LIBOR for the universities?

Paul Campos is excellent on law school shenanigans alkali.

Well, yeah to be sure, but so far as I know academic scandals have not 1) enriched a very few at expense of many, 2) crashed the world economy, 3) been perpetuated by people who have learned nothing, shown no signs of remorse, introspection or modified behavior, 4) promoted ever greater wealth inequality, 5) been associated with a self-absorbed culture that has taken much and produced very little discernible benefit to broader society. (Our self-absorbed culture has been of some benefit to society.)

Anyway, I think you missed the biggest scandal in US academia: funding of semi-privatized state universities by saddling students with debt. Which leads us back to the financial industry.

Do you really believe anybody care about these manipulated statistics (honest question)?

For instance, you write that manipulating the REF was “intended” to “redirect tax payer money,” but did it succeed, i.e did anybody really care about the results and took them into account in the allocation process?

Ditto with the USNWR and its clones: department do their best to game the system, sure, but do people really base any decision on them? It seems to me that people with little access to the inside of academia overwhelmingly choose their higher-education institution either by geographical or emotional proximity and insider don’t need USNWR.

In my experience, these metrics are almost pure kabuki justified by everyone because they are supposedly important to someone else, so academics say “of course, they’re bunk, but the board requires them”, boards say “of course, they’re bunk but politicians require them”, politicians say “of course, they’re bunk but the general public/the taxpayers require them” and the general public says “I don’t care about them myself, but apparently it’s important to people in academia.” So I guess I’m skeptical that anything will “blow-up.” People just don’t care (and that’s a big difference with your other examples: there at least one hot button-money, sex, crimes, power…-seemed to be involved).

I should say that this is my rational evaluation, I would oh so dearly wished to see this system being subject to such a scandal.

Aren’t all of these scandals that are well-known by, and roundly condemned by, people in the academy and people outside the academy who are reasonably well-informed? That’s certainly the case for the law schools. In general, the “these are real, bad problems in the academy” point is fine, the “hey, my friends in finance are GOOD PEOPLE because, look, other people in other areas ALSO game the system and do bad things” is not only blatant trolling, but about as convincing as that argument normally is.

Corruption everywhere, but dm@4 seems convincing on the unique iniquity of finance. And impunity: https://medium.com/bull-market/organized-crime-on-wall-street-2df24e632088.

Could you remind us briefly about the “exonerating background and detail” in the case of, e.g., the subprime mortgage industry?

I hope they don’t dig back to the time Bill Tozier and I tried to sell our Erdös numbers.

https://crookedtimber.org/2004/04/21/second-mover-advantage/

Worth noting that UK universities are particularly susceptible given that they are covered by FOI.

The only thing working in their favour is that it’s hard to find the smoking gun when the whole building is on fire.

In a variety of fields across the social and natural sciences, it’s common for senior academics to have themselves recorded as authors on papers which they did not write. They take it as a kind of payment-in-kind for providing advice to younger and less senior academics, or to boost the profile of the paper and get it a better publication. It, apparently, doesn’t mean that they take any responsibility for ensuring the integrity of the data which goes out under their name, or that they see themselves as being accountable in any way if it should prove fraudulent.

I don’t think that is common at all. The senior people I see do the planning and most of the interpretation. It’s an very real contribution. Also, that’s where the money to collect the data is. Plus, depending on the rules of that specific journal, often junior people who made important contributions to the data collection will be listed as authors despite relatively minimal writing.

Certainly the senior people don’t handle the data directly in many cases. On larger studies, it’s a full-time job for several people. To make high quality paper in the more complex portions of the natural sciences would be impossible for any single person. There is supervision, of course, but aside from the current system (which, if you look at the Green case for an example, does involve senior people checking into things after their suspicion is aroused), the only check would be to have somebody else independent duplicate the work. That’s what pharma does. The cost would be very large if it were done for all research.

[deleted -dd]

USNWR isn’t going to make the the cut as a scandal, because the locus of the scandal really isn’t in the schools, but at the publication. Shitty journalism is just a fact of life in the US – protected by the Constitution, even.

Sure, the schools are gaming a corrupt system in fairly egregious ways, but (as far as I know) nobody is breaking the law.

@10 geo

As Daniel noted, its difficult to give much more than a half-hearted, half-assed defense, but for example – in the LIBOR manipulation scandal – the thing to object to is that the market was being rigged rather than that it being allowed to clear in a transparent process, finding actual harm is far more difficult.

Market prices are a two sided game and no one is forced to play – for every seller there is a buyer. Imagine today the ‘bad guys’ set LIBOR a little higher than where it should clear on its own – that means every saver got more than they deserved and every debtor paid more than they should…should we ask the savers to pay the borrowers?

In subprime its easy and right to focus on the thousands that were evicted from their homes and damaged their credit by buying homes they couldn’t afford on terms they didn’t understand….there are thousands of others however, that are in a house that they love, making their payments and realizing the goals they had hoped for in homeownership – these folks make poor copy but far more people bought homes than had them foreclosed so its not impossible to infer that successes outweigh the failures.

20.3 is just nuts. The reason nobody focused so much on those people in a house they loved is because the resulting collapse of the housing market caused the median household net worth in the U.S. to fall by tens of thousands of dollars. It was in the papers.

@22 mh
How is the subsequent fall of value relevant to subprime financing. If a guy paid for his house in cash or borrowed subprime has no bearing on the future price of real estate. The reason subprime is important is that its a fair case that many borrowers didn’t understand the potential ramifications of the paper they were signing and/or should never have been approved to borrow in the first place – that’s to be punished. The bank didn’t tell any borrower to pay $500k for a house that subsequently was worth $350k….the borrower made the decision to buy on their own and then the lenders became involved.

Oh, that’s just crazy talk.

“How confident are we that when it does, that they’ll be found pure?”

I don’t think many around here think of academia as “pure” (morally? intellectually? legally?). It all depends of course on your standards of comparison. See dm 4.

“People just don’t care (and that’s a big difference with your other examples: there at least one hot button-money, sex, crimes, power…-seemed to be involved).”

I think Z has it here. People are just not going to get very upset about “a bunch of academics did some obscure and arguably slightly deceptive but not actually illegal things in an attempt to ensure that a few hundred grand for studying Byzantine potsherds went to the Loughborough Department of Archaeology, when really the Winchester Department of Archaeology should probably have got it”. And saying that they’re going to react to it like they reacted to the news of millions of pounds in fraud for personal gain by the same MPs who were telling us all to tighten our belts* is, well, trolling, and admirable for its ambition, but not nearly up to the standard of “Budweiser What A Great Beer” or “Richard Dawkins Is Worse Than The Ayatollah Khomeini”.
Academics just don’t have enough power (or enough money) to be really interesting in this respect. Not unless they were doing it for personal gain, which they weren’t.

*I guess it might be nice to live in a world where the public takes the integrity of research assessment metrics a little more seriously than they presently do. But I am pretty sure it would be horrible to live in a world where the public looked at the news of a five-decade conspiracy of silence surrounding the abominable abuse of children, and said to themselves “shit, this is nearly as bad as that stuff Paul Campos was blogging about”.

The point about the MP expenses business was that it was so obviously done for personal gain, though. This is more like (I can do analogies here) MPs pulling strings to get a grant in their constituency rather than someone else’s. Yes, it’s for their own good in the sense that it’ll help them keep their jobs. But I don’t think you’d find many people who’d say it’s on the same moral level as the Duck House.

You want something in academia that would really reach the level of the Libor scandal (or for that matter the PPI-misselling scandal, the laundering-Mexican-drug-money scandal, the Iranian-sanctions-busting scandal, the subprime-mortgage scandal, the forex-rigging scandal, the packaged-account scandal, the rate-hedge-misselling scandal, the dodgy-audit scandal, the dodgy-credit-rating scandal or the tax-evasion scandal)? I’d say institutionalised rape, and the covering-up thereof by university authorities. This research-fiddling business may be arguably illegal but I’d like to see someone else argue it. That it goes on is no secret (unlike all the scandals listed above) and you’d think someone would have paid attention by now.

When my daughter enquired of the bursers office on the details of how to pay for summer session, they[1] signed her up for a student loan in excess of the amount w/o her knowledge (zeroing out the bill), and she had to jump through hoops to get the loan cancelled. For her, it was efficiently educational. After a few semesters she caught on to the basic scam underlying the purpose of the “Honors” “School”. Funny how there are interestingly large fees for that. The scammers are everywhere, we agree. I’m quite proud of her. FUCK YOU giant/”respected” university which shall not be named. 8 semesters + 1 summer session and zero debt. As a family we’re a week out of that maw, cautiously examining the next sets of reeking jaws.

[1] I remain puzzled about who “they” was. There’s some implied underlying connections in the mix that have a bit of a smell to them.

Can I repeat something? Every scandalous thing mentioned in the OP or in comments has been publicly discussed, often by academics themselves, for a long time, in major media as well as on blogs, in local media based in college towns, etc. Every time a RAE or REF happens in the UK, there articles and blog posts about how the system is being gamed, for example. All these scandals are the most public scandals imaginable, and that is good – this stuff needs to be addressed! But this means they are simply not comparable to, say, the uncovering of criminal behaviour in the financial sector, or a cover-up of a child abuse scandal, or widespread illegal hacking by the press – even if the wrong doing in question was comparable. In all those cases bad behavior that was previously hidden and actively covered up became public quite suddenly. The only comparison in the OP that holds any water is to the expenses scandal, where something that was already public information developed into outrage.

As a non academic, whose only been a customer of the system, I have to agree with Ajay @30,38. These just aren’t aggregious enough to get my dander up about. The only instances of covering up rape I remember was when I was an undergrad, and it was simply word of mouth about paying off a victim to prtect some football star. I bet that sort of thing is much less common today.

Now I would consider the whole structure of the USA lower tier for profit thing, to be scandalous to the Nth degree. Attracting desperate students with largely false promises, and using the politically corrupted student loan system to collect on what should be written off as bad debt. But, thats not whats being discussed here, and I don’t think anyone here would disagree about the bottom tier in the US.

All the scandals you mention were well known in the financial industry… But they weren’t considered “scandals” – they were considered to be minor regulatory breaches.

That is the entire point. They were well known in the industry but not in public. It was not common knowledge among the public that PPIs were generally worthless, or that people were lying about LIBOR submissions for their own personal gain, etc etc. It wasn’t considered a scandal in the industry because, over the last thirty years, as has been widely documented in the media, in the trade press, by various public inquiries and court cases, and by researchers, the culture of the banking industry diverged radically from the culture of the rest of the UK (and the US), to the point where it became abnormally focussed on the use of deceit and evasion to produce short-term gains for banks and the individuals working at them, at the expense of the customers and the industry at large.

I don’t think there has been such a sharp and dramatic divergence between the culture of academia and the culture of the, for want of a better phrase, general population. That’s why there won’t be a scandal of the same magnitude – there’s nothing that academia thinks is OK, that is widespread within academia, and that the rest of the public is completely unaware of. The dirty linen’s out there already and it’s not really that bad.

” At this late date, I don’t think there’s much danger of the financial services industry being insufficiently condemned. ”

I suspect the reason you are getting serious pushback on this post is because we disagree with you on this point. So far, even the very most egregious cases and most obvious cases (the LIBOR scandal and the robo-signing/false-notarization scandal) has seen very few of the obviously available fraud prosecutions. (The notary one is especially obvious to me: notaries are required to swear under oath that they personally saw the signature take place. When you hire a bunch of them and put them in a room with no access to outside people, what do you think they are doing?).

The LIBOR scandal looked like it was going to be a chance to really deal with the bank cultures on clear and damaging fraud, but it turned out not to.

So unless ‘condemned’ means “kind of said nasty things about but very little institutional punishment doled out”, I suspect we have a rather noticeable difference of opinion.

On the topic of the academic world, in the US at least, I agree that we have the makings of a major scandal, but I don’t think it is any of the ones you have identified. Government loans have essentially gone straight to raising the price of university–damaging both student loan holders and even the people who can afford the prices. This has all the elements needed for an ugly scandal: greed, betrayal of stated principles, real damage to the injured parties, incentive structures deeply divorced from reality, and actors who are insulated from the damage they cause.

Daniel @ 29

” It’s quite some chutzpah for people like the author of comment #4 to claim that student debt is a problem caused by the financial services industry, unrelated to the universities who set the fees!”

I think it should lead one to ask why the financial services industry is even involved in the transaction. Would this be happening without a system which essentially mines middle-class and poor students, converting them into debtors to the profit of financial services companies? If the loans were interest- and fee-free, or not guaranteed by the government, or dischargable by the debtor, would the financial services sector even be involved? If there wasn’t a free-lowing tap of debt available, would universities and colleges be free to raise their fees to the extent they have? The whole thing is engineered. You can guess by whom.

” At this late date, I don’t think there’s much danger of the financial services industry being insufficiently condemned. “

If you mean ‘condemned’ in a purely verbal sense (‘she wrote a strongly worded letter to the editor condemning his behaviour’) this might be true; if you mean it a legal sense (‘the court condemned the robbers to twenty years in prison’ or ‘the building was condemned, and will thankfully be knocked down and replaced with one which doesn’t endanger the lives of everybody in the neighbourhood’) this seems somewhat less plausible.

ajay at 40: I’d say institutionalised rape, and the covering-up thereof by university authorities.

That’s it. I’m shocked it took 40 comments to get to it, frankly. I don’t think every university is harboring a Sandusky, precisely, but the institutional response details of the entire disgusting brouhaha of Penn State* are much more similar to other universities I know than different.

I said at the time, and I still believe, that the only real measure of whether Penn State had cleaned up its act was whether other cases involving other offenders were uncovered and prosecuted. Otherwise it’s just a lot of people being loudly shocked while the screwed-up system quietly keeps on operating.

It beggars belief that there haven’t been any additional cases, given the size of the university alone, and yet there don’t seem to have been any public stories. I have been reduced to hoping that at least the public shaming of Penn State has temporarily empowered the academic insiders with the most integrity, and that they can now wield the case as a liability weapon when pressured to sweep some offense or other under the rug.

But it’s years now since the Clery Act, and universities are still lying about crimes that take place on campus. And I don’t imagine things are much different in the UK.

*For those of you who aren’t in Pennsylvania, it’s still going on, with outraged alumni trying to restore Joe Paterno’s reputation and various lawsuits or threats of lawsuits going on about the Freeh report and other competing narratives of the case.

43: The process by which it turned into a scandal that put people in jail, did for the News of the World and stopped NewsCorp being allowed to buy BSkyB … that’s a process that I don’t fully understand at all.

44: They’re discovered, and then at a later date, by a not very well understood seemingly self-organising process, they turn into scandals. That’s my point here – there is so much dry tinder piled up around academia that it’s bound to have a fire one day.

If the process by which provincial problems become public scandals is not well understood, then why would one believe that some outcome of that obscure process is inevitable? Additionally, maybe the tinder piled up around academia is not dry at all, maybe it’s soggy, not flammable no matter the nature of the scandal-making process. “If it’s not leading, it’s not bleeding”, sure, but there’s a difference between “not bleeding enough (yet)” and “not bleeding the right kind of blood (ever)”.

Like Omega, I’ve only been a customer of higher ed, but it seems intuitive to me that when/if scandal comes to the ivory tower it will be burning some financial- or athletics-related tinder, as dm at post 4 and Mary at post 19 have it.

