Category Archives: Education

More degrees than a protractor factory.

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Senator Bernie Sanders favors making a BA at the 629 public four year colleges a free good for all “qualified” applicants. He says that this would be on the European model. https://www.facebook.com/OccupyDemocrats/photos/a.517901514969574.1073741825.346937065399354/844186619007727/?type=1&theater

What is the American model?

  Number Enrollment
Public 4-year institutions 629 6,837,605
Private 4-year institutions 1,845 4,161,815
Public 2-year institutions 1,070 6,184,229
Private 2-year institutions 596 303,826
Total 4,140 17,487,475
Undergraduate 14,473,884
Graduate 2,097,511
Professional 329,076

See: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908742.html

What is the European model?

European universities.

Country.          Universities.   Students.        Percent.[1]         Cost.               Drop-out rate.

Britain.           115                  2.6m.               43                    E10,500.          8.6 percent.

France.            80                  2.3m.               39                    E     177.          42.0 percent.

Italy.                79                  1.8m.               43                    E1.5-3,000      45.0 percent.

Germany.       108                  2.4m.               42                    Free.               28.0 percent.

Poland.            98                  1.8m.               54                    N.A.                24.0 percent.

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2012/may/31/european-students-statistics-interactive

The obvious lesson to draw here is that if something costs you something, you value it more. Where college costs are high, the drop-out rate is low; where college costs are low, the drop-out rate is high. “Eh, I’ll take a shot at it instead of looking for work, but if the professors want real work (or if the girls won’t come across), I’ll bag it.”—Anonymous.

http://www.bbc.com/news/education-11438140

So, France, Germany, and Italy all have virtually free tertiary education, BUT they spend one-third to one-half of what the USA does. How do they make it work? They admit a lot of kids from good schools, then throw them in the deep end of the pool and tell them to swim for it. No hand-holding. No office hours with professors. No counseling. No Writing Centers and Math Centers for free tutoring. No “second chance” when young Bobby messes up. You need help writing a paper? Hire a grad student with your own money. Short of money and you don’t want to admit to your parents that you’ve messed up? Try dealing hash. (I’m told that the “Milkweg” in Amsterdam used to be a good place to go, but how would I know? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melkweg ). Also, no sports teams. No dorms and dining halls. No marching bands. Just cafes on the Left Bank and Gitanes.

So, one follow-on question is which countries have people with degrees, rather than just having attended college?

Germany and Italy have lower graduation rates than does Britain or the United States.

Obviously, there is a lot more that can be done with this data, but this is a start. For one thing, why isn’t Sanders going off on the Finnish model? Nokia and mink ranches: let’s build our future on that.

Your thoughts?

[1] Percent of “young people” (otherwise undefined) in tertiary education of any sort.

The Least Generation 1.

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American education seems to be a lot like American health care: we spend more per-capita (patient/pupil) than do most countries and get less for the money than do most countries.[1] American 15 year-olds rank 15th in literacy, 21st in science, 24th in problem-solving, and 25th in math. Even in high school and college graduation rates, with schools pushing every lazy moron out the door with a diploma clutched in his/her hot little hand, America has lost ground from 1st to 18th place. (Now, it could be that everyone else got their ten pounds in a five pound bag and caught up to the US. I don’t know what the test scores show on this matter.) Still, American parents appear to believe that their own local schools are a happy island of excellence in a sea of national mediocrity.

The supposed crisis in American education actually seems to come down to what we do about the low performing schools, which are mostly in low-income areas.

Teachers make a difference in the lives of young people—and not always for the better. If you have three successive years of having a poor teacher, you’ll never catch up with the students in the same school who had a competent teacher.   The buzz surrounding the movie “Waiting for Superman” has focused attention on teachers and especially on teachers’ unions. The unions seem bent on frustrating every effort at reform out of a selfish interest in protecting even their least-competent members at the expense of the children.

What makes a teacher “good”? According to Teach for America: setting high goals for your students, seeking to engage them by whatever means necessary, and involving the parents in the education of their children. Teachers have to be persevering and hard-working. In another view, it isn’t so much the individual teachers as the culture of the school: instill good habits and ambition, create an expectation that everyone will strive to be excellent, and put in immense amounts of time.

