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I try to avoid shamelessly passing along links without any commentary; today you’ll have to suffer the indignity of such a post.   1. Ontario Catholics are able to choose between sending their children to the (Catholic) separate schools system or the public system, while non-Catholics could only go to public schools. 2. Separate schools [...]

I try to avoid shamelessly passing along links without any commentary; today you’ll have to suffer the indignity of such a post.

  1. Ontario Catholics are able to choose between sending their children to the (Catholic) separate schools system or the public system, while non-Catholics could only go to public schools.
2. Separate schools systematically outperform their public school counterparts, even though they receive the same funding and draw from almost-identical populations.

This was consistent with a story in which separate schools face incentives that public schools do not and in which they respond to those incentives in predictable ways. Since separate schools do not have a captive market, they have a greater incentive to provide higher-quality education.

There are some interesting echoes of that story here in Quebec. As in Ontario, there are two public systems: English and French. And as in Ontario, only one system has a captive market: unless a child’s parent was educated in English in Canada, she must go to a French school.

If we wanted to apply the Ontario story to Quebec, we’d predict that the English system generated better outcomes than the French system. And we’d be right.

The original post is available here, it contains some background links that are also highly recommended.

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.

Good or bad? Right or wrong? Just different?

I was into the department yesterday morning when I stumbled across a particularly rare sight for 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning: undergrads. Why are there undergrads making noise outside my office?

Turns out the LSAT was being administered today. Poking around, I found that four classrooms had been booked for this event, and they all seemed pretty full. I would estimate a minimum of 100 students – approximately 10 per cent of the graduating class.

That’s a lot of wannabe lawyers. Out of everyone I knew throughout high school and university, I can only think of three people who wrote the LSAT, two of whom are now lawyers in training. Googling around, it’s fairly easy to find that there’s about 1.15m lawyers in the United States, but I had to construct an estimate for Canada – about 70,000. Applying the 10-to-one rule, that implies that the US has 60 per cent more lawyers than we do in per-capita terms.

Tossing out some economic reasons for the disparity, I can think of lawyers becoming a larger section of the population with more income, more income inequality (though Canada and the States aren’t significantly different on that score) and some bias from the different mixture of businesses that comprise our respective economies.

Still, it seems that like would hardly account for it all. I don’t put much stock in those reasons. In general, the law degree in the States seems a prerequisite for political ambition, moreso than in Canada. Elite law schools down here seem like the ultimate network for the would-be movers and shakers, one that doesn’t have a Canadian analogue, just like our universities are much more egalitarian than south of the border.

Good or bad? Right or wrong? Just different? I’m inclined to pick the latter, with some mild worry that a select handful of professors are giving the same education to an awful lot of the future governing body.

Like any business, private universities rely on keeping their customers happy

Today, I received an email from the president of the the University of Rochester. I’ll quote some tidbits:

“…the University of Rochester’s endowment investments are estimated to have declined by approximately 25 percent during the [recent market troubles].
…
In the current circumstances, tuition increases are likely to be smaller than in past years.
…
I have informed our Board of Trustees that I do not wish to receive a pay increase next academic year.
…
Separately, the budget for the Office of the President for this academic year already has been reduced by approximately 5 percent.”

It’s a really long letter, discussing the university’s construction plans, potential areas for funding cuts if the market doesn’t recover, areas being targeted for cost savings, so on and so forth. I was really surprised to see it show up in my inbox.

Then I thought about it, and I wasn’t. Private universities have to depend on their students for tuition and alumni for donations. Thus, the majority of the funding of the university depends on keeping everyone as happy as possible, both while they’re at the school and afterwards. This includes spreading warm fuzzy feelings about cutting the president’s salary in hard times.

Conversely, the public university doesn’t rely on students/alumni nearly as much. It’s incentive is to squeeze the government, instead of charging profit-maximizing tuition fees and chasing donations more aggressively. Of course, it may be more prone to encouraging grade inflation and other such things, but it’s tough to argue that as a long-term strategy.

Like any business, private universities rely on keeping their customers happy. In the presence of public universities, that means that some people find them superior than the government product, high tuition fees or not.

Everything comes at a price, monetary or not

Attending Memorial, home of the lowest tuition fees for native English speakers in Canada, one rapidly becomes convinced that tuition fees are morally on par with 16th century monetary indulgences – and the student paper, student union, and local student groups of all stripes are a lot more vocal about the eternal need to lower tuition fees than Luther was about his griefs. It’s not just Newfoundland, either. Yesterday saw coordinated rallies across Ontario to protest the cost of tuition.

Now, if I remember correctly, I used to pay $2,550 in tuition each year at Memorial, with a couple hundred tacked on for fees. That’d cover me for ten courses, five each semester. Graduate tuition is even cheaper. Here at the University of Rochester, the cost of tuition for four courses was about $18,700. (Yes, I have a tuition waiver.)