I’d like to think the spirit of §144 of The Gay Science is relevant here: “The greatest progress of the masses up till now has been the religious war, for it proves that the mass has begun to treat concepts with respect.” Would that Joe Newspaper Reader cared enough about the ivory tower to give a fig about corruption in the academy qua academy! Unless they essentially have to do with money, sports, or sex (rape), I’d wager that, for the public, the problems of the university are too academic to become scandals. I suppose I’m not adding much value, just another voice to the choir of Z at post 6 and ajay at post 30.

What is the equivalent of the Enron scandal + Sarbanes-Oxley for university operations? That is, a previous large-scale scandal that was addressed with a specific law that was specifically broken less than 5 years later? (US-centric of course).

That’s my point here – there is so much dry tinder piled up around academia that it’s bound to have a fire one day.

The fire is ongoing, is it not? There’s always an excuse to reduce funding.

I can’t see there being some cataclysm in which AHA! FIRE ALL THOSE JERKS! happens (as it didn’t in notable spheres) because people still want to purchase the advantages that the aforementioned jerks are offering. What kind of fire do you envision for the academy? A conflagration of bad things being said?

@19 Mary

How about the perpetual scandal that is big time college athletics?

There is some remote possibility that the NCAA itself could go down due to scandal but if that were to happen the schools would simply form a new organization. The big athletic programs receive ample funding from their alumni and other local sources and the consumers have had a few decades now to become accustomed to conference realignments that maximize television revenue.

Collective bargaining laws allow the leagues, with the consent of unions, to exclude amateur players who don’t meet certain criteria like minimum age requirements. This helps to insure that the college programs remain viable as a free talent development system.

The demand for live sporting events is increasing faster than ticket prices. An programming that viewers aren’t likely to time shift like sporting events can be sold to advertisers at a premium. These are a not good times to be in broadcast television but sports is one area that is reliable.

anyone sensible will do anything they’re ashamed of in person or over the telephone. Make sure that it’s your name in the records attached to the lone voice of complaint saying “we shouldn’t do this, vice-Chancellor”.

Yes. I’m reminded of the old and sage advice:

“Don’t write if you can talk. Don’t talk if you can whisper. Don’t whisper if you can nod and wink.”

AB at #59 — good, same thing happens in US (research-focused — I emphasize this not because I believe others are different, just because I mam talking about what I know) universities, except that it is done is a way that is so opaque that understanding it is beyond most people. Unlike LIBOR….!

NCAA is, indeed, an ongoing scandal, recognized as such by many college leaders. But — it is extremely difficult for college presidents to act in concert, because of anti-trust law.

Thought experiment: How much would college football coaches be paid if college football player could be paid at market rates?

And, of course, a “fire” would be one in which the prestige and social status of the profession got very quickly tarnished, meaning that people who were totally innocent of the bad practices still got lumped into the same category as the bad offenders.

It’s hard to see this happening. There’s a faith in the value of education such that any number of idiotic practices have already been tolerated by those with that faith. Those without are already gutting the system when they can. It’s two churches at war (and both churches have children they want to give advantages to).

Universities are boring, the people who run them are boring, and the people who work for them are boring. Politically, financially, and (let’s face it) personally, if you’re on campus, you are boring and no one cares except for paranoid right-wing conservatives.

However. I agree we could be coming to a point at which the public acknowledges that universities pose a social problem, now that we’re all over the financial collapse, the church, the BBC, Iraq war, etc.

I think what the public is prepared to be scandalized about probably pertains to adjuncts. People seem to understand this issue now.

It might be a string of ugly, unfortunate adjunct deaths, of starvation or exposure in campus parking lots, say, in the span of a few months.

Or if some adjuncts turned out to be violent criminals hired by departments who haven’t done due diligence.

Or maybe if it were revealed that system-wide, there were long term plans to employ adjuncts and spend less money on teaching, especially at relatively elite institutions, even if it meant taking a hit in national rankings, and if secret memos detailing said plans were full of invective, maybe Universities would get the spotlight like those other institutions.

But what would even come from whatever sustained attention could be mustered, who knows. Probably not much.

dsquared @82:

Several people have made this point already, but I’ll say it again: the LIBOR scandal has to be understood in the context of the financial meltdown in 2008 (and maybe even earlier events like Enron, etc.). I’m not saying these associations are fair, but in terms of public perception, they were undeniably related. In other words, the banking sector was already really tarnished in the public’s eye when LIBOR broke. In the absence of that, it’s not clear to me that LIBOR becomes such a big scandal. Similarly, in the US and I think the UK at least, public trust in government has steadily over the last few decades—for some good and some not so good reasons. The MP expenses scandal makes sense against that background.

Universities are just not in that position right now: at least in the US, the public perception of universities is not already tarnished in a way that it would have to be for the kind of thing you’re talking about to really catch fire. Yes, the right wing hates them, but the right wing is a large-ish, vocal minority, and very much not the “general public”. This is reaching back a bit, but one can get a good handle on the distinction by recalling the public response to the Clinton impeachment saga.

One other, somewhat unrelated thing. The proper analogy to LIBOR or the MP expenses scandal, it seems to me, is an Ivy and co. scandal, or a for-profit universities scandal, but it’s not a university scandal. The latter class is way too broad (it would be like a scandal that involved the US Congress, every state legislature, and most mayoralties). And the distinction between Fitchburg State and Harvard is pretty damn clear in the public imagination. So—bar rape and sexual assault—I find it impossible to think of a scandal that would indiscriminately affect all subsectors within the university space, so to speak.

74 seems, well, a little too revealing; especially in light of earlier criticisms….

Daniel, you conjure up a scandal that will tarnish the reputations of “individual academics,” leading to mass resignations etc. I’m not saying this is fantasy, but
I’m not sure “sociology” alone can get you there.

The idea that academics, individual university professors/lecturers/teachers, are going to face individual consequences so clearly comparable (except for their greater severity) to those faced by bankers…Here’s an observation. The relationship of the individual university professsor/etc to the considerable ill-gotten gains universities have been getting for the past generation can be characterized as follows, from the point of view of said teacher: we haven’t gotten any. The relationship between bankers and the institutions of finance, I would propose, is, uh, not so straightforward. (At least, according to public perception. We could be getting a distorted picture. Can I blame the media?)

Unless this is all just a failure of my American perspective? But even so: those examples again: the BBC, the Church, MPs, journalists (who presumably overlap with the BBC). I dunno, I think this is all pretty fast and loose sociology. You need comparable institutions, or comparable groups of professionals, if you want scandals that are gonna shake down in such similar ways. Higher education, at least in North America, is hardly even comparable with itself.

I am happy to believe that the Academy is in peril. But I will continue to think nothing so telegenic as you imagine is likely to occur….

I can think of a couple other academic scandals which are very well known to the public, and I’m not sure how they affect this conversation.

1. Obviously, recently there’s been a lot of news in the US (and maybe elsewhere?) about universities doing a terrible job of dealing with sexual violence on campus. Very widely reported in mainstream (not just academia-focused) press. So far, not much sign of widespread reform (as opposed to changes within a few schools), heads rolling, etc. But the scandal is still pretty fresh, so maybe we should wait and see.

2. On the other hand, there’s the old scandal (entirely unique to the US, I think) of football and basketball players at some schools getting fraudulent grades. This has been going on, and well known to the public, roughly forever (James Thurber joked about it); every year, there’s a particularly egregious case or two and maybe a couple jobs lost; but absolutely no sign of an industry-wide shakeup. I don’t think there’s any trove of secrets that would shock the public – everyone knows it’s going on, everyone knows the scale is huge, they’ve known forever, but nobody cares.

Scandal has to be able to be explained in 5 words or less.

Here is a Philadelphia newspaper article which hits 5 possible scandals and cant reach that conclusion.

1) “My degrees lead to jobs. That attracts people,” Varsalona told me.
2) Wilmington’s faculty, Varsalona says, includes 150 non-tenured full-timers and 600 part-time adjuncts, most paid $1,500 to $3,000 a course.

“Adjuncts are our secret weapons,” he says. “They are people, working, who teach one or two courses a year. Or retired, maybe five courses a year.” Nationally, “everybody is moving toward adjuncts,” he added, saying that there are waiting lists to teach even the popular tech courses.

3) But Poliakoff also cites federal data that show Wilmington spent a relatively high $18 million on administration last year, versus $41 million on instruction, an inefficient ratio compared with other schools

4) Varsalona – who made $800,000 in salary and $700,000 in long-term compensation, comparable to the Ivy League

And my favorite quote:

“This university is different,” counters Wilmington spokeswoman Laurie Bick. “Most of the time, when people try to do statistics and comparatives, we don’t fit.” She said Varsalona’s compensation shows that “the board sees value in him.”

I say this with love.

Look. The OP is clearly a defense of bankers. Don’t be coy about it. This is a solid example of the writer scoring the critical points in the introduction to a piece that claims to be about something else. We readers are abjured from bringing these gems up, since it isn’t really the topic.

One great thing about the method is that readers frequently don’t go back to introductory statements that they find questionable if the statements don’t get used as premises in the body of the argument. They sneak in to the subconscious while we are looking for the proper argument to refute.

Here are the rhetorical points that I presume are the goal of the essay:

1) “Bankers have had their day under scrutiny.” – We’re done, move along.

2) “It’s not that these sectors are especially dirty and the rest are especially clean – it’s just that politics, finance, religion, journalism and broadcasting have, so far, had their day under the microscope.” – Because they appear in a list together, they are equivalent, as are any other institutions that might be added soon. No one is especially dirty!

3)“There are now a number of issues which might form the basis of a LIBOR/ expenses/ hacking/ noncegate type scandal.” – Hey, another list!

4) “… when these things blow up (like LIBOR) they get judged according to the standards of the uninformed general public, not the standards of people who know all the exonerating background and detail.” – Ah! What a beauty! This one didn’t quite slip by. Readers didn’t entirely fall for the tone (i.e. “I’m talking about YOUR great exonerating details”) and caught a whiff of the rhetorical device. Namely, bankers have exonerating details and, by the equivalence property, they are just as good as all the ones that you are going to bring up here. I am sure that we can all commiserate about those louts of the uninformed general public. Are we not brothers in victimhood?

The rest of the piece is interesting and has lots to chew over. A good honest discussion of a topic of concern to us all … if only we would stay on topic!

Thought experiment: How much would college football coaches be paid if college football players could be paid at market rates?

Pay for head football and basketball coaches would almost certainly increase. As of 2013, football and basketball coaches are already the highest paid public sector employees in 40 states.

If players are paid at market rates, the question of how shoe contracts and other endorsements would have to be addressed. The shoe companies currently sign licensing deals directly with the universities and supply all of the apparel with one of the stipulations being that the players and coaches can wear nothing else to practice or during games. Some of that money flows through the university to the coaches, a few of whom clear more than $1 million annually just from that source.

Once the shoe companies are allowed to market jerseys with the player’s name on the back they willabsolutely do so. That would mean getting the coaches to agree to only sign players who are willing to sign onto the team’s apparel deal. Signing with Ohio State becomes the same thing as signing with Nike. Ohio St. currently receives a 12.5% cut of net sales on its exclusive products, basically all “authentic competition apparel” and 11% on anything else with an OSU logo on it. Removing the restrictions on marketing individual players and featuring them in merchandise would likely be a nice revenue bump for the apparel companies.

Coming back to the co-authorship issue, the motivations suggested by DD go in both directions, and the initiative can come from either side.

1.Senior academics may get free publications by demanding co-authorship of papers written by their subordinates. In some areas of Big Science I get the impression this is common and used to be considered acceptable. But in the social sciences, it’s always been regarded as bad form, and is now explicitly prohibited in most places (which doesn’t mean it never happens of course).

2. Alternatively, and maybe more commonly, the senior academic’s name is used to get the paper a better chance at publication somewhere with high status, to help the job prospects of the junior author. I’ve been approached with direct requests to add my name to papers that were already pretty much finished (I declined, of course).

A bit of pushback for @harry b, @AB re the use of teaching funding for research.

If, as Harry sort-of notes, the university in question actually sells itself as providing research-led teaching, as Russell Group universities do, then it is fair enough that some of the teaching funding gets assigned to the reproduction of the capacity to provide research-led teaching. So, if in order to provide that kind of teaching I need time to read and write, I don’t think the students are being ripped off when their fees pay for that. Obviously, there would be some level of diversion that would be egregious, but the mere fact that some of the funding goes to reproduce that capacity seems ok.

Note that the idea that any research time not specifically funded by a research-badged income stream is a fraud on the students, is currently being used by senior managements as a stick to beat academics. This, it seems to me, violates the implicit contract that we entered when we chose our profession, viz, that in return for teaching etc we’d also get some time to read, think and write. Not that managements are disposed to recognize that this was the deal when they get all finger waggy.

Francis @97, the US land title system is unbelievably useless and non-functional to people from countries with universal, state provided, Torrens title registry systems. There is no ambiguity about land title in my big-ass country. Mortgages must also be registered, which is a big part of why we had no major problem with the kind of mortgage on-selling shenanigans that happened in the US. It makes a difference.

one doesn’t have to search far or hard to find examples of recent graduates being given economically meaningless short-term contracts with university libraries or the like, to inflate the employment statistics. And this can hardly be seen as a victimless crime. Based on these manipulated statistics, plenty of people make the decision to take on tens of thousands of dollars of non-dischargeable debt.

In the UK post-graduation employment gaming tends to happen slightly differently – the national DLHE survey of jobs after 6 months is typically run in-house by Universities, and it allows the University to eventually complete entries on students’ behalfs. This is a very obvious conflict of interest and I’m sure has led to inflated scores – it’s very hard to believe that e.g. 80% of any humanities cohort have a ‘professional/managerial job’ or are in further study, but programmes regularly get scores of those kinds. See:

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/is-employability-data-being-manipulated/2018930.article

A job at a library probably wouldn’t cut it over here, because for some reason the ONS definitions of jobs are used, meaning that you essentially need a postgrad qualification or to be on a graduate scheme (and even then it’s dubious) to have one of the all-important ‘professional/managerial jobs’. Jobs that literally require degrees, e.g. graduate teaching assistant who does actually teach schoolkids, are in theory classified as non-graduate.

But as many have said up there, there’s not enough of a story here. Not least because the gaming is only done by Universities with big enough budgets, thus Russell Group, and the media and politicians like the idea that their dominance, based more or less entirely on historical wealth, should be perpetuated, partly because Higher Education Is An Industry We Can Be Proud Of etc. People might generally dislike lazy academics etc, but they’re not Evil Bankers or Evil Politicians.

Just on rankings, too – people put an enormous amount of stock in the Guardian league tables, to the extent of building long-term strategy around them, but they’re so poorly compiled as to be almost meaningless – I think they’re compiled by one person. The methodology is silly too – if an institution fails to submit information for a category, typically they’re given the sector average, meaning that there’s actually an incentive to not submit ‘bad’ stats. At my University, a few years ago one programme shot up around 50 places because we’d not provided a ‘staff-student ratio’ statistic – if we had, we’d have still been near the bottom. Equally, at least one of the stats is preposterous – ‘value added’. It’s meant to demonstrate how much students improve from when they arrive to when they graduate, and thus to incentivise wider participation etc. This year Durham (which wants 524 UCAS points, thus at least A* A A) outperformed Northampton on that (which wants 283 points). The system is rigged, but nobody really cares.

Pretty sure most people dont understand libor at all. One of my felow students got a loan linked to libor (libor+some fixed risk percentage), and i dont think she even know she has a floating rate loan, much less what libor is…. And thats the kind of student that has just As (in a degree that does involves lots of economics). Point, theres about zero chance the libor scandal is non complicated enough for the public at large to understand. The scandals “work” without most people really understanding anything.