The Obama administration is trying to measure the effectiveness of teachers by means of a new scheme called “value-added modeling.” In theory, this allows schools to assess the contribution of individual teachers by tracking student test scores from grade to grade.   The Department of Education’s $4.35 billion in “Race for the Top” awards gives the federal government a lot of leverage.

However, the current debate is missing an important part of the equation. Parents play a powerful role in shaping the educational achievement of their children. Teachers argue that homes where the parents read very little, have limited vocabularies, and don’t value education or see much chance for their kids to improve plays a major role in individual success or failure. Some of the most striking elements of successful schools in low-income areas seek to address this problem. The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools operate from 7:30 AM to 5:00 PM, and the teachers must be available to answer questions until 9:00 PM. The provision of counseling and medical services by the Harlem Children’s Zone charter school goes in the same direction. Successful charter schools take over the responsibilities that many parents cannot meet. The problem is that no one actually wants to say out loud that the chief source of under-achievement is failed parents, not failed students or failed teachers or failed schools. The decline—relative or absolute—in the performance of American schools or of American students began about 1980. That would suggest that it began among children born between 1962 and 1974. That would suggest that a lot of Baby Boomers turned out to be lousy parents. The “Least Generation.”

[1] “Targeting teachers,” The Week, 15 October 2010, p. 15.

Rise of the Machine Minders.

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Back in August 2014, Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University, got the idea that students returning to college for Fall Term needed to hear his advice on the keys to success.[1] He wrote a column for the New York Times. Here, in a nut-shell, is what he said.[2]

He took as his point of departure the proliferation of “thinking” machines in the economy. Industrial robots threaten factory workers; self-driving vehicles threaten truck drivers, if not other motorists; drones threaten airline pilots, did they but know it; e-discovery research software threatens lawyers and college professors. What are we non-mechanicals supposed to do for jobs in this dawning era? What are the keys to success?

Being conscientious is one key. The opportunity to do something and actually doing it are two different things.[3] If students or workers need something more corporeal than a gnawing anxiety to keep them relentlessly on task, they’re in for a bad time.

Listening to the machines is a second key. GPS-based driving instructions delivered by an Oxbridge-educated woman of a certain age are just the beginning.[4] Pretty soon our smart phones will be tuning-up our decision-making in many areas. Deciding, like Doc Boone in ”Stagecoach,” to wave off the warning and have another drink will have a cost.

Remembering that Price reflects the ratio between Supply and Demand is a third key. Stuff that is rare will command a higher price than stuff that is common. In human terms, people need to work on how they present themselves and how they interact with other people.

The Return of Calvinism is a fourth key. Either people are internally motivated or they are externally motivated. If an employer wants to keep down labor costs, then an effective “Atta boy” or “You slime” can replace a bonus as a motivator. People who know which to choose incentive will thrive in the new economy.

Developing a Thick Hide is a fifth key. Computer programs will be able to measure productivity and some other aspects of employee performance.[5] (Not all aspects, just some other aspects.) Workers at every level will get turned into a mathematical formula.[6] You need to be able to learn from a harsh performance review, get up, and move on.

Remembering Harold Lamb is a sixth key. One of his characters was a 17th Century Cossack who bought a pair of expensive leather boots to demonstrate that he had money and then spilled tar on them to demonstrate that at he didn’t care about money. Lots of young workers are libertarian-subversive in this way.

Recognizing that machines under-cut the price advantage of cheap (Asian) human labor is a seventh key. A higher class of Nineteenth Century “machine minders” is on the horizon. That will be good for the right American workers.

Your quick conceiving discontent will have noticed that none of this has anything to do with which major a student chooses. It is all about what kind of person chooses that major.

[1] My guess would be that he was fed up with the stuff that his teaching assistants had been telling him and with the results of the Generals Examinations of the graduate students.

[2] Tyler Cowen, “Who Will Prosper in the New World,” NYT, 1 September 2014.

[3] See: Dorothy Parker.

[4] You ever wonder if people into BDSM choose some German dominatrix’s voice? Just asking.

