service and decor To submit photos or videos, send them to oncampusfood at gmail.com. Bon appétit! BACK TO CAMPUS CHOW

What are you eating?

Fill out the form below, and remember to include:

- Your full name
- Name of your school and the cafeteria/restaurant
- Up to 500 words on food quality, value, service and decor

To submit photos or videos, send them to oncampusfood at gmail.com. Bon appétit!

BACK TO CAMPUS CHOW