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Canadian academic salaries top world
China comes last in limited sample, no word on the variance statistics.
In a survey of academic salaries in 15 countries around the world, Canada came out on top, with an average monthly salary of $4,856 per month (in PPP dollars), and China came last with a monthly salary of $1,182.
No wonder we’re importing professors from Asia. Link; hat tip.That being said, I bet the variance in American academic salaries is much larger, since private American institutions have the ability to chase after the elite profs at far higher salary levels than average. Here’s a dated example. There have been rumours that select profs are starting to approach the seven figure mark in salary, while those toiling at low-ranked public American colleges can likely expect less than their Canadian counterparts.
Economists of the ivory tower
Something is wrong with how the economics profession presents itself to the world.
I usually don’t read the famous Freakonomics blog, but this post caught my attention. I’ll quote the relevant bit:
But it was something President Robinson [former President of Ireland, high-ranking U.N. exec] said after the program that I’ll truly remember. I [Stephen Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics] asked her if, say, a well-regarded development economist from, say, Harvard or M.I.T. were to issue a paper on some important aspect of food supply or famine (like some of these, perhaps): would the folks in Robinson’s circle pay attention?
She smiled kindly as she said “I’m afraid not.” Which only further reinforced my belief that at the very least this is one person who truly does tell the truth.
From my limited tenure (four months last summer) as a policy wonk, I’d agree. Which I find somewhat disappointing, but of course I’m biased. There are undoubtedly a lot of people who are glad that the world is not run by hyper-rational economists.
I’ll concede that there’s lots of results from economic theory that fail the laugh test. But so much of the discussion that fills up the papers on a regular basis has a “right answer” in economics and yet doesn’t fully penetrate the public consciousness, but this is rehashing my tyranny of the majority post.
However, former presidents and UN authorities aren’t the public at large. Here’s the question I want to ask. What have economists done to ‘rub society the wrong way’? Because there’s something we’re missing if we can get quotes like the one above.
Yes, I understand that lots of papers are written solely to show off advanced mathematics or to colleagues. And that lots have extremely limited policy application. But there are metric tons of papers which are interesting, applicable, and ignored. What’s wrong with our PR?
Unrelated postscript: Here’s a paper that shows using standard assumptions that fiscal federalism promotes the accumulation of human capital, i.e. it really is better to leave education to the provinces.
Rethinking our ‘brain drain’
Canada is in fact a substantial importer of skilled labour, primarily from developing countries.
I remember that when I was going through high school, the ‘brain drain’ panic was at its peak. Word on the street was anyone who had even a couple of university courses was heading south as fast as Air Canada could get them there, and people with graduate degrees were more endangered than the beluga whales in the St. Lawrence.
You don’t hear so much about it these days, and maybe it’s not just because we can brag about the Perimeter Institute. Today, I stumbled across a report (hat tip: Chris Blattman) which indicates that Canada imported some 16,000 PhD’s over the 2001-2006 period, largely from Asia. Conversely, our nation’s universities produced some 20,000 doctorates over the same period – one quarter of which were foreign nationals.
So, even if every single Canadian-born PhD left for the States after graduation (though the last link indicates only 18% do), Canada would still be a net importer of doctorates. As of right now, we import thousands more highly educated people every year than we export. This is hardly a brain drain.
We owe this in large part to our progressive immigration system, which accepts more entrants per capita than most anywhere else in the world. We were also the first to adopt points-based immigration procedures, which were rolled out in 1967. The fruits of these policies are easy to point to, one oft-mentioned example being Microsoft setting up in B.C. last year specifically because they couldn’t bring skilled workers into the States.
Remember, there are gains from trade in labour, just like there are gains from trade in goods.
Final point. North American graduate education and Asian graduate education are not identical. However, without evidence to evaluate whether PhDs earned in Korea or wherever are worth more or less than ones in Canada, it’s hard to draw any further conclusions that aren’t pure value judgments, so I’ll leave it there. G’night.
Against net neutrality—sort of
Even if you are burning gigabytes learning calculus from streaming video online, you still need to pay for it
Was checking back through the blogging history of my fellow contributors and stumbled across this post. It sounds good, but to me it mixes up the concept of net neutrality with something completely different.
I define ‘net neutrality’ as the idea that internet providers or government do not restrict or monitor the theme of the content you view on the internet. Whether that content is MIT OpenCourseWare or something much less socially acceptable, that doesn’t matter. It’s not their business.
This is not the same thing as being granted unlimited access to the internet for free. It’s unreasonable to expect the nation’s ISPs to grant every household as much bandwidth as they can consume, even if they’re using it to view videos of lectures on linear algebra. Every time someone loads an internet page, it’s an order to send electrons through wires and transformers around the world. Unfortunately, that infrastructure does not come free. There is a real cost to accessing the internet. And it’s only fair that whoever gains the benefit – the user at home – pays the cost.
Sure, we could legislate that all internet providers need to provide free unlimited access to the internet to further the education of the populace, but it wouldn’t be long before Canada didn’t have a single company willing to provide internet service. Alternatively, how about bandwith used to access designated educational content is free? Well, then someone has to monitor your internet use to determine what sites are visited, which I don’t find acceptable and prevents us from reaching ‘net neutrality’ anyway.
This is nothing new. We pay the electric company for running our computer even if we’re accessing educational content. Bus fare or gas money to go to university classes. Etc, etc, etc. There is no free lunch that provides us with an online educational utopia, as much as we would like one.
So, in short, even if you are burning gigabytes learning calculus from streaming video online, you still need to pay for it.
Economics as a necessity for civic literacy
The Athenians were right: an (economically) educated populace is the first prerequisite of a functional democracy.