[5] The SEC wants to track executive compensation against company performance. The first rule for plumbers is that shit runs downhill. The second is to not bite your fingernails.

[6] This will lead to its own disasters. Both life experience and literature indicate that there are non-performers who are vital to the functioning of an organization. So, judgment and experience will be vital.

Inequality 4.

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By and large, in recent years the upper income groups have collected most of the profits from economic growth while everyone else has lived with stagnant incomes. How much effect in monetary terms has that monopolization of growth had? According to one calculation, if the top one-percent still received the same share of income that they received in 1979, then every other family could have received a cheque for $7,105.[1]

However, compare this with another form of inequality. If incomes have stagnated for most people, so has educational attainment.          In 1900, about 11 percent of Americans aged 14 to 17 attended high school. By 1950, 75 percent of that age group attended high school. That was about double the European rate. The G.I. Bill (1944) carried the American lead forward into college education by financing college education for veterans (among other things). Then something started to go wrong in the 1970s. Male graduation rates for four-year colleges began to decline. Essentially, women have taken up the slack in educational attainment. Unfortunately, this coincided with the decline in heavy industry that paid good wages for people without a college education.

The educational differential both is and isn’t generational. Of Americans born between 1950 and 1959, 42 percent have a college degree. Of Americans born between 1980 and 1989, 44 percent have a college degree. However, only 30 percent of Americans reach a higher level of education than did their parents. Among 25-34 year-olds, 20 percent of men and 27 percent of women have made the big jump from parents who didn’t finish high school to having a college degree.

The differential is linked to social class. From the mid-1970s and the mid-1990s, college graduation rates for those in the top 25 percent of income groups rose from 36 percent to 54 percent; rates for those in the bottom 25 percent rose only from 5 percent to 9 percent. Between the early 1980s and the early 2000s, college attendance rates for people from the top 25 percent of income groups rose to be 15 to 25 percent higher than for those in the bottom 25 percent.

Why do these figures matter? They matter because, on average, Americans with a college degree are paid 74 percent more than those with only a high school degree. Between 1979 and 2012, the difference between the incomes of families headed by college graduates and families headed by high-school graduates grew by $30,000.

Education isn’t working as a vehicle for social mobility. It is starting to do the opposite.

The causes of this stagnation are complex. For one thing, middle class students go to much better schools than do lower class students. The middle class students come out less unprepared for college than do lower class students, usually markedly less unprepared. For another thing, college costs more in the United States than it does most places, and cuts in already inadequate support for public colleges have thrown even more of a burden on families.

If you think that a BA or more makes for a highly skilled work force, then expanding the percentage of Americans who are college graduates is vital for improving the quality of the American work force. If you think that international competitiveness in a globalized economy is vital for American prosperity, then improving the quality of the American labor force is essential.

Which of these two forms of inequality is worse for the country? This isn’t an attempt to divert attention from one form of inequality on behalf of the “one-percent.” It is an effort to get people to pay attention to complex fundamental problems.

[1] Eduardo Porter, “”Equation Is Simple: Education = Income,” NYT, 11 September 2014.

The Man Who Saved a Billion Lives.

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In the 19th Century, a lot of Norwegians migrated to places like Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakotas to make a living as farmers. Tough, hard-working, close-mouthed, decent people. Norman Borlaug (1914-2009) fit the stereotype. He grew up during the Depression, worked his way through the University of Minnesota to get a BA in forestry (1937). Along the way he got interested in plant diseases, so he went on and got a Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics (1942).

Borlaug spent most of the Second World War on research work for DuPont down in Wilmington. In 1944 his old Ph.D. adviser recruited him to work on improving wheat harvests in Mexico. Borlaug spent sixteen years in Mexico developing disease-resistant strains of wheat. Along the way he had to overcome resistance from incompetent, lazy, or anti-foreign bureaucrats. He also had to persuade farmers to try something new when they were both wedded to tradition and fearful that a failed experiment would leave them to starve. He persevered. The seeds developed by Borlaug both yielded high returns of grain and resisted disease. A bunch of his developments were impossible in theory, but possible in practice. (So much for Rene Descartes.) Largely as a result of Borlaug’s work, the yield of Mexican wheat rose five-fold between 1950 and 2000. Mexico went from being a wheat-importer in the 1940s to being a wheat-exporter by the 1960s while feeding a much larger population.