#45

After all, everyone knew about phone-hacking too. Piers Morgan wrote about it in his autobiography! The process by which it turned into a scandal that put people in jail, did for the News of the World and stopped NewsCorp being allowed to buy BSkyB … that’s a process that I don’t fully understand at all.

So academia should probably think about the risk of a number of discrete loose practices becoming joined-up in the public mind. Academia should also think whether they are being led into a number of loose practices by others (such as politicians) who will then use those loose practices against them at some future date. I have seen that happen in the non-profit sector, where government grants have been made available on a “flexible” basis but then procedures tightened up without notice; there was clearly an intention of entrapment.

re Andrew Fisher @109: it’s true that university lawyers will tell you (following the Zellick Report of 1994) that it’s settled law that criminal matters incl. sexual assaults are basically for the police, and universities can do nothing, unlike in the US. But that doesn’t mean there’s no potential scandal there & both these two developments seem to indicate somewhat more of a risk:

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/may/08/former-student-legal-challenge-oxfords-handling-of-rape-claims-elizabeth-ramey-university-policy

(an unsuccessful legal challenge to that policy, but unsuccessful because the wrong claimant & the courts didn’t get to the legal issue)

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/24/reporting-sexual-assault-at-universities-share-your-stories

(personal testimony would be the basis of any scandal)

The world’s going to hell in a hand basket, no? So go see Mad Max: Fury Road and then go collect your “T” pin at the end of Tomorrowland.

As for academia, when I see that a university president is pulling down $7M a year (Jackson at RPI) I’m thinking that $6M of that could be translated into a meaningful number of faculty lines or TAships or scholarships or library books, etc.

I’m also bothered by various kinds of intellectual misbehavior, including faked data, poor experimental design leading to results that can’t be replicated, and so forth.

And, yeah, permatemping and student loans.

I will say that some of the “kiting of employment rates” isn’t all that evil, in my experience. At least by law schools. It works like this:

– Law market is so tight that some big-name law schools can’t place all their grads.
– Most of the unplaced grads are perfectly competent lawyerlings.
– Many real law shops (like mine) could use such lawyerlings as free temp labor, although they’re neither willing to pay for them or commit to them.
– Voila–the kite!
– 6-12 months later the law shop may be impressed by the lawyerling, and offer a real job. Or the lawyerling may find a real job, aided by the encomia of the real law shop, which has far more market credibility than the student’s grades.

Yes, this pumps up the school’s employment stats. Yes, only rich schools can do this. But it makes a lot of sense, if you think that the school has some responsibility to the student.

From the OP.
“It’s a general trend, one of gradual social re-assessment of whether the fiddles and skeletons of the past are going to be tolerated in the future.”

Is there gradual social re-assessment? (Note: I don’t work in the satanic mills of Academe, I haunt the groves of Commerce. I do have some family who have been teachers and researchers in universities). In 2007 some of us woke up to having to deal with the issue of whether there were banks that we could deal with. There were pictures of queues outside Northern Rock. Those were short, sharp jolts of reality rather than anything gradual.

Also it is not hard to find press reports from that Financial Sector remuneration was higher than ever – with the implication that this was a success story,which benefited all of us. The financial crash was a jolt of reality and Libor should be understood in that context.

With the phone hacking, was there a re-assessment, or did the phone hackers go to far? I suspect most people were relatively disinterested in tabloids hacking celebrities. But the hacking of Royal phone and of Milly Dowler were just too far. The ascent of Coulson to communications director also put a political wrinkle into it – which meant that Cameron could be impelled toward an inquiry that he probably didn’t want to have.

With the sex abuse scandals such as Savile or the various Churches (or care homes), is it more about a gradual build up of evidence against figures that the public felt they trusted/should be able to trust rather than some process of re-assessment? This was a build up of evidence over many years that the Churches and Savile (and people close to Savile) managed to suppress and ignore. It took Savile’s death for the truth about him to be confirmed and known more widely. Surely this was more about the inability to people to suppress a story that was previously whispered, rather than a process of re-evaluation.
From the posts above it is clear that there are problems in universities. But I don’t that it is clear that you can draw a line through “LIBOR/ expenses/ hacking/ noncegate” and point at universities and say “you’re next”.

Belle — I sort of disagree with you about this. The student debt problem (which, I hate to say it, is less serious than people make it seem — if you graduate with an average or somewhat above average amount of debt, you are still much better off than if you hadn’t gone to school) is much more down to schools which i) advise students badly (if at all) about how to finance their education and ii) mis-market themselves, mis-advise students, and fail to get them through to graduation in a timely way (if at all). Taking on debt and NOT graduating is worse than not going to school at all; and that accounts for about half of all students. This is not a problem for highly selective colleges, which typically spend a great deal of money on administration (administration is a catch-all phrase for managers, student services, advising, etc), and therefore have well-developed support systems for getting people through, and tend to enroll relatively advantaged students most of whose parents went to college and therefore are further sources of advising for students. But most of the problematic debt occurs among (the vast majority of) students who attend institutions that are less well designed to get them to graduate. I don’t think finance bankers are central to the problem here. (disclaimer — and this is a response to CB’s comment above — I am only talking about the US, not the UK — I don’t understand the UK system well enough to comment on these kinds of things, and did not mean my comment about subsidizing research to apply to the UK).

CB @ 113 — Jesus — there was a WOMBLES case and, more bizarrely, an Uncle MAC case. Who the hell registered Uncle MAC? A 90-year old?

#93 no I don’t see this. The reason that the debt burden is so high is that the fees keep being increased (by the universities). The reason that people have life-destroying debts is in general because they didn’t get a valuable qualification, generally because the degree program was missold to them by the university. Surely it ought to be a clue that a major change to increase the state control of the lending side of the program didn’t change things hardly at all?

#97 but if the US land title system is not broken, why is there such a thing as “title insurance”?

By the way, although it’s mentioned in quite gruesome detail in #93 as a specific iniquity of student loans, it’s in fact true of any form of debt, including utility bills, that it’s taken into account when calculating the value of an estate in bereavement. Standard disclaimers on financial advice apply but this is normal everywhere.

Andrew Fisher @119 – I agree! But i think, if you were looking for something that might turn into a scandal, it might be there, particularly in the case where attitudes and law are not in sync.

Many people don’t realize that tuition, at least at private schools, is very redistributive. Since most private schools don’t cover their operating costs with tuition revenue anyway, the ‘sticker price’ has almost nothing to do with costs, but with market position, and with the wealth of the students and their families. Setting aside the rise of ‘merit aid’, which has made tuition more regressive, it really is a sort of ‘from each according to his ability’ arrangement. I sometimes worry that people would freak out if they realized how tuition works, under the hood.

Seems like the main difference between scandalizing banks and scandalizing universities is that on balance – the sins of one bank are happily viewed as replicating to all of the other banks whereas the sins of one university are more commonly presumed to be sins of that school alone.

Within these posts a good dozen or so University “scandals” have been noted ranging from Penn State and North Carolina to LSE (U Chicago could be another). Corinthian, a for profit even bankrupted after a Federal investigation, yet none of these has metastastized into a wider indictment of the University system. I think DD is correct that there is plenty of good kindling, but it might really require a clever set of circumstances to get a good firestorm since there are so many organizations involved that are already highly skilled at closing ranks and hiding behind the proverbial ivy walls.

Separate on Student Loans: There’s plenty of blame to go around the link below is my favorite ever representation of the “problem” in 9 easy data laden charts. Im sure some of the data might be crap, but the story is so obvious that not much precision is really required in the telling:

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/06/student-loan-debt-charts

@101: the Colin McGinn sexual harassment revelations didn’t have wider repercussions on academics as a whole, did they?

I think that if the response to the scandal from academics was to shrug and say – “Everybody knows that professors sexually harass their students, where’s the scandal?” – followed by telling general public to just shut up already, the case would indeed have had wider repercussions for academics as a whole.

Daniel: “And the terrible thing is that when something that they did blows up, it affects people who weren’t responsible for it and didn’t benefit from it.”

I can understand your anger over such injustice.

@133

Points 1-4 are the core of the problem, but I really do think you’re missing what drives this description of the problem and the solution. There is a reason that it isn’t basically done with grants – no private company can profit from grants. There is a reason that it is done with private finance, rather than a state agency and public funds – no private company can profit from such a solution. The original reason for making the loans non-dischargable goes back many decade to a time before private finance got involved, and the loans were actually being made by the schools themselves and backed by government funds. When private finance got involved, of course they used campaign funding and other lobbying efforts to extend those protections to themselves.

Of course, if it was a grant system, or a publicly-funds low-cost loan system, not of these points would really apply.

To a great extent it mirrors the health care debacle in this country, where no sensible public solution is possible because any sensible public solutions destroys the profit opportunity for private companies. Health care in the U.S. must be structured in a way that funnels profits to insurance companies, and education finance must be structured in a way that funnels profits to finance companies. Because markets and freedom.

Ebenezer Scrooge 05.27.15 at 11:05 am
“I will say that some of the “kiting of employment rates” isn’t all that evil, in my experience. At least by law schools. It works like this:”

Read Paul Campos’ work and get back to us.

TL;dr: For most law schools, only a small minority of graduates will obtain jobs which offer a chance of paying off their loans. In addition, a JD is a handicap in trying to get a non-lawyer job. Law schools quite deliberately posted fraudulent statistics, to hide this. People spent well over $100K believing that it was a reasonable investment.

harry b 05.27.15 at 11:50 am
“Belle — I sort of disagree with you about this. The student debt problem (which, I hate to say it, is less serious than people make it seem — if you graduate with an average or somewhat above average amount of debt, you are still much better off than if you hadn’t gone to school)”

Is that true? And more importantly, are there large, identifiable sectors for which that’s clearly not true? Referring back to Paul Campos’ work, for example, it’s not true for at least 75% of US law schools. It’s also generally not been true for large swathes of the for-profit trade schools in the USA.

I would also push back quite strongly on the notion that someone who has gotten a quarter of a million dollars in debt for a degree that turns out to be useless in getting a job is odds-on having a “better” outcome. Because that’s the real problem. It might have been true fifteen or even ten years ago that we assessed that person’s lifetime earnings as making up for the debt, but no one can make that claim with a straight face today. The villians here are for the most part university administrators, I think, and it was a straight money grab–setting up law-accreditation at your fourth-tier place, paying the administrators tons of money, and then leaving the students (and the lenders, technically) holding the bag. If university professors object to this characterization, I think it’s fair to note that administrators and some few super-star legal faculty members doing it as a side-gig have gotten paid tons of money, while the average professor??? But I confess ignorance on this point; are the law-professors at the “we take anyone now–no seriously” university of “some of our graduates get jobs as paralegals after an unpaid internship” getting paid well? I don’t know anyone who has such a job, and I must say I’d look askance at it…but I wouldn’t be very surprised if they were getting hosed too when payday comes around. Should the university professors teaching students with scores of thousands of dollars in debt subjects like Classics feel personally that they are doing that person a disservice? At this point we start to talk about the life of the mind and such, but maybe it’s just not a fair or kind thing to do at all, I don’t know.

This is much more serious, but is not about academia.

It totes is.

Hey, my very next sentence started with “It is about US academia.” I don’t think it is accurate nor fair at all to conflate US academia with academia at large. Your next sentence, in which young Americans feature prominently, suggests we are in furious agreement.

dsquared 05.27.15 at 12:41 pm
“#97 but if the US land title system is not broken, why is there such a thing as “title insurance”?”

First, that doesn’t prove that the system was broken, and second, it doesn’t prove that mass-produced systematic fraud was justified.

I’m quite amazed at your belief here. ‘Robosigning’ in the end involves fraudulent transactions, where the seller’s, buyer’s and/or notary’s signatures were forged.

That strikes at the heart of business.

Harry: humanities students paying the same tuition as engineering students, who cost much more to teach;

This is true, and a trivial point, but on the other hand: (1) engineering students almost never have small classes taught by full-time faculty members–though this is increasingly true also of humanities students; (2) engineering students need labs and so on, but not the kind of labs their professors need for research, and although engineering students need computers, humanities students increasingly use nearly as much in terms of resources; (3) engineering students don’t need libraries nearly so extensive as humanities students do–if a comparison of journal costs, for example were done, I wonder how that comparison would come out (in fact, and I don’t begrudge them their existence because I free-ride on the amounts of money involved, undergraduate tuitions are arguably subsidizing poets and short-story writers who publish in small journals, though the prices for these are small change compared to the academic ones).

And with all the hype about STEM, it’s worth pointing out that even at the top universities, many or even most engineering graduates won’t get jobs in their field. Some will get jobs on the fringes, like corporate recruiter or PR flack, some will go to law school or medical school, and many will be as underemployed as any English major might be. (I have a cousin who was compelled by her parents to major in a computer field, had no aptitude for it at all, and after a longish search is now working as a bank teller. Well, you might say, the degree proved she could do basic arithmetic.)

I mean take the Catholic Church example. There has been significant sexual abuse in state run care homes (and more than likely within a lot of elite insititutions and groups) There was also widespread societal and govt complicity in the abuse by the Catholic Church. But most of the scandal attached itself to the Church specifically , because its power was waning and this was the story people wanted to tell at that time.
This is where the financial sector stands now. Any scandal will blow back on them as they basically represent the root of all thats wrong with this moment in history.

I’m going to be cranky and point out that STEM is not a field or an area of study, it’s a magic word that administrators like to chant back and forth to each other.

The career and earning prospects of someone majoring in ecology are very different from those of someone majoring in electrical engineering or being a pre-med. A term that conflates these is next to meaningless.

‘Robosigning’ in the end involves fraudulent transactions, where the seller’s, buyer’s and/or notary’s signatures were forged.

Fraudulent documents, maybe–but not in any case I have seen in the newspapers fraudulent transactions. Most of the “robosigning” was creating paper copies of electronic records-records of real transactions.

Witt 65: I don’t wish to defend the practices of Penn State in this matter but I hope you realize that conducting a criminal investigation is up to the criminal justice system, not the university. The article states that a police investigation is going on and that its status was “not available”.

I think what gives all these scandals traction is the sight of a small minority of people either doing ridiculously well or gaining ridiculous amounts of power, or both. We don’t really like that – we may like the spectacle, but the inequality always rankles. So there was already a smouldering bank of resentment towards Bankers, Politicians, Celebs and the Press before we knew that any of them had done anything wrong.

Who’s the hate figure here – professors? Not sure that works. University administrators and VCs might qualify, except that nobody outside the sector knows they exist. See also this comment. If it takes you ten or twenty years of desk work to get to a position of power, and at the end of that time you’re still not breaking six figures, nobody’s going to care enough to hate you, no matter what colour your braces are.

Daniel@145: excessively Chomskyan view of how American society works

My understanding of the Chomskyan view is that it’s fairly broad and tendential: private control of capital translates into control over investment and employment levels, which translates into generally decisive leverage over policy, though it can be constrained by public mobilization. Of course this sounds obvious and unoriginal, but it has remarkably little (close to zero) purchase in mainstream American political discourse, so Chomsky has spent his career propounding (as he would be the first to acknowledge) truisms, thereby incurring the contempt and indignation of nearly all respectable American pundits and academics.

handing it over as a present to people who, ex hypothesi, are going to be richer than the average

“Present”? Is Head Start a “present” to poor children? Doesn’t it have more to do with wanting to foster a productive economy and harmonious society?

it doesn’t make sense to analyse progressivity at any level less aggregated than the whole tax and benefit system

Assuming this is true (though in the US, just being part of the “benefit system” is often a stigmatizing and soul-destroying experience), does it significantly change the inequality profile of the US?

I don’t think such a totally generic fact about public choice economics can be called a scandal though.