Having gotten used to the perpetual campaign to tax the populace to finance postsecondary education – even for those people who spend literally decades wandering around different departments in pursuit of a solitary bachelor’s – it was with shock I stumbled across an editorial in the student paper down here advocating against a proposal to use the university endowment to lower tuition fees.

Seriously, what does the student body have to lose? This is a chance to run off with someone else’s money! And yet, the students didn’t want it. Oh, and let me dissuade you about the political leanings on campus: the Obama victory parties were pretty nuts Tuesday night. Or so I heard, anyway.

This editorial had one basic proposition, that affordability compromises quality. And they’re right. As much as I’d like it otherwise, the best in education does not come free, but from paying out for a quality product. There is no free lunch.

From this, we can go ‘rattling off in all directions’. Let me toss out a couple of immediate questions that intrigue me. Is there a reason a high-quality education is apparently valued more in the United States than in Canada? (A weak reason is the higher expected taxes on the earnings premium.) How difficult would it be to start a private, world-class research university in Canada? (Consider the success of the Perimeter Institute.) What impact does higher tuition have on the student body makeup? (Each university is probably more homogeneous as students self-select into the amount of human capital they want to invest in, more money redistributed from rich students to smart students, more social mobility for the very bright/hardworking, less so for everyone else.)

Either way, there are books here. But it’s prudent to remember that everything comes at a price, monetary or not.

I couldn’t help but chuckle when this event popped up on my facebook. I realize some of you may not be indocrinated, so I’ll post the concise summary here: Female University Graduates in Newfoundland and Labrador earn $0.68 to every $1 a Male University Graduate earns. [...] To raise awareness regarding this issue, a bake [...]

I couldn’t help but chuckle when this event popped up on my facebook. I realize some of you may not be indocrinated, so I’ll post the concise summary here:

Female University Graduates in Newfoundland and Labrador earn $0.68 to every $1 a Male University Graduate earns.
[...]
To raise awareness regarding this issue, a bake sale is being held at MUN in the Loft, third floor of the University Centre. At this bake sale, goodies will be sold for $1 to men and 68 cents to women. And the evil Gapzilla may be lurking around…

I can’t find the study to which they refer, but for the sake of argument I’ll grant them their figures. Economists have always found the existence of these differentials puzzling at first glance. If, for some reason, you’re unwilling to pay a portion of the population their true worth, then your competitors will scoop them up and run you out of business using their talents. Systematic discrimination isn’t a supportable theory without some sort of way for employers to form a cartel against a segment of the population, i.e. on grounds of religion or law – neither of which we’ve had for awhile.

There are, however, lots of more realistic theories than multinational conspiracies to explain this gap and why there’s no need to ‘fix’ it. I’ll link a recent (June 2007) government study, which points out that record numbers of females are going to university, but their wages haven’t shown any tendency to converge to that of the male graduate. The figure they use is that 60%-ish of graduates are female, just so you know.

My personal belief (which I like to think is supported by the data, I’m just hesitant to claim absolute proof in these things) is that it comes down to self-selection. If I correctly recall the engineering faculty at MUN, the students were predominately male, perhaps 4:1? Engineering is probably the best-paid undergraduate course of study at Memorial, ergo we would expect that the earnings gap partially stems from more males choosing engineering compared to their female counterparts. Maybe they, on average, tend to like it better. Maybe women don’t feel comfortable in the department – but that’s sociology, not economics, so I won’t go there. Feel free to go there in the comments, however.

One way to fix this discrepancy would be to force a bunch of female liberal arts majors into the engineering department or other monetarily lucrative choices. Happen to like French literature? Folkore? Too bad, here’s your soldering set and math texts. Deal with it. Anyone think this is a good solution? Anyone?

This is why economic models typically deal with utility, not money. There are more things to what makes a person happy than how fat their wallet is at the end of the month. If females place a higher value on leisure, or have preferences for less-lucrative majors because they’ll enjoy their careers more, these pay gaps are natural, a result of everyone doing what makes them happiest.

To return to the study, I’ll quote: “…university-educated women have lost ground to university-educated men. This is likely due to the fact that men and women continued to choose traditional disciplines during the 1990s, but only male-dominated disciplines saw improvements in average earnings.” Self-selection confirmed.

Okay, we have a second target for the conspiracy. Wages are rising much more in male-dominated professions. Well, if there are a lot more women graduating university than men, and each gender has different preferences over potential occupations, this is natural. Demand and supply. There’s a relative surplus of females crowding into the jobs that they prefer, which lowers the wages in those sectors, and the relative scarcity of labour in male-preferred careers drives up the wages needed to attract the necessary number of workers. The numbers in the paper say that about half the wage gap can be explained by the educational choices of females, and that’s before taking into this supply-and-demand mechanic.