In the early 1960s developing countries all over the world were struggling with rapid population growth. (See: The Population Bomb.) How were they to feed their people? Agricultural scientists in India and Pakistan got their governments to call in Borlaug. Borlaug had to overcome all the same difficulties that he had encountered in Mexico, with the added problem that India and Pakistan were at war with each other for part of the time. He persevered. As a result of Borlaug’s work, the yield of Indian and Pakistani wheat quadrupled between 1960 and 2000. Other countries in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa then copied the Borlaug seeds. Then Asian governments applied his basic approach to producing high-yield, disease resistant rice instead of wheat. The huge increase in food production in countries that once faced the certainty of mass-death from famine has come to be called the “Green Revolution.”

In 1970 Norman Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize. When the committee called Borlaug at home to inform him, his wife said that he had already gone to work. It was 4:00 AM.

Later on, from 1984 on, Borlaug taught at Texas A&M University.[1]

Critics have found much to dislike in the effects of Borlaug’s work. They denounce the shift from subsistence farming to single-crop agriculture because it makes people dependent on the capitalist market. They denounce the reliance on scientifically-bred seeds and fertilizers and tractors and irrigation systems because it creates profits for American corporations. They dislike genetically-modified foods because it seems unnatural.

Borlaug replied that “They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things”

Borlaug was a tough, hard-working, close-mouthed, decent man. It has been estimated that about a billion people didn’t starve to death because of his work.

[1] The “A&M” stands for “Agricultural and Mechanical.”   Once upon a time, we had a different vision of education.

Inequality 1.

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In December 2013 President Obama called income inequality “the defining issue of our time.” He’s agin it. Soon afterward Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) garnered many accolades and some readers. This added academic fuel to the populist fires.

Already by Summer 2014, however, there were reasons to doubt the substance behind the passions aroused by the issue. Eduardo Porter raised two issues.[1] First, the problem of income inequality isn’t that important compared to other problems facing the United States. Social scientists have been trying to demonstrate that the rise of the “One Percent” has harmed society. They haven’t been able to prove it. Second, it may not be a problem with a practical solution.

What we think of as “globalization” (technology + open world markets) has polarized people toward the extremes of income: high-earners and low earners, but fewer and fewer people in between. The relationship between one’s job and technology is key. Someone who has a job that is not easily replaced by a machine, but which requires the manipulation of technology, is in a good place. In contrast, anyone with a job that can—or one day could be—done by a machine is in a bad place.[2] Generally, higher incomes are flowing toward people with higher education.[3] That’s true both within the United States and within the global economy. From this perspective, the “defining issue” is how to promote enough economic growth to insure a rising standard of living for the low-earners. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist who served as an economic advisor to both George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, argues that raising the amount of education of American workers offers the best path to higher incomes.

Seen dispassionately, the best solution would be to help the people at the bottom of the income ladder without preventing the people at the top of the income ladder from doing the stuff that generates income for all. Allowing the gains from growth to flow only to those at the top of the income pyramid will not head off political trouble.  More could be done to take the rough edges off the state in which we find ourselves. For one thing, cuts in public aid to state colleges and universities has shifted a heavier burden onto parents and students seeking the higher education that is supposed to allow them to climb out of the pit. Restoring that aid would be a valuable step. Increasing the Earned Income Tax credit is another way. Developing policies to make the urban cores of the dynamic cities affordable to low-income workers by is another way. Still, reducing inequality by higher taxes on the well-off and an ever more generous social welfare system[4] cannot turn back the tsunami of change.

However, dispassionately isn’t how most engaged people are seeing the issue. Both the political parties have a stake in stirring up passions by misrepresenting the realities. The Right sees President Obama as an anti-business zealot. The Left sees Republicans as pawns of corporations.

How long will it take to make a more educated and better educated workforce? In the meantime, how does the country manage the social costs of the transition?

[1] Eduardo Porter, “Income Inequality And the Ills Behind It,” NYT, 30 July 2014.