If “scandal” means something new, unsuspected, “interesting,” then I suppose not. But if corporate lobbying isn’t scandalous any more, it’s something worse.

A final annoying thought about people’s exasperating tendency to cry FINANCE BANKERS: wouldn’t the repeal of the carried interest deduction, perhaps along with some actual regulation of offshore banking, be enough to finance universal free higher education?

FWIW, I despise the university apparatchik class even more than I despise bankers. Probably because while I loathe what bankers have done to the economy that I work in, I actually part of the time work directly with universities… As such, I can more often be found condemning Uni Vice Chancellors even more often than lashing out on D2 posts about banking. Some of these scandals send me into a frothing rage – particularly the research abuses – I have 2 friends whose lives were seriously set back when a senior figure stole their research. Yet I can’t see these things “going large.”

I think it’s interesting and instructive in the UK context to compare universities with the NHS. Both are insulated at some level by the level of government control.
Really, beyond the generic dislike of “NHS managers” the gaming of targets etc. (analogous to many of the gaming issues mentioned in the OP) mostly rebounds on the politicians. Sociologically (and this blowup from fringe to mainstream is my area) you’d really expect the REF and the jobs figures to be in the same category.

Part of the problem is “imagined impact” – every “ordinary family” felt for Milly Dowler’s parents. Every “ordinary person” grew up with Jimmy Savile on the TV. (Not to mention the grim resonance of “Jim fixed it for you…”) Every ordinary person has a lifetime of mistreatment by the banks (c.f. the overdraft letters) – a wellspring of bile amplified by the financial crisis, etc.

Even an Oxbridge scandal seems kind of remote – although you can imagine a Savile-esque setup certainly being able to break into the headlines. Really hard to see a non-Oxbridge scandal getting significant airtime. Really hard in the UK to see a widespread financial scandal landing more on the universities than the politicians. (Although the politicians may quite likely make an example of a particular institution – much as happened with London Met over visas.)

While reading this thread, I realized that there just has been a major, earthquake-like scandal in US education, albeit not in higher ed but in the public schools: a bunch of school teachers in Atlanta were convicted and sentenced to actual, multi-year jail time, under an organized crime statute, for tampering with standardized tests – a practice that zealous prosecutors and judges have claimed harmed the students greatly although no logical reasoning for this was ever offered. I’m actually surprised that this hasn’t been brought up earlier (and it took me this long to even remember it – it has been very recently in the headlines). Yes it is a local issue but it is an apt comment on the question as to whether the financial sector has been “condemned enough”. AFAIK, during the whole of the financial crisis, fewer bankers have been criminally prosecuted for wrecking the world economy than have been teachers in Atlanta for trying to game the thoroughly dysfunctional and ineffective standardized test system. If you want a direct comparison, robosigning would be it – robosigning is perjury, a felony offense, and prosecutors needed only arrest the signers and have them rat out the senior executive es who gave the orders. I think the case provides some useful perspective on how scandals are made.

The student loan debacle is the ultimate neo-liberal solution to higher education funding. It puts all the risk on the student and makes it an individual-choice/individual-suffers scenario. At the same time, because it is a loan, funneled through students, it does not constitute “government funding” which would come with certain requirements and accountability.

If universities were funded by big federal grants in the US, those grants would have strings – the government isn’t going to fund X many billions directly to institutions and then have those institutions turn around and hike tuition without some oversight. But by funneling it all through loans it becomes the students responsibility, and like healthcare, the information asymmetries are large enough to eliminate any sort of price accountability.

It also means that any attempt to restrict loan loads and the like then ends up being an attack on the individual student, rather than on the institution. Instead of saying – “you are charging students too much for a worthless degree,” the conversation becomes a value judgment on the students chance of success et al., with all the flaws that kind of conversation entails.

(Referring back to 173)

“The career and earning prospects of someone majoring in ecology are very different from those of someone majoring in electrical engineering or being a pre-med. A term that conflates these is next to meaningless.”

I think you’re over complicating the situation. I think of STEM as *not* liberal arts. Within that set, of course there are going to be a wide variety of income patterns for successful graduates. So I made an effort not to overstate the fraction. Yet the point still stands, because the more difficult and usually remunerative majors (such as my undergrad major, ChE), have more transfers and dropouts. What looks like a good ROI for a degree leading to a high paid job probably doesn’t hold for something that ends up shifted quite a bit to the left of the compensation distribution.

An 18 yo undergraduate calculating, or even holding a naive understanding of the ROI, is a preposterous assumption on my part, of course. I didn’t learn how to do it until my senior year at Ga Tech.

And this is part of my huge gripe. Society is (seems to be?) expecting undergraduates to make large scale investments based on their personal judgements about their future earnings potentials when they have essentially no tools available to perform that assessment. It’s a situation ripe for exploitation by scammers, boy howdy are they scamming.

Personally, I’d be surprised by any really major media scandals coming out of the universities, particularly those in the UK – of the examples listed, the individuals and/or institutions are very much in the public eye (politicians, celebs, journalists, the BBC) and/or have done something especially awful (child abuse, blowing up the world economy). I think universities as a sector fail on both counts, and individual universities fail on the first count, but abuse scandals (eg Penn State) may pass on the second. So the campus rape epidemic in the US and the colleges’ bizarre way of covering it up in-house is the only scandal I can see really gaining traction, and that may have fatally lost momentum thanks to Rolling Stone, as well as the he-said she-said nature of rape accusations and the whole patriarchy thing (I think it’s obvious that child abuse gets a much stronger response – and sells more papers – than rape).

That said, if I’m wrong, I agree that it’s an interesting sociological question as to how these things suddenly explode, albeit perhaps not one with an answer – you never know which fruit seller will cause an Arab Spring, which Nick Davies article will finally register, which butterfly flapping its wings, etc.

Oh and to comment on the meta-thread, I think it’s 1) quite an interesting question, without needing to address the implicit defence of bankers which may or may not exist and 2) can’t be dismissed as ineffective trolling – if that’s what was intended – since it’s already on course to reach a couple of hundred comments, many of which involve words in all-caps.

TJ 180: the data on grade inflation is already out there (http://www.gradeinflation.com/). I would love to see the e-mail directives but they may not exist. It would be rather amateurish for chairs and deans to leave that kind of paper trail. It seems clear that the incentives of most players are aligned. What isn’t clear to me is what has changed over the last few generations to bring about the marked upward shift in the grade distribution. Perspectives?

@185
Only my view, and I can’t begin to prove it with data, but when kids are paying +$40K per year for their eductation – they “expect” to get an A for their work if its even moderately literate and handed in on time. Likewise the modern millenial has been trained to ask for “extra credit” to raise grades that fall a little short and is far less afraid to enlist parents, mentors or others to lobby on their behalf if they think a grade isn’t where “it should be.” To be fair with the blame, I also think there are a lot of educators, who specifically test in ways that lends to work having objective answers (i.e. multiple choice) rather than subjective simply so they don’t have to make judgement calls that will then be second guessed.

Perhaps a partial OT, so I’ll not comment further on this unless others give it traction…again, educators know all of this, none of its completely new (as you note) what will change is whether its perceived as a “unfair” or “wrong.”

A mentor once told me “Education is the only commodity that anyone ever asks for less than they pay for.” If that axiom ever changes – that’s where the firestorm begins.

The MP expenses scandal was a direct consequence of various governments avoiding bad tabloid headlines about MPs pay and attempting to get good headlines by having either a pay freeze or an increase lower than the pay commission recommended. In order to actually pay enough for people without independent means to be MPs they were quietly informed that expenses claims wouldn’t be too closely scrutinised. Most MPs have to maintain two homes, one in central London and another in their constituency. While being paid about the same as the deputy head of a school.

@137: “Now, if it came to light that there was an Ivy League Sandusky-style rape cult targeting Ivy League co-eds, that *might* do it. It would still depend on the balance between protecting criminal Ivy League sons vs. keeping Ivy League daughters from being raped…..”

Barry, since I teach at the university, I had a moment when I thought you were satirically alluding to the fraternity system. However, I’m not sure. Here’s an example. I am purposefully linking to a story on the topic written by the conservative defenders of the notion that banning a fraternity from chanting, in public, “No means yes; yes means anal,” is a violation of their free speech rights.

https://www.thefire.org/cases/yale-university-fraternity-suspended-five-years-for-intimidating-satirical-chant/

As I say, if that’s not a scandal…

Now that I think about it, the fact that Harvey Mansfield has named professorship at Harvard and a named fellowship at Stanford at the same time, is itself pretty scandalous.

@31 “It’s quite some chutzpah for people like the author of comment #4 to claim that student debt is a problem caused by the financial services industry, unrelated to the universities who set the fees!”

I guess #4 would be me. Of course, I made no such claim. Pointing out that the financial services industry is all over it like flies on a bloated carcass just speaks to the character of the industry.

“a) in general ethical terms, there has to be an element of caveat emptor. Someone doing a postgraduate degree in classics has to be aware of the financial odds; the period during which people were claiming that there was a demographic argument that professorial hiring prospects would turn up is well in the past.”

Please. Caveat emptor? The biggest scandal is the continued existence of PhD granting departments where the students have little chance of finding a tenure track job. Maybe try telling prospective students in no uncertain terms that the chances of getting a job in their field is terrible and that they may be lucky to get an adjunct job at $2K a course. The odds of getting a tenure track job in the humanities is much worse than getting a legal job coming out of a crappy law school. While the law student is out 3 years and 200K, the humanities grad is out 8 years.

Of course, then you’d have no one to grade the papers and teach the sections. And faculty salaries would fall from research institution levels to teaching school levels. But hey, cavat emptor. This is an old issue and will never be a “scandal.” And the folks doing it seem to have no trouble looking at themselves in the mirror each morning or keeping a straight face to the 8th year student finishing up their PhD.

Insider trading in securities is well known to be routine. I haven’t looked at the recent cases, but I’m pretty shocked at the authorities’ inability to get convictions – and less shocked at the public’s indifference.

Y’all can breathe easy for another year anyway. It’s clearly football’s turn.

kidney 199: You have my full sympathy. Did you try doing anything about it? I wish these stories would come out and be public. Whether that will be considered a scandal… well we’ll see.

@ 205

Am I missing something? Are these sources wrong?

Yes, you are. For example, are the students at Harvard in the 21st century “the same as” in the relevant senses as those that were there in the 20th? (Mansfield would say they’re obviously worse, because more are black and more are women. He is not untypical of many grade inflation people.) Take a look at the percentage of applicants Harvard took in 2014 compared to the percentage in 1970. (Or Princeton or Michigan or Berkeley or any of the prestigious liberal arts schools.)
What you’re really have to do is take a look at the work the students do and compare it with the work they did in the past, which in my experience no–no–critic of grade “inflation” has ever done, or ever proposed to do.
Let me put it out there this way: in 1970, if you applied for admission to the Ivy League, you were competing against the pampered scions of the comfortable, complacent elite. In 2010, you were competing against a much larger pool of much cannier applicants in a much more competitive atmosphere. In some ways, I have no doubt that 2010 students code as better–they have been relentlessly trained to do so.

One of the things that’s hilarious about this is that whenever my grades are questioned, it’s usually by someone who not only doesn’t know the work my students did, it’s by people who haven’t taught the course, or who never taught at all. One example: I supervise TA’s. One of my TAs gave 12 As in a class of 20 students. And administrator who had never taught the course (first year comp) looked at the list and said, “12 As is too many. Tell your TA to lower some of those grades.” I looked at the list and noted the following:
1. It was an Honors section.
2. 17 of the 20 students were nursing students admitted at matriculation into the nursing school. Both the ACT and high school gpa requirements for a nursing pre-admit are higher than admission to the Honors program.
3. In general, compared to the general student population, nursing students work their asses off.
4. Several of the students had won highly competitive one year scholarships. At least one was on a four year full ride academic scholarship.
My response to the administrator was a polite form of “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” I got to say it to a dean later. It took an hour, but I convinced her. Neither of them has read a single student paper from that class yet, now or in the past.

The sources aren’t wrong, unless you think that focusing on a laughably tiny sector of the data is a form of wrongness. In which case, yes they’re incredibly wrong. (Americans must be healthier! On average they weigh more!)

The point is this: in my experience the people who are exercised about grade inflation are looking at the numbers. Those who take a more nuanced view are looking at the students. I know who I think are likely to have a better grip on what’s actually happening.

“What you’re really have to do is take a look at the work the students do and compare it with the work they did in the past, which in my experience no–no–critic of grade “inflation” has ever done, or ever proposed to do.”

It would be interesting but I don’t know how it could be done. All I can say is that I have seen how grading happens in many cases and I am appalled. What I observe is that many students are deprived of a realistic assessment of their academic work. Of course this is just anecdotal and I do not have a comparison to how it was decades ago. It would be great to have that comparison but I don’t know how, apart from anecdotes, it could be gotten. The grades themselves are of course only a proxy, they don’t tell us how the grading was done, but they are the only data we have. The phenomenon is difficult to study objectively but based on my experience I do think it’s real.

I wish these stories would come out and be public.

See a couple of recent articles by Marina Warner, here and . The second includes responses to the first, on which Warner comments:

“A different kind of silence holds in its grip the many people who wrote to me in response to my piece in the LRB. With only two exceptions, every single one of the correspondents, terrified that their complaints would come to light and that they would be punished (the term used is ‘disciplined’), made me swear not to reveal their name.”

Interesting discussion here about grade inflation and whether or not it’s real. Maybe I was wrong to assume grade inflation as a given.

I have noticed from browsing through old digitized library materials that there has definitely been thesis deflation in the sciences (probably other fields too). Theses are expected to be much more expansive and significant now than a century ago.

Here is a chemistry MS thesis from 1913. It is about 8 pages double spaced, only about half of that being original experimental results and discussion.

Here is a physics PhD thesis from 1916. There are 6 pages of real material. Even taking into account that we have much better tools now compared to then, I would say this represents roughly the easy side of effort expected of an undergraduate summer research project.

People are using “inflation” here to mean different things.

I took it to mean that the more people are getting high grades and that the value of a given grade (in the job/grad school) market is declining over time. This does not necessarily imply the objective grading standards are falling, and can be consistent with standards rising.

The only actual problem is if you run out of grades to differentiate at the top. In which case, you can just do what they recently did with A Levels in the UK, and introduce an extra grade. “Scandal” over.

@219
Maybe they wouldn’t be such “willing grad students” if you told them that it would take 7 or 8 years to finish and less than 50% of new PhDs in your field find tenure track jobs. And the ones likely to get those few jobs typically went to top tier universities unlike the one they’re applying to. And if they’re interested in research rather than teaching your school has few placements and even fewer in research institutions. Or is it better to leave someone broke and with few job skills at age 30 or 31?

T: no, share all placement information with prospective students, for sure. (Some depts do this.)

I want to echo one point that PatrickinIowa made. In my brief-ish teaching career, the highest overall grades I’ve awarded were in the (few) upper-level, major-oriented classes I’ve taught. Why? It should be obvious: the students tended to be more interested, more involved and better prepared; they came to talk to me much more often and worked harder to improve their grades; in one place I taught, there was with several students very marked improvement between the beginning of the semester and the end of it. This kind of thing will get you a good grade, entirely fairly. It is, if anything, extraordinarily more unfair to think, I must have 30% Cs because otherwise, holy shit, grade inflation!!

“Grades don’t give students a realistic assessment of their academic work. They can’t. They’re too crude. Most of the time, they’re fairly arbitrary letters plucked out of the air. But we use grades because giving people a realistic assessment of their work requires time, and detail, and nuance, and effort, and directness, and honesty.a realistic assessment of their work requires time, and detail, and nuance, and effort, and directness, and honesty. And the Mansfields of this world are too fucking lazy to do that, the legislatures are too fucking cheap, and the students–frankly–don’t really want to hear it.”