Okay, a recent top story in the papers for some time now has been the idea of Dion’s “Green Shift”, carbon tax, whatever you want to call it. If you’re actually reading this, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. I was recently tuned in to local radio, featuring a call-in show on this issue. It’s particularly contentious out here in Newfoundland, because the rural culture lends itself to fuel consumption, and the province is an oil exporter.
Regardless, this radio show was flooded with opinions. A lot of ‘we need to keep our oil for ourselves, ban exports’. A lot of ‘we need government subsidies at the pump’. This sort of thing. What I find strange about this is that the economics profession by and large – I’d estimate 95%+ here – would dismiss these opinions as bad for Newfoundland and bad for society in general.
Similarly, an equally large proportion of economists would probably agree that if global warming imposes costs on society, a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system is the correct way to fight carbon emissions. (These plans are actually equivalent according to economics.) Heck, many would support a tax on carbon even if global warming was a fantasy and other nations were unwilling to match our carbon tax, since burning cheap gas produces other things we don’t want – traffic congestion, urban sprawl, smog, and so forth.
Now, I don’t want to say economists are always right, because we’re not. But I’ve yet to hear a remotely convincing argument that would move me to consider supporting local oil autarky or a different scheme to control greenhouse gases. So I’m going to proceed under the assumption that the economists are right. Deal with it.
The problem for me is that if the aforementioned radio show is any indication, these “correct” policies aren’t going to garner substantial public support and so we’ll end up with inferior plans, meaning that we’re all worse off. This lack of democratic rationality has already been written on by such people as Brian Caplan, but it’s still a problem. The tyranny of the majority reigns.
Really, the only solution to fixing this is to improve the education of the populace – one more reason the government has a role in funding postsecondary education. If you’ll permit me to quote Susan Jacoby: “It is difficult to suppress the fear that the scales of American history have shifted heavily against the vibrant and varied intellectual life so essential to functional democracy[.]”
Wrong country, but the point is still clear: education, and I would argue in economics above all, is necessary for the voting booth to mean much.
Doing graduate education differently across the border
Is there any reason to be concerned as our southern neighbours adopt a new path to the PhD?
About nine months ago, I had the pleasure of applying for graduate programs in economics. This involves bothering professors to write letters on your behalf and sending exorbitant cheques to numerous schools in the hope one of them will deign to return an acceptance letter. One thing learned from the process is how American schools are moving away from the traditional structure of graduate education that Canada is used to.
Applying to Canadian universities (and generally the European one, as well), I was told to apply for Masters’ programs, which typically took one year to complete. After successful completion of that degree, then apply to a four-year PhD, which may or may not be taken at the same school. Applying to American universities, the norm is to apply directly to a five-year PhD program.
Okay, sure, it’s five years of torture either way. But there’s still a big difference, though it’s hard to call one approach superior. Our neighbours’ approach lets the universities offer more certainty to prospective students, since there’s no need to wonder whether you’ll be accepted into the actual PhD after the Masters’. There’s typically more money on the table for PhD-level students, and the student is spared having to go through the application process twice.
Conversely, the Canadian system rewards those who didn’t know they wanted a PhD by their second year of university, or who have some rough spots on their undergraduate transcript. These people have the option to get their M.A. and excel at that level, earning entrance to a top American PhD, a feat which would have been impossible applying straight from undergrad.
This pattern even holds outside the realm of economics, but not nearly as strongly, in case you’re wondering. So, consequences? Well, that’s the wrong word. This split is more of a reflection of the different academic philosophies that prevail in each of our countries. The American system is typically more of a tournament, the “winners” of which end up in the Ivies or similiarly prestigious institutions, and their system is thus predictably designed to bring the superstars of the world back to Harvard, MIT, Chicago, and the rest.
Being Canadian, we’re less comfortable with having a really elitist crop of universities. And our top universities don’t have the funds of their private American counterparts to really compete for top students, which requires lavish spending on faculty. The result is that we have a more egalitarian and accessible system, but one that has great difficulty attracting the world’s best.
Oh, and in the end? I’m going to the States, but sadly not Yale or the like.
Can video games lower your grades?
Maybe. Especially if they’re your roommate’s
As a dedicated video gamer, I found this article (warning: math) extremely interesting. Now, the real point of the article is to to establish causation between time spent studying and educational achievement, so let me explain that before I get to the games.
The authors find the effect of an additional hour of studying a day is equivalent to, on average, an increase in first-semester GPA of 0.38. That’s equivalent to bumping two C’s to B’s, or two B’s to A’s – about an increase of 6% for one’s overall average on a percentage scale.
This result also indicates that how well someone does in university depends heavily on how much work is put in, since assuming study effort is subject to diminishing returns would imply that the difference between no studying and putting in the average amount of work improves 4-point GPA by in excess of 1.33 points, or 20% on the percentage scale (likely somewhat more) – enough to turn someone who typically earns C’s into an honour student, maybe more. Again, not a surprise, unless you believe that university performace is determined predominately by intelligence, which is hard to defend via common sense, but it’s a result that often pops up in these kind of papers, which the authors claim are statistically flawed for reasons I won’t go into.
More interesting to my eyes is the effect of being placed in shared housing with a roomate who owns a video game system. This lowers a student’s first-semester grades by about 4% – their GPA drops by 0.24, or one B turns into a C. (This is statistically significant at the 5% level, if that question was on your lips.) Peculiarly enough, bringing your own video games to university appears to have a smaller effect than if your roommate brings them.
So, students (and their parents) be warned: the roomate’s Xbox can cause slight collateral damage to your (or your kid’s) transcript. Had your fill of common sense yet?
Full disclosure: Author’s calculations, and the data comes from a Berea College, which may not be representative of all Canadian undergraduates.