[2] A 2012 poll of economists showed that the great majority believed that the uneven impact of technological change best explained the rise of income inequality. Reagan, Bush II, “deregulation,” and the other usual suspects didn’t figure

[3] Scholars have compared the college graduation rates for those born in the early 1960s with those for 1979-1982. People in the top 20 percent of incomes rose from 36 percent to 54 percent, while it rose from 5 percent to 9 percent for those in the bottom 20 percent. Furthermore, even the real incomes of people with a BA have hardly risen since the mid-1970s. NB: There is a lot you can do with this basic set of statistics.

[4] “Free sandals for foot fetishists,” as the Democratic columnist Mark Shields once described the policy prescriptions of the Democratic Party of the 1980s.

Nothing to CLAP about.

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There is an exam called the College Learning Assessment Plus.[1] The exam measures how much college students gain between the freshman year and the senior year. It assesses communications skills (reading, writing); analytical reasoning; and critical thinking. Thus, it is applicable across disciplines and measures the “transferable skills” that have long been touted as the real value of a college education.

The results of the CLA+ for 2013-2014 give cause for hope and fear.[2] Of Freshmen who took the test, 63 percent scored below the Proficient level and 37 percent scored Proficient or higher. Of Seniors who took the test, 40 percent scored below the Proficient level and 60 percent scored Proficient or higher. Of Freshmen, 31 percent enter college at a Below Basic level, but by the Senior year this share has been reduced to 14 percent. Similarly, 32 percent of Freshmen score in the Basic level, but by the senior year this had been reduced to 26 percent even as 17 percent have moved up from Below Basic to at least Basic.

So, the good news is that colleges take the 37 percent who are already proficient and make them more proficient; and they take 23 percent who are not proficient and raise them to proficiency. So, sixty percent of college students benefit from attending college.[3]

What’s the bad news? Well, 14 percent of seniors graduate with a Below Basic score and another 26 percent graduate with a Basic, but Below Proficient score. That’s 40 percent who come out of college deficient in the intellectual skills assessed by the CLA+ exam. That is a huge wastage of resources. Of late, much attention has focused on graduation rates and time-to-graduation. Here, the United States has lost its world-leading position and has fallen behind some other countries. The results of the CLA+ exam suggest that the problem is actually worse than it appears because 40 percent of college graduates don’t actually function at a BA level.

There’s a part I don’t understand, but which I will report. Test scores fall in a range between 400 and 1600. The average Freshman score is 1039; the average Senior score is 1128. The average improvement is 89 points. If, for the sake of argument, you subtract the 400 points you get for being able to sign your own name, then the Freshmen average score is 639 and the Senior average score is 728. An 89 point increase amounts to just under a 14 percent.

Still, these reports raise several questions. Why do almost two-thirds of Freshmen start college below the level of proficiency for their group? Furthermore, many students do not go on to college at all. This suggests that K-12 education is failing many students. It also suggests that an increasingly remedial function is being forced on colleges. (At the same time, they are being criticized for loading students and parents with debt and for not graduating students in a timely fashion.)

Is a 14 percent average improvement enough to justify the cost of four years of college? Does the 14 percent improvement push students over some undefined threshold between incompetence and competence? If it does, then the money probably is well spent.

It’s just my opinion, but professors are the least-qualified to understand the nature of the problem. Their children grow up with books, pictures on the walls, a variety of kinds of music playing, trips to cultural events rather than Disney World, experiences valued over possessions, and parents who work all the time. So, their children are usually successful in school and in life.

[1] This is abbreviated as CLA+ so that anxious parents will not be overheard asking other parents “So, how did your kid do with the CLAP?”

[2] Douglas Belkin, “Skills Gap Found in College Students,” WSJ, 17-18 January 2015.

[3] Maybe all of them do, without that showing up in the test scores. Maybe they are marginally more attuned to key skills without quite getting out of the bottom category.

Colleges Bobbing for French Fries.

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Education has always been a commodity like any other. Sellers set the price at what the market will bear. Calling colleges and universities “not-for-profit” hides from this reality. The only difference between Chrysler and a college is that colleges have no shareholders or proprietors.[1] Therefore, increased revenue goes directly to the employees. The reverse is also true. In a period of revenue constraint, the costs are taken out of the hide of the employees.