Be sure to let your students, chair, and dean know that’s what you’re up to. I’m sure they’ll all understand that the grades you give are “fairly arbitrary letters plucked out of the air.”

I guess high school grades are the same. Of course, that’s how the kid got into college in the first place and is the best indicator of their success in college. But, hey, just plucked from the air.

So next time I’m sitting in front of 200 job applications from new college graduates I’ll be sure to ignore their grade point average. I won’t keep in mind that every Harvard application has a 3.8 grade point average and they graduated with honors. I’ll screw all the kids from state schools with a 3.5 that actually means something. Because, you know, I’ll have time to interview each one to get “a realistic assessment of their work that requires time and detail and nuance and effort.” I’ll give each a bespoke assessment, curated and artisinal. I’m sure that’s what their college admission officers did as well to the 25,000 applications they examined.

And I didn’t write “by logic,” I wrote “by your logic.” I suggest using your well earned AB major (congratulations!) to figure out the difference.

@ 223 Kudos! You succeeded in spitting the dummy, and in reducing a diverse collection of students, parents, educators, and administrators on at least four continents I can name, and their concerns, into grotesque caricatures.

Anyone familiar with K-12 education can confirm that grade inflation are social progression are endemic in many school systems. Funding and ‘teaching the test’ are key related issues. Some of the latest figures, I believe, put high school history proficiency in US schools at 37%, 18%, and 6%. Guess which ethnic groups are involved. These figures do not arise out of a vacuum. A percentage of these students end up in universities where the travesties documented here, and others, are repeated.

Over the years, we have invested a great deal of our money on education. We’re not paying to have any educator blow smoke up our keisters, or to cough up same lame-ass relativist crap about grades not being a realistic indicator of ability.

Our jobs, in part, demand we devise reliable metrics to measure student progress and proficiency, and to test the efficacy of our pedagogies. If this strikes you as strange or unreasonable, I suggest you spend a bit more time around teachers.

Further to Patrick in Iowa — even if students in the top end of the distribution were not better prepared now than 45 years ago, and had not had far more invested in them, and were not far more oriented to success — the talent pool is simply twice as large (because women compete for places on an equal basis, and have been as well trained for academic success as the men they compete with). So, basically, the bottom 50% of 1970 Harvard students would not be enrolled. You would therefore expect that grades would have dramatically improved if there were no inflation at all. Which they have.

Personally I suspect grade inflation is real. But there is no evidence for it because there are no databases of old papers and exams with grades attached to them which we can look at to decide whether standards have dropped. I have started archiving papers by my students recently, in order to be able (later) to figure out whether I am using the same standards over time.

Credit goes to Matt at 218 for his delving. To be fair, the idea that there has been grade inflation since 1918 is ludicrous and no sensible person asserts it! College then was finishing school for posh kids, and no academic rigor was demanded (though it was slowly creeping in, due to the efforts of pesky administrators).

Past discussions prompter by me and JQ here, including why we should chill out about grade inflation even if it is real:
https://crookedtimber.org/2005/07/26/is-grade-inflation-real/
https://crookedtimber.org/2008/12/05/grading-medical-students-and-more-on-grade-inflation/
https://crookedtimber.org/2008/08/18/grade-inflation/
https://crookedtimber.org/2008/06/29/marks/

@237 With respect, better teacher training, smaller classes, career-long professional development programs, and peer skills-sharing produce many of the desired results. Yes, we need to be able to assess how much learning is taking place, but many good K12 teachers complain that completing paper work to address your concern means less time serving students.
@TM Thanks for the kind words. The problem arose when I administered several standard unsanctioned proficiency tests to an upper-level class and provided the actual test scores to the students. More than 70% failed. My responsibility was to process the lambs, ensure they and their parents were properly fleeced, and then dispatch the unlucky creatures into the job market to be slaughtered. So, you see, the problem was entirely of my own making. Really.

Sorry about the typos/errors. I’ll work harder to arrest this recurring problem.

228: This kind of thing will get you a good grade, entirely fairly.

Two friends of mine at university graduated at the same time, one in economics and one in chemistry. The chemistry graduate had got a first, and the economics graduate a 2:1. I witnessed the following scene.

Economics: [petulantly] Well, they give out more firsts in chemistry.
Chemistry: [exploding] Remember first year? I was going to labs and lectures pretty much 9 – 5. You went to five hours of lectures in the whole year.

I think both of them were telling the truth. There probably were more fairly awarded firsts in chemistry, as the workload made it harder to finish the course, so 1) less-motivated students dropped out, instead of coasting through to a lower grade in the end, which messes with the percentages and 2) having done all that work, been shunned at the cool parties, etc, the amount of extra work required to lift grades to a first was negligible for chemistry undergrads with the ability.

If you’re wondering how the economics graduate got through first year with five hours of lectures, it’s because my uni gave first years exemptions from summer exams if they passed their winter exams with a reasonable grade.

(I promise this is true, including the subjects, and happened at a Russell Group university in the UK.)

I just wanted to thank PatrickinIowa for post 212, which was great.

This seems relevant: http://io9.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-chocolate-helps-weight-1707251800

Documentary maker does p-value hacking, shops article to pay-for-publication journal, then uses that to demonstrate credibility to the press. It helps that the press have a limitless appetite for fad diet kill-or-cure “news”, but fundamentally the “science” industry isn’t stopping him either.

Oh, and I don’t think robosigning is a red herring. In other fields where traceability of inputs is important, you don’t get to just make up the supporting documentation even if it’s retroactively correct. The wrongful foreclosures should have resulted in prosecutions for fraud for those instances.

On the subject of uneven law enforcement, imagine if HSBC during their drug money laundering period were treated like a person carrying a large amount of cash and subject to civil forfeiture: confiscate first, resolve later.

It is deeply comforting, when you are the target of universal disapproval, to be able to tell yourself “this is something that happened to me, something that was imposed on me by outside forces” rather than “this is something I did”. If you can convince yourself that what you were doing wasn’t wrong, or at least not very wrong, certainly not really criminal, and that it’s blown up into this huge storm because of some inexplicable process going on in the minds of your hysterical accusers, it makes you feel a lot better than if you have to force yourself to acknowledge that you were doing things that were in fact very very wrong indeed and that the condemnation you’re hearing is entirely rational and justified.

This is just human psychology. How many of us have heard friends discuss arguments with their spouses using phrases like “I just can’t understand why she/he is taking this so seriously! It’s no big deal! She/he is being completely irrational about this! All my friends do this kind of thing all the time. She/he’s never complained before. Anyway she/he does bad stuff too. At least I bet she/he does.” It’s one of the biggest problems with instituting reform after a scandal, because one of the common features of many scandals is that, in the sheltered subculture in which they originate, the acts involved really were seen as no big deal, and so it’s shocking to the people involved to realise that the rest of the world feels differently.

Sebastian H @ 239

I’d like one example of someone (a) losing their house in a foreclosure (b)when they did not have a mortgage in arrears, (c) because of MERS/robosigning. (I’ve followed this since 2007, and haven’t seen one.)

Note that none of the following count:
1) Joe Homeowner has a mortgage, hasn’t paid on it, but is arguing that Bank X can’t demonstrate that they own it/have the right to collect it.
2) Joe Homeowner has a mortgage, definitely in default, but Bank X and Bank Y are arguing over who takes the loss.
3) Joe Homeowner has a mortgage with Bank X, and Bank X has thoroughly screwed up it’s internal record keeping and keeps misapplying payments/misstating the payments due.
4) Joe Homeowner had foreclosure papers filed when he didn’t have a mortgage in arrears: he demonstrated that he didn’t have a mortgage in arrears and the foreclosure process ended with him owing the bank nothing.

Sebastian H:

“That is an honest answer. But it isn’t an answer that reflects well on banks. The LIBOR scandal is in that context–it was so scandalous because it suggested that the banks learned that it was well to their advantage to engage in deep and pervasive frauds BECAUSE that was how they would avoid punishment. Eventually the common people who are being fleeced might decide that isn’t ok no matter what the financial cost (especially as it becomes more and more obvious that financial gains aren’t every going to trickle down anyway).”

What I call the ‘nuclear bomb’ theory of crime:

If somebody is running around with a grenade in their hand with the pin pulled, shooting them is an option.

If they are running around with a nuclear bomb on a deadman switch, they’ll be given what they want.

I expect that the lesson the money boyz learned here is that trillion-dollar frauds are safe – either you win, or you get bailed out.

Again the robosigning issue. I understand d2 you are not defending the practice, just claim it didn’t matter. An analogy would be to say that it doesn’t really matter whether the police have a warrant when they knock down the door of a suspect, or whether the warrant was obtained through lying, as long s they do find the drugs. It’s just wrong, procedural fairness is not just a formality, it is at the heart of our legal system. A judicial system that colludes with the banks by allowing them to break the law for expediency is corrupt, let’s face it.
I have said above that the foreclosure process is onerous and is supposed to be onerous, for good reasons. In fact, in many places in the US, the process is shockingly un-onerous. In many states, it doesn’t even require any kind of court approval. A sworn affidavit filed with the county is really all that is required. When those affidavits turn out to be perjurious, and not one or two due to honest error but thousands due to systematic practice, the whole process is not just tainted, it has become a law-free zone. I don’t know how many actual provable screw-ups there were but that too is a red herring. We certainly don’t know how many victims were too stressed an demoralized to try mounting a court challenge. Perhaps most importantly, the foreclosure crisis was in large part caused by the shoddy if not fraudulent practices of the very banks that then engaged in mass foreclosure. To then say to hell with procedures is a cynical joke.

And read Taibbi’s book or the report (link at 235).

dsquared @ 253

In my understanding, robosigning is a MERS problem–it’s creating paper records of transfers originally done electronically; it is completely irrelevant in a case where the issuing bank has the paper records, but has somehow gotten them in its own systems incorrectly.

(Corrections welcome, but I’m pretty certain that there’s no need for robosigning where the issuing bank, the servicing bank, and the bank on the recorded mortgage are the same.)

harry 255: “My aim — basically my only aim — is to make them learn. To learn they have to work. Most normal people, given lots of demands on their time, and distractions, and the fact that grades really are pretty low stakes (what effect does a letter grade difference in one course have on your final GPA? Virtually none), need a combination of encouragement, cajoling, pressure, and frankness about their strengths and weakness optimally to motivate them.”

Totally agree. Unfortunately in my experience, it rarely happens that way. I have, in different roles (student, TA, instructor) seen many students get high grades who, I can say with confidence, were not, or only so-so proficient in the subject (again, my point isn’t really the grades but the unrealistic feedback given to students). My experience is similar to kidney’s at 238. Do I have reliable non-anecdotal data to prove any of this? No.

Right, but in that case you’re not concerned with grade inflation (at least in the sense that suggests a pernicious lowering of standards.) You’re making a case for grade deflation – ie, progressively raising the standard that’s required for getting an A.

And once it’s put like that you can see that the problem you’d have in getting that case accepted might lie with people other than university professors.

Harry @ 137: the absence of an infrastructure that allows us to assess how much learning is taking place, and continuously improve the quality of instruction).

I’ve been stewing about this since last night. I don’t want to be that mom, and if I’m going to be called a right-wing tool I prefer it to be to my face (for that matter if I’m going to be called a right-wing tool for an opinion that IRL would get me called a liberal whiner, just forget it), and I’m going to overlook the B-school, self-help book “continuous improvement” jargon because after all what other language do we have available to us, and I actually don’t know what work the word “infrastructure” is doing in the argument, but:

In this state, we just had a “high stakes” test that had been used for decades, implemented after years of public debate, replaced by a test that is produced for-profit by a group known as P….n, with not only no debate but with almost no publicity. One day the towns were considering switching on an individual basis, and my town decided not to, which I thought was a good thing because frankly, they have so many initiatives going on right now anyway and we really don’t have the ability also to be a pioneer, and the next thing I knew, the school calendar had a new acronym on it, and found about about the state-wide change through the grapevine. But don’t I know that the most pressing problem facing education in this country is that we have no way to figure out who is successfully teaching the right things–we’re so bad that outside people have to come in and implement end-of-year evaluations without even telling us what’s going on!–and don’t I know that the only morally responsible thing is to listen to those outside people, and let them take our time from us, because after all, we couldn’t possibly be doing anything worthwhile, if we don’t even understand that they know best!

Really, we have a ten-month school year, and a month of that at least is given over to the tests. The library is closed down, because that’s where the computers are. (Who knows what they do in schools that don’t have computers.) The state came out with new curriculum standards a few years ago, to align with Common Core–will that be good enough for the new, secret tests? But they should be teaching the right stuff anyway, how could a really decent teacher need to know ahead of time what would be on the test?!

IMHO from what I’ve seen, a more–I don’t know if I’d say “pressing” problem–is that clearly the early-ed teachers and the kindergarten teachers and the pediatricians and the art and music teachers with specializations in early education and the social workers all have different ideas about what should be going on. But we’ll all use our Mom’s Intuition! (Sigh!)

It’s not as if the collusion between financial industry, regulators, and the justice system makes this affair any less ugly, now is it?

The difference between conservatories and graduate programs, from the perspective of someone who knows quite a bit about the latter but nothing about the former, so take it as you will, is that graduate programs, especially in the sciences, are inherently dependent on graduate students and postdocs (who are merely somewhat older graduate students) to do all the work. I was part of a medium-sized astrophysics collaboration in grad school where all the labor was pretty much done entirely by grad students and postdocs; if those people were not around working for the small amount of money they were being paid, it would be more difficult to do the science these people do.

Careers are important obviously, but prospects of future income played very little role in my own decision to go to graduate school. Hindsight not with standing, in 1980 with Carter’s malaise and the pending election of Reagan and all, the future was far from clear. Graduate school was the only path to doing what I wanted to do, which was science. That is really the only reason anyone should go to graduate school in any field.
Graduate programs do over-recruit and draw in a lot of students who really don’t belong. Its not just about finding people to do the work, pressure from granting agencies push outreach to cast a broader net, etc. But there will always be some who do it because its what they want to do and they are willing to risk future income to do it. Many end up in long-term postdocs and soft-money faculty positions. A disconcerting number are supporting families. Is that wrong? Anyway, it probably beats the old way of having suck up to some rich patron.

harry b @255
…Mansfield feels his job is to gatekeep for an elite. I wouldn’t let a kid anywhere near a teacher like that, if I had a choice, and while Harvard is welcome to waste the money of the wealthy in that way, the voters and taxpayers of my state have a reasonable expectation that I try, instead, to increase the total sum of human capital in the state

Mansfield has been on the Harvard faculty for many decades and is now in the twilight of his career. As long as he remains capable of teaching his courses, Harvard can’t force him to retire; the Age Discrimination in Employment Act prohibits that. So keeping him on the faculty for pretty much as long as he wants to be on the faculty is something the university has to do under federal law, provided he continues to be competent to discharge his basic duties.

However Mansfield conceives of his job, one professor acting alone can’t really be a gatekeeper of anything. In recent years, I gather he has effectively conceded this by giving his students two grades: what he considers the ‘real’ one that he thinks they deserve, and what he would call the ‘grade-inflation-adjusted’ one, which I think is the one that appears on the transcript. This is so students in his courses are not penalized relative to others, or at any rate I gather that’s the justification.

The crusade against ‘grade inflation’, although it has some other adherents, seems to have been largely a decades-long one-person show, and once Mansfield retires I’m not sure whether someone else of his prominence is waiting to pick up the ’cause’.