This gets us 84 cents on the dollar as an absolute lower bound. If I wanted to try making a stab at explaining the rest, I’d put a few cents on the supply-demand as above, a couple more on maternity/anticipated pregnancies (employers hesitant to hire people they think will be on maternity leave for a long time, though with more dads staying with the kids, maybe this is changing; compensating government transfers may not show up in the data, either), a cent on the average higher ability for men to perform physical labour, a few more cents on the extreme tail of the distribution distorting the figures, e.g. business inheritances tend to go to sons, and on a related note, maybe Larry Summers for the last couple pennies?

Basically, the existence of the persistent wage gap between equally well-educated and capable members of disparate genders can be mostly attributed to the success of society at getting women into university relative to their male peers and the choices the two groups make once in university. I’m not saying the gap is 100% explained, but if you want to construct an argument based on evidence, you pretty much have to accept this as far and away the primary reason a pay gap exists.

P.S. If I was feeling particularly cynical today, I’d be tempted to suggest that this would be an excellent time for some males at MUN to develop a sweet tooth. A few cents extra on baked goods for the chance to ‘fight pay inequality’ in front of the female student body…?

P.P.S. The common statistical technique here is ‘Oaxaca decomposition’, feel free to google it if you’re so interested, but it doesn’t have a Wikipedia page…

Using income to measure the reward to education is misleading

We propose that per-capita income gaps across US states and Canadian provinces can be explained by university education. Our ordinary least-squares regressions show university education having a robust positive and significant effect on per-capita incomes, when controlling for, e.g. taxes, unionization, government spending, and the sectoral composition of the economy….Our results support a causal link from education to incomes[.]

Just a paper I stumbled across this evening. Obviously, this could be used by certain people with agendas to promote education funding, whatever. That is, of course, if think tanks ever pick up an academic journal, which is a rare event from my admittedly limited experience, but I digress…

What defeats the whole point of the paper is that this result is a truism. Suppose we have a productive span of 45 years in the workforce. If we take five (or ten) of those years and spend them in poverty, studying, of course there must be a greater annual reward at the end of the tunnel, otherwise very few people would bother with university.

However, the total wealth accumulated over the 45 years will show much less of a differential than the income in any one year, because the people who opt out of PSE will have more years of earnings. If we factor in that people are risk-averse and typically prefer a smoothed pattern of consumption, the difference would be even smaller.

The problem is that the study I just described is beyond our tools. It’s very easy to measure someone’s income. It’s very difficult to measure someone’s happiness over different streams of income varying over 45 years.

Comments on conditions for success as a foreigner

Technically, I’m an international student. However, I’m only about eighty minutes drive from Niagara Falls and grew up speaking English, so I don’t really count, according to my classmates – over 75 per cent of which are truly international. Regardless, I’m not the only blogger in my class, and I thought I’d comment on some “necessary” conditions for being a successful international graduate student in economics as posited by a friend before I get back to work.

1. “English. If you are just good at English, then it is not enough.”
2. “Math. Fortunately, this can still work as your forte[].”
3. “Aggressiveness. ”

It’s the last one that’s pretty interesting. And it’s somewhat true. I’ve always been quiet in lecture, but I usually tried to answer the rhetorical questions back home. And there was rarely a dead silence following a question from the prof. Here that’s more the norm. (I can no longer answer, because I’m very occupied keeping my head above water.)

Makes me curious to sit in an truly foreign classroom. Maybe my math skills would improve. At least I’m international enough to complain about the immigration hassles.

Paper finds that TV may boost performance on standardized tests

The Wall Street Journal on why television may historically have boosted academic achievement.

It’s based on a paper by a pair of Chicago economists, Jesse Shapiro and Matthew Gentzkow, who noticed that American cities were not all hooked up to television in the same year. Specifically, television started up after WWII, then stopped expanding between 1948 and 1952 for regulatory reasons. Comparing the later test scores of those who had access to TV during their early years to those who did not, they found the former group did noticeably better on these standardized measures.

In case you’re thinking that those who had TV first were richer, and thus their kids would do somewhat better – my first reaction – the statistics controls for that, so no dice there. Read the full article for more possible explanations. HT: MR.

I try not to do this, but if you’ve ever spent time in a university lecture, go and read this blogpost. Here’s the highlight for me: A manuscript hand-copied book back in 1000 cost roughly the same share of average annual income as $50,000 is today. The point is often made that the lecture format [...]

I try not to do this, but if you’ve ever spent time in a university lecture, go and read this blogpost. Here’s the highlight for me:

A manuscript hand-copied book back in 1000 cost roughly the same share of average annual income as $50,000 is today.

The point is often made that the lecture format hasn’t changed in a millenia. That being said, I’ve yet to find a better way to impart most information than a good lecturer armed with chalk and board. Powerpoint slides or any sort of technology in the classroom have yet to produce any real gains for me. Admittedly, maybe a function of what I study, but still, I wouldn’t dream of replacing the lecture with anything else.