Suzanne Mettler has argued that the political gridlock in Washington has kept federal aid, like Pell grants, from rising enough to keep an increasing burden for tuition from falling on ordinary families. At the state level, the requirement to balance budgets and a widespread hostility to taxes has intersected rising costs for Medicaid and prisons to force cuts to state aid to public institutions.[2] Access to college is becoming a privilege of wealth instead of motor of American prosperity.

Barton Swaim isn’t buying it.[3] First, he sees a huge expansion of the scale and activities on the part of colleges and universities since the mid-1980s. “Departments and schools have multiplied, lavishly expensive student facilities and high-tech research centers have gone up even during recessions, well-paid administrators have multiplied like locusts, and federal grant-money has poured in at ever-increasing rates.” Why has this happened? “When government pays the bills, prices always go up.” Sellers charge what the market will be bear. Second, Swaim argues that the supposed recent “cuts” in state-funding for education are usually presented in terms of a falling share of state budgets, rather than as inflation-adjusted real dollars. (Swaim himself doesn’t bother to give any figures to support his alternative interpretation.) Implicitly, what is needed is some market discipline. Third, Swaim’s interpretation fits into the narrative of the unforeseen—and disastrous–consequences of liberal good intentions. Mettler, he says, “is right that American higher education is no longer the force of equality and opportunity that predominantly liberal policy makers intended it to be. What she misses is that those policy makers are to blame.”

What does Swaim get right and what does he get wrong? First, he’s right about the fact of the huge expansion in activities since the mid-1980s. He’s just wrong about the cause of it. Simply put, there are too many colleges and universities relative to the demand for them. They compete by multiplying academic program to reflect the latest fad, degrading academic standards, engaging in an amenities arms race, and multiplying recruitment and support staffs (i.e. administrators). We need a shake-out.

Second, he’s wrong on the cuts-in-state-financing-causing-tuition-increases issue. Tuition at public school has spiked much more than has tuition at private ones. This is the product of cuts in state aid. (See: “College costs: the old eat the young,” 27 September 2014.)

Third, he misses (or dodges) the chance to talk about the equivalent unforeseen—and disastrous–consequences of conservative good intentions. The war on drugs and the conversion of tax cuts from a rational policy choice into a primitive fetish (of the religious, rather than the sexual sort[4]) have been just as much exploding cigars as anything liberals have advocated.

[1] On the other hand, when is the last time you heard of a student recall? Jus sayin.

[2] Suzanne Mettler, Degrees of Inequality (Basic Books, 2014).

[3] Swaim, review of Mettler, Degrees of Inequality, WSJ, 14 March 2014.

[4] Although I suppose that someone could work up a funny patter on the parallels with BDSM. If that’s how you roll.

Pakiban I.

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Public schools are—or should be—a big issue for Pakistan. The country is very poor. It isn’t a major oil producer, nor does it have much in the way of other natural resources. Other countries in similar circumstances, like South Korea, have created a competitive advantage by investing heavily in improved “human capital.” That means public education. You build up from the primary schools to secondary schools to technical training schools to universities. Furthermore, developing countries can’t afford to ignore any segment of the school-age population in this drive for prosperity. As was the case with the American and European public schools systems created in the 19th Century, girls and boys both have to go to school. Education is only part of the solution to national and individual poverty, but it is a vital part.

Pakistan needs such a basic school system: about one-quarter of its population is aged between 5 and 16 years old. It doesn’t have one.[1]

Almost half of the school age population doesn’t go to school at all. Almost all of the children not in school are girls. The law says that they are supposed to go to school. But imams and parents say that girls should not go to school. The government doesn’t bother or doesn’t dare to enforce the law.

Test scores for primary school students matter most in a country building up its schools from the bottom. In Pakistan, about half of 10 year-olds score at the level of 6 year-olds in language mastery, at the level of 7 year-olds in arithmetic. How do you make only one year or two years of progress in five years of school?

You turn the schools into a political machine, that’s how. Right from the establishment of independence in 1947, Pakistan has botched its public school system. The school system has always been under-financed relative to needs. Then much of the funding has been diverted into the pockets of crooked politicians and their bureaucratic clients. Half of public primary schools have no electricity. Forty percent have no working toilets. A third have no drinking water.