FWIW, I wasn’t even aware of and don’t personally care about Mansfield’s opinions regarding grade inflation. My views are based on personal experience. The “grade inflation” statistics are suggestive but I agree not conclusive. Perhaps I should have framed my initial comment differently. The problem that I perceive is really sloppy grading and as such a sub-issue of poor teaching practices.

SamChevre @ 250 asks good questions, but I confess my reaction to them is to reply in kind. My question is, should I decide to withdraw money from my bank by using a gun rather than using my debit card, will someone please later remind everyone that, after all, it was my money, so it’s really just a question of whether I used the right procedure, and no actual harm was done.

With respect, we probably had different experiences. Like you, I am now one of those software engineer refugees from science, but not necessarily of my own free will. I don’t want to get too deep into my personal story, which doesn’t interest anyone, but I will say that I don’t believe I got any sort of “sweet deal.” I traded some key money-making years to obtain some level of expertise in a very narrow field; I’m not at all convinced this was a good trade, and if I’d gone to work at Google or some other similar place circa 2005 instead of going to grad school, there’s a chance I could be retired already.

I traded money-making years for graduate school also. I went to graduate school because I was excited about research. I got to advance the state of the art in scientific knowledge, albeit in an extremely narrow way. That was its own reward. I would call it roughly a nerdier equivalent of backpacking around Europe for a few years. I’m already so fortunate compared to the vast majority of workers in the USA, much less the world, that I can’t resent missing the road-not-taken that could have made me even more prosperous.

Today I am using some leisure time to continue pursuing research ideas I had back in school. As long as I’m not accumulating debt I will pick increased leisure over increased pay. If I eventually have to go back to living in a two room apartment and bicycling for transportation, that wouldn’t be terrible. I think that was better for my physical and mental health anyway. I’m pretty happy as long as I have love, leisure time, ideas, and my health. I’m sure things would be a lot more complicated and difficult if I’d wanted children.

Layman @274: SamChevre @ 250 asks good questions

If you mean this:

I’d like one example of someone (a) losing their house in a foreclosure (b)when they did not have a mortgage in arrears, (c) because of MERS/robosigning. (I’ve followed this since 2007, and haven’t seen one.)

then please do read the Taibbi article linked @235. It gives several examples and strongly suggests that there are tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more. I wish Sam would read it too and comment.

geo,

I did read the Taibbi article–when it came out, several times since, and again today.

It strongly implies at least-nearly states–that there are people in the situation I mentioned, but it doesn’t name anyone or give any details. I’ve kept my eyes open for 7 years now, and have never seen an actual report with that set of features.

It gives lots of details about a different problem–if Bank X says “this is a mortgage we have the right to foreclose on,” and Bank Y issued the mortgage, there should be a clear paper trail of “how did Bank X get that right from Bank Y.” Otherwise, there is a huge amount of possible litigation as to “who takes the loss here anyway”–and there has been. Knowing who owns what and has what liabilities is important

This is a real problem, but it’s a problem for Banks X and Y–it should be completely irrelevant to the homeowner, and, so far as I can see, it has been. It’s a question about who takes the losses on loans that aren’t paid, not a question of whether the loan is paid.

Nonetheless, to me, the fact that so many scientists (and not just scientists but humanists as well) are forced out of the field in which they received their training, not by virtue of any defect but because there are simply no jobs for them there, represents a disastrous misallocation of talent. These people want to be doing productive research and expanding the frontiers of human knowledge, but they can’t do that, because we don’t give a fuck or a dollar about any of that noise.

This I can fully agree with. It’s depressing to me that so much talent, deeply trained in research, is being used to sell advertisements, juggle financial instruments, and find “disruptive” opportunities to skirt/violate regulations. That’s why I prefer to talk about my non-work interests, except among hard core nerds who can appreciate the how if not the why of my paid job.

Sam@250: I’d like one example of someone (a) losing their house in a foreclosure (b)when they did not have a mortgage in arrears, (c) because of MERS/robosigning. (I’ve followed this since 2007, and haven’t seen one.) … It’s a question about who takes the losses on loans that aren’t paid, not a question of whether the loan is paid.

Taibbi:

“[The defendants’ attorney] Kowalski’s clients, like most of the homeowners he represents, were actually making their payments on time; in this particular case, a check had been mistakenly refused by GMAC. … ”

“… almost no bank currently foreclosing on homeowners has a reliable record of who owns the loan; in some cases, they have even intentionally shredded the actual mortgage notes. That’s where the robo-signers come in. To create the appearance of paperwork where none exists, the banks drag in these pimply entry-level types … and get them to sign thousands of documents a month attesting to the banks’ proper ownership of the mortgages. … This isn’t some rare goof-up by a low-level cubicle slave: Virtually every case of foreclosure in this country involves some form of screwed-up paperwork. “I would say it’s pretty close to 100 percent,” says Kowalski. An attorney for Jacksonville Area Legal Aid tells me that out of the hundreds of cases she has handled, fewer than five involved no phony paperwork. “The fraud is the norm,” she says.”

“Many people who are being foreclosed on have actually paid their bills and followed all the instructions laid down by their banks. In some cases, a homeowner contacts the bank to say that he’s having trouble paying his bill, and the bank offers him loan modification. But the bank tells him that in order to qualify for modification, he must first be delinquent on his mortgage. “They actually tell people to stop paying their bills for three months,” says Parker. … The authorization gets recorded in what’s known as the bank’s “contact data­base,” which records every phone call or other communication with a home­owner. But no mention of it is entered into the bank’s “number history,” which records only the payment record. When the number history notes that the home­owner has missed three payments in a row, it has no way of knowing that the homeowner was given permission to stop making payments. “One computer generates a default letter,” says Kowalski. “Another computer contacts the credit bureaus.” At no time is there a human being looking at the entire picture. … Which means that homeowners can be foreclosed on for all sorts of faulty reasons: misplaced checks, address errors, you name it. This inability of one limb of the foreclosure beast to know what the other limb is doing is responsible for many of the horrific stories befalling homeowners across the country.”

“In a great deal of these cases, in fact, the homeowners would have a pretty good chance of beating the rap, at least temporarily, if only they had lawyers fighting for them in court. But most of them don’t. In fact, more than 90 percent of the cases that go through Florida foreclosure courts are unopposed. Either homeowners don’t know they can fight their foreclosures, or they simply can’t afford an attorney. These unopposed cases are the ones the banks know they’ll win — which is why they don’t sweat it if they take the occasional whipping.”

Unless the defense lawyers Taibbi spoke to were lying, a lot of people not in arrears were in fact foreclosed. And that, as the last few paragraphs of his essay make clear, is only the tip of the iceberg of the fraud of which robosigning was just an amusingly named part.

Harry b @ 259. On this, we absolutely agree:

“My point is not that grades don’t matter at all, but, again, that this is a huge distraction from the real scandal, which is the absence of continuing professional development to improve instruction, and the absence of an infrastructure (which would include actual standards) to support that. It is suboptimal instruction and learning, not grade inflation, that we should be thinking about.”

I firmly believe that talking about grade inflation is a brilliant way to distract us all from precisely this. In particular, I believe that our students are desperate for difficult material in classes that fully engage them. (The fact that they rarely get this is depressingly overdetermined.) But that’s hard too. I predict, though, if we made most university classes more difficult–i.e. requiring more work and deeper thinking–many of the problems at the university would subside a bit.

My grades are a nudge higher than most people who teach the courses I teach. But I’ve looked at the syllabi and read the work their students produce. My students work harder and for some versions of the course, way harder. That’s a crude index, but it suggests to me they’ve learned more. (They say they have, but I have to discount that because of they also suck up a little.)

This is a dick move, but I’m going to do it anyway. If someone turned in a paper that had this as its thesis:

“Personally I suspect grade inflation is real. But there is no evidence for it because there are no databases of old papers and exams with grades attached to them which we can look at to decide whether standards have dropped.”

I would fail that person so fast it would make his (I guarantee you it’d be a he, too) head spin, and that’s no lie.

Harry, to your two comments in reply to me:

I have no real issue with Common Core in itself. I’ve looked at some of the standards and they seem reasonable, and specify skills (not “cultural literacy”-style content). I’m dubious about the way the slow pace of math in K-1, with very little taught that couldn’t be at least introduced in a good preschool, becomes mastery of multiplication by grade 3 and long division by grade 4–I think that’s setting most kids up for failure–but that’s minor. The quick change in the test used does concern me—I’ve read nothing good about this (one thing that’s been suggested is that it is, in fact, testing content). I was shocked how much time was taken up by the old test, and that was only in four grades—months taken away from regular instruction in grades 10 and 11, to test something different from what many of the kids were studying at the time—and now it’s Every. Single. Year. And every time the state changes its standards, all the teachers have to be retrained. That’s time taken away from other planning, other initiatives, even from the classroom. (At my daughter’s small preschool, I was able to see how much time was taken up with planning for accreditation, checklists, and so on, that they had to be able to prove they were teaching and evaluating on, and that was just accreditation from one agency, and the school only ran for part of the day and didn’t assign homework, which gave them slightly more time to deal with it.)

On your second question: I have no idea what led to the change in testing. Within a space of months, we’d gone from “Mass. is better-placed than other states because everyone thinks highly of MCAS” to districts having a couple of months to decide whether they’d scrap MCAS in 2014-15, earlier than they had to, because the state was eventually moving everyone to it. There’s nothing on the DOE web site like a press release announcing the change. I imagine it might be felt that continually aligning with an external standard might not be worth it, when there’s a corporation ready to do it for us. I don’t know what data there is on that test either. I don’t know what data there is on the effect of making MCAS a high school graduation requirement, or of high-stakes testing in any other state. I’m not opposed in principle to the testing (although, more than a month, even four times in twelve years, seems like a lot). But I haven’t read anything good about these particular tests, only arguments like the ones I angrily satirized in my earlier comment.

(MCAS was a pet project of John Silber, then president or president-emeritus at BU, and was developed by a panel of experts, and imposed on the legislature as a fait accompli, not a popular initiative. But it was well-covered in the press and most people seem to have got on board fairly quickly–except for the pressure being put especially on young students who are told this test, the first of its kind they’ve ever taken, is super, super-important–which is the complaint I’ve heard from parents with older children.)

geo @ 284

Unless the defense lawyers Taibbi spoke to were lying, a lot of people not in arrears were in fact foreclosed.

Absolutely. The fact that in 7 years of following this, I haven’t seen one such case reported in any newspaper, despite it’s clear newsworthyness–in every case I’ve seen, the “fraud” has been that the bank couldn’t demonstrate its claim, but there was clearly some bank that had one–makes me think that somewhere in the client|lawyer|Taibbi|article chain, the facts were not communicated accurately.

Disclaimer: I worked for a company (Genworth) that had a mortgage insurance subsidiary, which was active in the “the paperwork wasn’t in order, so it’s not OUR loss” set of claims. I didn’t work in mortgage insurance, so don’t have any info that didn’t make it into the newspapers–but I did have reason to pay extra attention.

PatrickinIowa

“This is a dick move, but I’m going to do it anyway. If someone turned in a paper that had this as its thesis:

“Personally I suspect grade inflation is real. But there is no evidence for it because there are no databases of old papers and exams with grades attached to them which we can look at to decide whether standards have dropped.”

I would fail that person so fast it would make his (I guarantee you it’d be a he, too) head spin, and that’s no lie.”

That worries me about your standards. I wouldn’t fail a paper with that as its thesis, though it would likely be a boring paper. I value intellectual honesty a great deal (something that, actually, I notice more in female than in male students, personally). Its fine for people to believe things that they don’t have reliable evidence for. I was reporting a residual belief and then focusing on the lack of evidence for it, in my comment. Of course, if the point of the paper was to argue for the thesis that grade inflation was real, the person having admitted that they had no evidence, I would be unimpressed. But that is not what I did. Check the posts I link to (which I wrote). Given that I chimed in completely on your side and bolstered your case, and am pleased that you pushed back (if I hadn’t been so busy today I’d have looked for your email address and thanked you for doing something I was too tired to do myself) I’m surprised by your tone.

Bianca — I haven’t followed Mass, and I had no idea that John Silber did something good! I’ll ask around — maybe there are good reasons for the change but MCAS was highly regarded nationally (by experts, for what that is worth), and MA was widely regarded as the one state that had gotten things more or less right. I completely sympathize with your extremely irritated reaction to me, and for what its worth I’ve pretty much uniformly found your comments extremely congenial so was particularly unnerved by that reaction.

Speaking of grade inflation: I’m a department head. I’ve been asked by my dean why courses x and y have too any students getting lower than a C. (One answer: Because it’s predicate logic, and if you do well (pretty much!) iff you come to class and put in the work.). I guess an alert popped up on the dean’s course spreadsheet or the like.

Patfick 286: I kind of depends on how the assignment was specified, doesn’t it? Let’s be clear about this: everybody in this debate is drawing on their anecdotal experience. Yours is no more valid than mine. What data exists is suggestive but not conclusive. Nevertheless, it won’t do to say that we should stop talking about this until we somehow come up with an ingenious study design that will allow us to test the null hypothesis once and for all. That’s not gonna happen although it certainly would be splendid if we could come up with some NAEP-like college graduate minimum proficiency test that would give us an unbiased assessment of what our graduates actually have learned. My suspicion is that the results of such a test wouldn’t be pretty.

Sorry, dsquared, will definitely keep it buttoned. And honestly, I’ve never imagined you yourself were within a country (or City) mile of monkeyshines, or that you meant for a minute to minimize them. There’s a long populist tradition in the US of railing at Wall Street, and I’m afraid it’s something of a reflex with me by now.

” This comment also serves as notice that when I put up that post, I will be operating a very very draconian policy on people giving me crap about the job I used to do, because I am already at the point where I don’t find writing anything on CT at all to be any fun at all.”

I should thank you for your CT posts since without your New Zealand post about the Treaty I might not have found out that in other colonial jurisdictions public trust law interacts with indigenous land rights.

I think you are right about universities. One aspect is the curriculum: there are some great improvements since the 19th and early 20th Cs but also relativism is a problem too, especially as a lot of the time post-positivism is the main other alternative epistemology. As I study part time though I can say I have been able to see good changes. This is especially the case where I see professors trying to find a hopeful path forwards, given they are aware of some students feeling hopeless at all the problems.

Harry,

I apologize for sounding like I was personally attacking you. It was not my intention. Apparently we’re even in agreement regarding the idea that testing is a panacea, or even a solution to many of the problems facing schools that need to be addressed yesterday. Probably we’d even agree that it’s had unintended consequences. Maybe a miracle will happen and schools will move on from this craziness without doing too much damage to themselves in the process.

“work harder and learn more, but to understand less”

I partially concur. Students do have to work a lot and many have what seem to be excessive class loads in addition to also having to work for a living at least part time. It’s hard to square the circle: either these students’ learning is superficial at best, or they have close to superhuman abilities. Of course that raises the issue of the economic pressures these students face on the one hand, and the financial interest of the institution on the other. Institutions need the tuition money and students understandably expect something in return. A realistic assessment of actual academic achievement is in neither party’s interest (at least short term – in the long term I am convinced superficial studying is a colossal waste of time).

I’m also, to be fair after all this university-bashing, stunned by the quality of the care and education the 18 year old is getting from her teachers as a freshman at a large public research university (not UW-Madison). Can’t imagine what could be better, and it is better than what I received (partly because, when it works well, the US model is better than the UK model of undergraduate education). If her teachers are reading, I am SO grateful, and impressed.

Harry B, I am curious, why are you “unnerved by the most of the opposition” to CC”?

Bianca — no its not taken the wrong way. I regard standards and tests as tools, and like most tools they are not idiot-proof, and like many tools, in the hands of the wrong people they do damage. NCLB has some good features (disaggregating data by demographic subgroups) that I’d want to see in any accountability regime: and the emergence of using value added/growth measures, which, though not part of NCLB, NCLB prompted, has been very good. But there’s also lots of gaming, and narrowing of curriculum, etc. CC is potentially better. Very few schools and remarkably few districts have the expertise needed to mmake optimal use of the data now widely available (about tests, etc), and many decisionmakers (principals, district level people, etc) have entirely misplaced confidence in their own abilities to interpret and then use data. Its all a big mess. Everything should be compared not with some ideal system but with what else we might realistically expect to have. I think there are two reasonable views to have about the Common Core/Tests:
i) on balance it will, if implemented well, spur improvement, and could, if managed well, be a big help
ii) on balance, it is sufficiently likely to be implemented badly that it will make things worse.

I think I believe i) — and, at least at the moment, I don’t believe ii). You, I think, suspect ii) might be true. And I can’t tell you anything that will compel you otherwise.

Raw achievement scores tell you exactly nothing about the quality of a school, and comparing them tell you very little about the relative quality of schools, even if they are quite similar on observable characteristics, and any statistician who tells you otherwise should be discounted. Only growth scores tell you anything, and they need LOTS of interpretation.

All very depressing!

There is another view that even if implemented well, the testing regime won’t be likely to “spur improvement” or be “a big help”. Do we really have good reason to believe that data availability spurs educational improvement (even assuming that the data is in fact reliable)? Has this ever happened in the past, or in other countries? I understand that social scientists favor data availability, especially such big population data sets, but it’s easy to delude oneself when it comes to the power of data-driven science to shape public policy.

To be clear, I’m not assuming that knowledge has declined relative to earlier generations, just that increasing grades do not reflect increasing knowledge/understanding. Also, why doesn’t Americans’ increasing level of educational attainment translate into a more rational, better informed public discourse?

Harry B.

I apologize My tone was too cranky, and I regret it. (I hope I’d have the good grace to say this if we disagreed more.) I was carried away.

My point was that the arguments offered by people who want to “solve” grade “inflation” from above, usually by beating up on adjuncts and grad students, usually embody the laziest intellectual practices imaginable, practices that a professional would not allow in his/her students’ work. (Read the original Mansfield article.) I should have left it at that.

One thing that I kinda sorta disagree with you about is this: I think “interesting” is a legitimate criterion for evaluating student writing. One has to be careful about imposing one’s hobby horses, but I’ve read too many uninteresting papers written by disengaged students that I expected would bore anyone. They do no one any good. I have no problem demanding engaging prose from engaged students. And, by and large, I get it.

I teach Rhetoric, so I know the insistence on concrete evidence comes from that.

Finally, if a student turned in a draft (I always read drafts, which is why I rarely have to fail anyone) that had “It’s a dick more, but I’ll do it anyway” in it, I’d simply write in the margins, “You’re right. It is. Take it out.”

With respect.

I don’t know whether or not grade inflation is A Thing, but I do know that Mansfield is a crank and no one should take him seriously.

I guess one day I’ll have to read that infamous Mansfield article.

Note that grade inflation is often considered a humanities and, to a lesser degree, a social science phenomenon. If it were the case that the students are getting better, it is plainly in the natural sciences. It is not uncommon for a large percentage of an entering class at a competitive college to have taken calculus and some AP courses in bio, chem, and/or physics as compared to 30 years ago. Further, there is no question that the state of the art in the natural sciences has progressed considerably over the last 20-30 years. Nonetheless, there is much less grade inflation.

Is this meaningful? Very much so. People understand and act on this information. Take a look at very prestigious law firms. A high percentage of the lawyers attended Ivies and similar schools as undergraduates. There is one exception — the patent lawyers at these same firms. Many went to state colleges to get their science or engineering degrees. A 3.7 GPA actually means something in the sciences. The firms use the GPA rather than the school as a indicator of competence. The implication for social mobility are obvious.

To be clear — I’m against using VAM/VAS scores for high-stakes assessments of teaching. But the ASA doesn’t say they’re useless. They just say to be careful when using them. I do think it is very interesting to see where your students fall compared to a reasonably well specified regression line.
Like the ASA, I’m very skeptical that you can use it to just churn out quantifiable teacher quality measures.

I don’t have time to dig up the details, but Mazur says (in talks) test results on the same test (which assesses general conceptual understanding of physics at a lower technical level than the intro to physics class at Harvard) went up dramatically after he changed his instruction.

adam.smith@ 319 does speak for me except the last paragraph — and that last paragraph, only really because I think that handing things over to the public, given the design of american democratic institutions is not better. Nobody sensible thinks that teachers should be evaluated according to value added scores. The sensible thing would be to hire principals who knew nothing about athletics, but a lot about teaching and management, and gave them power to make judgments about quality, and to change the career structure so that it made more sense. People have long blamed teachers’ unions for the absurd design of the career structure. My state is about to get rid of teachers’ unions, and I think within 5 years we will have very good evidence that the teachers’ unions were not to blame, because districts will not introduce sensible changes. (And — why would you think that bunch of former athletic coaches who are now principals and superintendents will suddenly start hiring women who know what they are doing just because you got rid of unions?)

Harry b. @326, I don’t understand how you can say “Nobody sensible thinks that teachers should be evaluated according to value added scores.” when you also maintained previously that “the emergence of using value added/growth measures, which, though not part of NCLB, NCLB prompted, has been very good,” since the whole point and purpose of using value added models was as a method intended to evaluate teachers.

To evaluate teachers as to whether they had added monetary value to their product, namely, children, and then to fire them according to rank and yank.

Val @329
one reason for “grade inflation” in humanities might be that it used to be very hard to get high marks in humanities, compared with maths and science subjects.

This may have been the case in Australia, but I’m not at all sure it was ever the case in the U.S.

T @320
Note that grade inflation is often considered a humanities and, to a lesser degree, a social science phenomenon. If it were the case that the students are getting better, it is plainly in the natural sciences.

You offer no evidence to show that students are not in fact “getting better” in a range of fields, including those outside the natural sciences.

I do think grade inflation over the last several decades is probably a real phenomenon, but (1) I don’t pretend to know the cause (there may be ‘benign’ and justifiable causes, as has been suggested) and (2) I don’t think, as others have said here, that it’s a very pressing issue compared to other issues about education.

Re law schools and law firms: the latter care above all about where one went to law school and how one did there. My impression is that everything else is secondary. Patent law is very much its own thing, as practitioners tend to have, as you note, science and engineering backgrounds.

If you sit down with a legal directory (Martindale-Hubbell for example) and actually take a close, systematic look at where partners in prestigious law firms have done their undergrad degrees, I bet you’ll find a fairly wide range of undergrad schools — a much wider range than you might think. This probably will especially be the case if you look at all the branch offices of a given firm, rather than limiting your perusal to, say, the NY or DC office.

HArold

I’ll find the long post where I explained all this several years ago, and link to it, when I have time. VAMs have proven very useful internally, for professional development purposes. I don’t know about adam.smith, but my discipline has not developed high quality tests at the college level. I know how I would use them if I had them, but I don’t have the expertise to design them and don’t have the money to test them.

Cranky
Read what I said in the parenthesis. In fact, just read what I said altogether, slowly, and not assuming I am a right winger. You’ll find that we don’t disagree much. When I said “the sensible thing” I meant “what other countries that value education and have half-decent education systems do”. I do not have a plan for changing the culture of the principalship (except making being a gym teacher or athletic coach a disqualification). Brad De Long is absolutely right about that (Martin West was the first to make the point I think, and I’ve made it here before)…. but I think if you look carefully you’ll find plenty of less talented men being promoted over more talented women in k-12 schooling, especially in secondary schooling: there is plenty of human capital being wasted because of sexism in our schools.

Ok, about principals. Maybe I should be clearer. I’ve said it before here a number of times but no reason you should have read it. The kind of people who become principals are the kind of people who are, by and large, completely unsuited to managing the instructional aspect of the school. Because that is not part of the job. So teachers do not want to be evaluated by principals. (My anti-teacher-union relatives all stop short when I ask how they would feel about having their job performance evaluated by a gym teacher — nobody who cares about being good at their job wants that). Unions resist principals evaluating teachers because they know what principals are like. Because unions resist principals managing teachers, there is no reason to appoint people who would be good at managing teachers as principals. So, we keep the bizarre culture of the principalship.

But do you guys think that NOBODY should manage teachers (or the instructional program in schools)?? My suggestion is, if it were feasible (and I completely understand that it may not be), it would be sensible to design the career so that someone could become a department head (with some evaluation and management responsibility) while remaining a teacher (teaching fewer courses), learn how to lead the instructional program on the job, becoming part of a senior management team, and apply for more senior management positions on the basis of that experience (rather than on the basis of i) having taken a not-very-worthwhile set of courses at a university which nobody who has a teaching job that involves a lot of grading can take while doing their job properly, and ii) having spent a lot of time hanging out at basketball games with the current leadership). This is, amazingly, what the career structure looks like in lots of other rich countries.

Lots of people blame the stupid career structure, and the lack of power principals have over the instructional program, on unions. There is some truth to that. As Cranky’s cranky and unecessarily rude comment implies, unions had excellent reasons for curbing the power of districts and principals, given what they were actually like (and thereby did the profession, but more importantly schools and the country, a service). (And AL Shanker, who led the teachers’ union that actually dared to call itself a union was, in fact, an extremely visionary thinker about American education, and it is a tragedy that nobody made him Secretary of Education — that said, he wouldn’t be on my list of people to give a nuclear weapon to, but that list has nobody on it at all). My state has just got rid of teachers’ unions. My prediction was just that we shall find that whereas there will be plenty of changes in the contracts that will have harmful effects (annd some, sure, might have beneficial effects), what we will not see is a systematic (or even piecemeal) move to establishing a sensible career structure for teachers, and a sensible pathway from being a teacher to being an administrator. This is because, in fact, unions are not to blame for the fundamental problems in the design of the career structure, or the fact that 1/3rd of all public school principals are former gym teachers and athletic coaches; rather, they have reacted to that fact in a sensible manner that anyone (including everyone who hates them) would have done in the same situation. Another way of putting this: Act 10 in Wisconsin has given districts freedom to enact beneficial reforms and districts will not enact those reforms because they are not interested in doing so. And nobody will be able to blame unions for that any more (which is a shame, because what we’ll discover is that not only teachers but the quality of the education system benefited from the presence of unions, even the crappy union).

Just an anecdote. A group of leaders union locals (mainly dissident NEA, plus some AFT — most rural, but a couple of very big city unions) asked me to present an analysis of Race to the Top to them a few years ago. I presented the main provisions, and spent a good deal of time presenting a series of arguments why evaluating teachers based on test scores was such an extraordinarily bad idea (they all opposed it, but did not have good reasons why — I gave them the good reasons). I was struck that they, unanimously, agreed that the teacher evaluation system is broken, and how extremely frustrated they were that their members have to live with incompetent colleagues, because principals, who are entitled to fire teachers pretty much at will during the 3 probationary years, NEVER DO SO, and systematically grant tenure to incompetent teachers, which wrecks the working conditions of the other union members, and undermines both their morale and that of the union leaderships. None of them would have said this publicly, and I do not feel at liberty to reveal who was saying this. But I could (and won’t) name several teachers who during their 3 probationary years were NEVER ONCE observed by a principals; and others who, though observed, were told by the principals to WRITE THEIR OWN EVALUATIONS.

Make of all that what you will — I’m done, its nearly midnight and I have a needy sick 8 year old, and four 14 year old girls helping/hindering me.

Two prior posts on value added:

https://crookedtimber.org/2005/01/26/value-added-league-tables/

https://crookedtimber.org/2010/08/30/evaluating-teachers-using-test-scores/

Finally, having recently been excoriated on hundreds of right wing blogs and several national radio and TV hosts imputing stupid ideas to me, I’m more impatient than usual when I read comments from people I regard as roughly on my side that assume that I am naive, an idiot, or ill-willed. I’m even more impatient with the crappy treatment of Daniel, who is smarter than any of us and entirely on the side of the angels. Some people here seem like they’d rather live in a world in which everyone in Daniel’s profession is an evil shit to one in which Daniel is in that profession. Me, I prefer this world. Fortunately, he is the one person I have ever come across who is able both to combine rudeness with good humour, and capable of calibrating his rudeness perfectly to the situation. Anyway, I don’t expect anything but crap from Mr. Limbaugh, but it would be nice to experience a bit more charity and assumption of good faith from our commenters.
The 14 year olds seem to have saved the day, but I am bloody tired, and buggering off.

So that happens in Miami…and it’s one of 77 accredited universities in Florida. It can, in the US, be a constant case of “one bad apple” and affect nothing.

In Russia and Pakistan being a professor is still a status position despite massive corruption…why should it be different in the Western world?

LFC @334

If the students are getting better (50% increase in As in 15 years) and you want to grade on some invariant historical standard (although the material changes in many disciplines) then all grades will asymptote to As and all GPAs to 4.0. Harvard’s median grade is already 3.67 (A-) and the average GPA is nearly 3.5. http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2013/12/9/stats-grade-inflation/

Once this process is complete, grades will fail to distinguish among college graduates and you’re just left with the signal of which school the student attended. In essence, the only thing an outside observer would learn about the student’s four years at college was their academic major. And, if you are correct, the additional knowledge that all students are smarter than their predecessors. So much for college as the path to social mobility. The other side effect is that school brand becomes even more important, something very much in the interest of top-branded institutions.

btw — I thought studies show that current undergraduates spend significantly less time studying than students in the past.

harry, I have twice asked whether there are precedents from other countries using VAS successfully to improve the quality of education. You seem to say that there are ( “When I said “the sensible thing” I meant “what other countries that value education and have half-decent education systems do”” ). Would you mind giving examples of that (I understand you know of more than one)?

harry b,

Thanks (as always) for your comments on (K-12) teaching and associated issues. I don’t think we’re in complete agreement, but your comments have significantly altered my thinking my thinking on these issues (which—let’s face it—doesn’t happen often in a comment thread).

LCF
Let me fill in the steps to my reasoning.
While college increases social mobility on average, performance in college does as well. If college acts only as a signal, students at high-prestige colleges garner most of the benefits. These colleges are typically private institutions attended, on average, by children of the income eleite. Last time I looked, Ivies still accepted over 40% of their students from private secondary schools and a significant proportion of their students are paying full freight which is approaching $300K. If a less wealthy student attending a state school cannot distinguish herself from a wealthier student who attends an elite school based on performance due to grade inflation, grade inflation mitigates against the increase in social mobility of the less wealthy student.

I agree that this is a sideshow to the original post. I really don’t see a scandal that taints all faculty, no LIBOR moment unless it is the collective sham of admitting grad students with no future job prospects. I don’t see that gaining much traction since th grad students are pretty powerless and the faculty exploiting them is not. I can see potential scandals for the academy in the way they treat sexual assault and mental illness.

The adjunct issue may surface as well. But not because the adjuncts are treated miserably (which is a scandal) but because parents and students get pissed off that they are paying $60K to the college and having multiple courses taught by part-time adjuncts who may or may not have been vetted carefully. Once gain, the powerless adjuncts are shafted again.

Harold — there really is nothing sinister about my choice of name — I am Harry when I’m logged in (and posting) because that’s how the system was set up, and harry b when commenting (and not logged in) because that’s…well, that’s how I post. Apology accepted. Your perception that VAM has been used to destroy public education is quite different from mine. Its a tool, and a useful one. The enemies of public education have plenty else at their disposal.

js — thanks! And thanks to others for the kind things you’ve said about what I write here.