Jobs as school teachers became a plum awarded to political supporters and nephews. Usually the teacher’s salary goes to the man who got him the job, while the teacher sells off whatever school resources fall into his grasp and takes another job. So, Pakistan has schoolrooms with students, but without teachers or books or desks. In the 1970s and 1980s the national government played to a rising religious tide by “Islamizing” the school curriculum.

Everyone knows that the schools are a disaster. Malala Yousafzai was campaigning against the many failings of the school system when she came to the attention of the Taliban. Many powerful people have a vested interest in the disaster continuing. Is it fair to ask if the government of Pakistan put the Taliban up to shooting Malala Yousafzai so that it wouldn’t have to do the work itself?

Pakistan isn’t the only developing country with a disdain for public education or for school girls. Aravind Adiga’s novel of contemporary India, The White Tiger, scalded Indian opinion exactly because it told so many truths about the country, the schools included. The kidnapping of hundreds of school-girls by the Nigerian Islamist movement Bozo Haram[2] is telling about the attitude of Islamists. The slack response of the Nigerian government is even more telling about the attitude of an elite pre-occupied with stealing oil revenues.

It’s worth comparing these places with Japan, China, South Korea, and even Turkey.

[1] Mosharraf Zaidi, “How Pakistan Fails Its Children,” NYT, 15 October 2014.

 

[2] Yes, I know, but did you ever see that guy on television?

Shuffle the Deck and Deal.

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The “recent unpleasantness” of the housing bubble and collapse has disguised a larger and more long-term movement. As economists never tire of pointing out, education is linked to prosperity—for both the individual and the community. In 1970, 11 percent of the population aged over twenty-five years had at least a BA. These people were spread around the country fairly evenly: half of America’s cities had concentrations of BA-holders running between 9 and 13 percent.

By 2004, things were very different in two respects. First, 27 percent of the population aged over twenty-five years had at least a BA. So, Americans appeared to be much better educated. Second, educated Americans now clustered together in a few cities. The densest concentrations are around Seattle, San Francisco, up toward Lake Tahoe on California’s border with Nevada, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Denver, Salt Lake City, Austin, the Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston, and in college towns scattered across the map.

 

Why this sorting?

Part of the explanation is a reciprocal relationship between educated people and prosperity. Businesses in science, health, engineering, computers, and education need to be where there are a lot of educated people; people who want to work in these industries need to be where they can get rewarding jobs. Part of the explanation is that some cities tolerate, or even foster, a high degree of diversity. All sorts of people who move toward these cities find a ready welcome and at least some other people like themselves. It’s easy to fit in. It’s easy to find people with whom to share ideas and projects. Seen from these two vantage points, another part of the explanation is that some cities got there first. Like early-birds at a yard-sale, they snapped up all the best things. Seattle, for example, had Boeing (lots of engineers), a big and more-or-less respectable university, a lot of racial diversity (and not just the White-Black kind that most Easterners mean), and a spectacular physical location. It’s easy to see why Microsoft stayed where it started. Others flocked there for the same reasons.

 

What are the effects?

The more that talent concentrates, the greater are the synergies that spin-off innovations—and economic growth. The more that prosperous people concentrate, the greater are the demand for all sorts of other services and amenities.

The production train used to run from innovation to design to manufacturing to distribution to sales to service. In this system, virtually all the different stages and skill-levels would be located in the same area. Detroit and cars or Pittsburgh and steel offer good examples. Today, much of the lesser-skilled work can be either automated or out-sourced to low-wage foreign suppliers. So, great prosperity can co-exist with economic decline.

But not for long. High income earners bid up the price of housing. It is common to find people without BAs being forced to re-locate away from the areas of tech prosperity. A long commute is one of the badges of un-success in contemporary America.

Steel and cars are waning as major American industries. The “knowledge economy” is central to future American prosperity. The transition has costs and problems that we don’t yet know how to resolve.

Richard Florida, “The Nation in Numbers: Where the Brains Are,” Atlantic, October 2006, pp. 34-35.