TM — in context, you’ll see what I am referring to is the design of the career, in particular I don’t know of anywhere else in which teachers are not allowed to manage and managers are not allowed to teach (I also don’t know anywhere else in teaching gym and coaching athletics are treated as qualifications for running a large instructional program, but there may be such places I suppose).

Hmm — somehow wordpress seems to have swallowed my comment wholesale. Don’t see it as in moderation either. In any case — if you’re looking internationally, Poland is probably the most interesting case of VAS. They went through a lot of effort to specifically train teachers and principals in how to use the scores (which rely on state-administered public end-of-year exams) and their use isn’t required. My knowledge of this is not terribly in depth, but that’s along the lines of what I’d have in mind.

T @352
Last time I looked, Ivies still accepted over 40% of their students from private secondary schools and a significant proportion of their students are paying full freight which is approaching $300K.

Not sure how many pay full freight. I suspect it’s maybe on the order of 15 to 20 percent, but that’s a guess; I may look up the figures later. (But anyway, I understand your chain of reasoning re grade inflation and social mobility.)

Even most who don’t pay the sticker price at the Ivies plus are, nonetheless, very affluent by any reasonable standards.

adam.smith @359
thanks for the figures

Colin @361
Seems the data shows the big decline in studying occurred between the early 60s and early 80s, before technology became widely available. Hours studying fell from 24 to 17 over that period and have fallen to less than 15 since.

“Between the 1960s and the early 1980s, higher education began to serve a more diverse population of students, with many students having greater work and family commitments. At the same time, faculty interest in teaching declined as colleges and universities increasingly emphasized their role in producing new knowledge through research and scholarship. We began asking less of our students during this period, and their performance fell to meet our expectations. The good news, such as it is, is that the steep decline arrested itself in the early 1980s.”

https://www.aacu.org/publications-research/periodicals/its-about-time-what-make-reported-declines-how-much-college

Take it for what it’s worth…

361: “If we can teach better than we used to we’d expect both better results [==”grade inflation”] and less effort spent getting them. Technology change, essentially.”

I’m curious, do you really believe that the quality and effectiveness of instruction in this country is increasing? Due to technology? Any evidence for that? Shouldn’t we see some effect of that improvement in, say the quality of public discourse? Or anywhere really? (I’m still puzzling over 313).

Median family income at Harvard is around 200k.

I think Harry was talking about the role of principals in other countries, not VAS for evaluating teacher quality (I don’t know about the role of principals in say, Finland.) He is suggesting, as I understand it, that in problem schools in the USA, principals tend to be incompetent.

It was Adam.Smith who asserted that in at least one other country that has been using , VAS / or VAM (same thing?) is doing well educationally and that is Poland. Though I believe his figures come from the Bill Gates-supported OECD, which is rather dicey and has a conflict of interest. In any case, Poland is using VAS to evaluate educational training programs, as I understand it — I may be wrong — not for the purpose of evaluating teacher competence.

In short though harry b. and Adam.Smith are calling VAS “good” or a useful tool when used correctly, neither one approves of using them to assess teachers, nor as a way to get rid of unions (harry b). Adam.Smith even goes on to say it would be advisable to stop talking about “accountability” though harry b. still uses this buzzword.

As far as the Common Core, I gather that harry b. is not opposed to the idea of a common core if done properly; in his opinion, i.e., not by a multi-national corporation of bad repute, such as Pearson.

There is another thing here that is not being mentioned. That is, that students in affluent schools in the USA score as well or better than Poland on the PISA tests and as well as all other developed countries except for a small group at the top that have a cut-throat testing and extensive extra-scholastic tutoring tradition (not to mention a tradition of cheating in some of them), such as Korea, Japan, Singapore and certain cities in China. Russia, I believe is also among the top tier. So the idea that our PISA test scores are a problem is not even true and has never been true. The problem is the number of children is poverty and lack of jobs and affordable homes. transportation, and health (including mental) and dental care for the parents. In short: inequality.

Those pushing the VAM scores also make a habit of testifying in court cases against equitable school funding, claiming that by using VAM scoring and firing the worst performing teachers, students in impoverished schools can be made to perform as well as those in affluent schools without spending any money. Which is clearly a lot of snake oil and casts further doubt, if there were any to begin with, about the validity of VAM as a useful educational tool.

I’m curious, do you really believe that the quality and effectiveness of instruction in this country is increasing? Due to technology? Any evidence for that? Shouldn’t we see some effect of that improvement in, say the quality of public discourse? Or anywhere really? (I’m still puzzling over 313).

I presume that “technology” of education was intended in its broad sense: the practical application of scientific knowledge. Not the narrower connotation of stuff from Silicon Valley. I still remember a high school physics teacher’s ire that her “technology grant” could be used only to buy personal computers and associated products, not a vacuum pump or lasers.

Public discourse is largely performed for persuasion, not for earning a high mark from humanities instructors. It has about as much in common with the skills honed in a liberal arts program as drone strikes in Pakistan have in common with Judo at the Summer Olympics.

Yes to adam.smith on the OECD. OECD data (and conclusions!) have a bent, but the data is pretty helpful.

Ah, “very good.” Yes, I forgot the “very”.

The study that was published by the OECD came out quite some time ago, in 2008 and was a “working paper”, i.e., not subject to peer review prior or subsequent to publication.

http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maciej_Jakubowski/publication/24125222_Implementing_Value-Added_Models_of_School_Assessment/links/00b7d52679120209ee000000.pdf

Therefore, as Adam.Smith says, it would be hard conclude whether the emergence of VAS as a measure, was “very good” or not, as related to educational outcome.

I think that you might be expecting too much of education. Highly educated people often still believe weird stuff and become even better at rationalizing their beliefs than their less-educated fellow believers.

I had a major epiphany when I was an undergraduate. Chemistry, geology, and physics all came together when I really understood isochron dating for the first time. The Earth really is ancient. All the evidence fits together with marvelous elegance. This realization kicked off my exit from Christianity, since my family and church up to that point had endorsed Biblical literalism in the form of Young Earth Creationism.

The YEC evidence didn’t fit together the way mainstream science did. It was a bunch of ad hoc rationalizations and misrepresentations. I thought that I would understand the apparent weaknesses better when I got older and learned more, but the weaknesses just became more glaring. Maybe if I had been raised with the half-assed compromise position of Old Earth Creationism my faith wouldn’t have collapsed, but it was too late for me. I’d been deceived too much up to that point and most of my childhood beliefs were up for re-evaluation. Many did not endure.

I came to find after graduation that my experience was atypical. Most of the middle class kids I grew up with at my church also went to universities where they took mainstream science courses. Few of them seemed to emerge so changed. They knew how to supply Science Answers for Science Questions and Bible Answers for Bible Questions and didn’t seem troubled that the answers were in conflict. Even if Not Getting Fooled by Yourself or Others were a required course for all graduates, I suspect that many would demonstrate Not Getting Fooled skills only so long as they were in a classroom getting graded on it.

“very good”, because before the emergence of VAM almost everyone in the policy world outside of academia judged schools by the way students performed on standardized tests. I prefer the introduction of something that enables us to get beyond that.

“Accountability”. Well, I use the word because I don’t know what other word to use. You want principals to reserve jobs to their golfing buddies or their former students; you want school districts to make it impossible for anyone who does not live in the vicinity to apply for a job; you want teachers not to teach math because they are math-phobic; you want schools (like those my children attend) which have socio-economically mixed populations to concede, every time, to the demands of the upper-middle class and educated parents? — sure, no need for accountability. In fact — welcome to the world before people talked about accountability. Affluent and educated parents make damn sure the schools their children attend are accountable to them both in terms of results and process. They also make sure (in the US, where they can!) that it is extremely difficult for other kids to get a look in with the best qualified and most experienced teachers and leaders. So schools are accountable to the market (most obviously, through the housing market) whatever we do. Government accountability systems can, used well, help to counterbalance the market power of the affluent.

Exactly how to design an accountability system? The US has an allergy to allowing inspection of schools, in which civil servants with experience make judgements by looking at quantitative data and interpreting it in the light of the qualitative data you get from spending time in a school, interviewing teachers, principals, and students, etc. I understand why (nobody trusts government officials, and everyone has some reason not to, plus there are all sorts of vested interests). We need to try different things out. Hearing people (as I do, all the time) rail against CC and testing, without offering any alternative, and sneering at the term ‘accountability’ makes me wonder what they think the default is? The default, in the US, is school districts carved up to separate social classes, unequal district-level funding to benefit the affluent, catchment areas within districts also designed to separate social classes, in-district transfer rules ensuring that more experienced and more qualified teachers can migrate to the schools with more affluent student populations, a housing market which gives you more choice among all these schools the more affluent you are (and the mortgage income deduction which artificially raises the cost of housing, and keeps people at the margins from owning homes, so they are subject to the whims of landlords in addition to already having insecure employment so that their children are much more likely than the children of affluent parents to have to move mid-year, and often, both of which seriously harm their ability to be educated well). If you’re happy with that default, go ahead, sneer at people who use the “buzzword” accountability. Me, I’m not, I think it is outrageous.

If you want a really good book about accountability, here’s a post for you:

https://crookedtimber.org/2008/11/18/grading-education/

harry b- Maybe we need a different word for standards that build in responsibility at the front end- classroom observations, student and colleague interviews, area expertise, mentoring. These have long been supported by teachers’ unions. But they don’t at this point sound like “accountability” measures, since they don’t hold anyone to outcomes measures.

@382 harry b The US has an allergy to allowing inspection of schools, in which civil servants with experience make judgements by looking at quantitative data and interpreting it in the light of the qualitative data you get from spending time in a school, interviewing teachers, principals, and students, etc.

The US has an allergy to civil servants, so there goes that idea.

However, the ills you describe do not hold true in all schools, only the ones in poor districts. And, as I said before, VAM and “accountability” have been used for the past 20 years precisely to avoid doing anything about educational inequities and to maintain the status quo as far as funding goes and/or allow unaccountable private firms to take over segregated school and run them more like prisons.

Harold,
It doesn’t take a private company to run a school like a prison, I promise you. Political actors have mixed motives; some of the advocates of test-based accountability clearly want bad things, others clearly want good things, just like its opponents. I disagree, by the way, that only poor districts have the problems that I describe, in fact some of the problems are specific to socioeconomically mixed districts. And even in affluent districts lots of schools seem to coast. In fact one thing that NCLB has done is reveal the level of coasting in mixed districts — districts like my own used to have “excellent” high schools, because although the low income kids were completely ignored, the 40% with affluent and educated parents did great (big surprise!). One of the reasons people talk about the achievement gap so much is because NCLB forced schools to disaggregate achievement data for the first time.
Further reading if you’re interested:

David Cohen and Susan Moffitt, The Ordeal of Equality: Did Federal Regulation Fix the Schools?

Elizabeth Green, Building a Better Teacher
(here’s what I said about an NYT article of Green’s, though the link seems to be missing: https://crookedtimber.org/2010/03/05/building-better-teachers/)

Just about test scores going up proportionately to years of experience — I’d want to see the study. If it is raw scores (not value-added) that is just what you would expect in a seniority system, in which more experienced teachers are able to choose to teach the higher scoring (because more socio-economically advantaged) students. If the study uses value added measures, well that is real information, something that VAM makes possible.

@382
Its interesting to note that in many states associations of independent schools undertake the peer-review, audits and sharing of best practices that you describe and likewise tend to have a much more rigorous approach to requiring instructors to pursue continuing ed and other development activities.

To be sure there are a) reasons why they can afford to do these things and b) independent schools have their own sets of pros and cons – my point isn’t to debate or suggest that independent schools have some advantage. My point would rather be that the forms of accountability that you suggest wouldn’t have to be invented from scratch but could be adapted from some of the experience that independent schools have already had.

NAIS.org has an assortment of papers and resources on the topic (with all the biases and data limitations such papers normally have) but it is ground that has been covered. Whether such ideas can be exported and supported by elected school boards, union employees and taxpayers remains to be seen.

In other fields there is a recoil now from the fad of using statistics and logorithms as a panacea: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/jun/04/training-young-doctors-current-crisis/

The motto should be “first do no harm”.

Not to mention the malign effect of using the (tax-exempt) “charity” of billionaires in formulating public policy.

Here we get back to the premise of the OP: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/whats-left-after-higher-education-is-dismantled-20150528

The scandal is the involvement of malefactors of great wealth, large commercial publishing conglomerates, and the business model in general in public policy, public health, and education.

Microchips and slide rules, there’s a big difference there.

Bloix — that’s absolutely right. It is relevant data though. If it is reliable, districts should dismantle the seniority rule whereby more experienced teachers migrate to schools with more advantaged students (and the schools with less advantaged students are taught by beginning teachers, many of whom are going to quit). Doesn’t matter much in districts with homogeous populations, but it does in others.

Harold — you’re missing the point. I’m not assuming anything about why experienced teachers are more effective (if they are). Whatever makes them more effective, we don’t want their skills to be disproportionately devoted to more advantaged students. At least, I don’t — I want them disproportionately devoted to less advantaged students. Seniority transfer rules work to the benefit of the children of affluent parents; that’s why I’m opposed to them.

Matt 380, you are making the case for me. If one can graduate from an American college (probably with high grades) without even minimal understanding of how the universe fundamentally works, how can that be considered a successful education.

I will give in to the temptation and relate an anecdote. In one “sustainability” class I TAed, a professor had the class watch Gore’s Inconvenient Truth movie, doubtlessly because he hadn’t prepared any actual teaching. There was no no actual teaching about climate change apart from the movie, not even any classroom discussion. Instead, the prof had write an essay on the movie (no specific instructions, just write something). The prof graded the essays himself. Now the effort of actually reading them would have been prohibitive. I know he read a few of them and made short comments but he must have given up. Almost everybody got an A. Needless to say many of these successful essays were ill-informed rants and many more were just poorly written and bereft of an actual argument. To me this is scandalous. Not because these students didn’t “deserve” their As or because future employers wouldn’t be able to discern whom to hire. The point is that the students were given the feedback that they had done a good job and reached the educational objective when in fact they were mostly as ignorant as they had been before. This kind of teaching and grading – which I believe is by no means the exemption – is just going through the movements, rather than actual education. As the old joke goes, the students pretend to do academic work and the profs pretend to grade them.

I came across an attempt at actually measuring undergraduate learning based on the CLA: http://www.ssrc.org/publications/view/D06178BE-3823-E011-ADEF-001CC477EC84/

I’m surprised this hasn’t come up so far in the discussion. Any perspectives on the results or methodology? Any views on the “Academically Adrift” study by Arum and Roksa (who coauthored the above study)? I haven’t read it. Appreciate any input whether it’s worth reading.

Another possible scandal in HE, courtesy of George Monbiot:

…Oxford University asked us, “isn’t it preferable that [the City] recruits bright, critical thinkers and socially engaged graduates who are smart enough to hold their employers to account when possible?”. Oh blimey. This is a version of the most desperate excuse my college friends attempted: “I’ll reform them from within.” This magical thinking betrays a profound misconception about the nature and purpose of such employers. They respond to profit, the regulatory environment, the demands of shareholders, not to the consciences of their staff. …

The hero of this story is Gordon Chesterman, head of the careers service at Cambridge, and the only person we spoke to who appears to have given some thought to these questions. He told me his service tries to counter the influence of the richest employers. It sends out regular emails telling students “if you don’t want to become a banker, you’re not a failure”, and runs an event called “But I don’t want to work in the City”. …