The Future of Education and Lifelong Learning: DeLong Opening DRAFT

Harvard Class of 1982 35th Reunion :: Science Center B :: Saturday, May 27, 2018, 10:45-12:00 noon

  • Seth Lloyd, MIT: Moderator
  • Brad DeLong, U.C. Berkeley
  • Ivonne Garcia, Kenyon
  • Noel Michele Holbrook, Harvard
  • William Sakas, CUNY
  • Carol Steiker, Harvard

In the spring of our freshman year, then-young economics professor Richard Freeman came to Ec 10 to tell us that going to Harvard would not make us rich.

He was wrong.

Up until 1980 America was winning, and Richard Freeman expected it to keep on winning, the race between education and technology: Thus there were ample numbers of people to take the increasing number of jobs requiring formal education for first class performance. Thus the amount the market paid you extra for taking a college requiring rather than a high school requiring job was modest: 30% or so–not enough to make up for the income you would’ve earned, had you taken the tuition you would not have spent and the extra wages you would have made from working, and put them into some reasonable investment.

But after 1980 America began to lose the race between education and technology.

The expansion of American higher education slowed massively. Higher education for native-born males simply froze in its tracks. As a result, in the world in which we have worked for the past 35 years employers have been betting up the relative price of college graduates: Rather than making 30% more than our counterparts who went straight into the job market after high school did, we have on average received double.

The freezing and of the relative numbers of native born American males taking advantage of hire education as demand, supply, and heterogeneity components.

On the demand-side, states withdrew tuition subsidies. Public college ceased to be free. Those whose parents were not rich worried about their student loans: what if they didn’t succeed and finish and could not get one of those high paying jobs? How were they going to pay back their loans? Americans almost surely over worry about this. But people are who they are, and not who economic theory dictates they should rationally be.

On the supply side, states stopped building campuses. Getting the courses you wanted and needed at public universities became iffy: five or six years rather than four.

And on the heterogeneity side, our colleges are designed for those who take to print literacy and to Arabic mathematics like ducks to water–if you do not have that, or are not trained to have that, learning the way we are taught to teach becomes much more difficult. We economists see this every semester, as even Ec 10 requires great facility in reading, in arithmetic, in algebra, and in algebraic geometry. The extra slice of the population that we would have been sending to higher education in a better counterfactual world in which America had not lost the race between education and technology would have been less well prepared and less suited to benefit.

What is the balance between these supply, demand, and heterogeneity considerations? That, we say, is a research problem.

How important is all this? I would say that about 1/3 of the problem is with America that have developed over the past 35 years–1/3 of the ways in which I see America today falling far short of what I confidently helped America would be by now–are due to our losing the race between education and technology.

Let me make one final point: Over the past generation, Harvard has not helped. We had 1600 in our class. Last week’s graduating class was essentially the same size. Worldwide, between five and ten times as many people are well-qualified to join my niece as freshmen this fall. In our class there were perhaps four times as many people well-qualified to attend as Harvard admitted. Today there are between twenty and forty. Yet Presidents Bok, Pusey, and Rudenstine seemed to have little interest in helping America and the world in the race between education and technology. Contrast that with the University of California, which, under Chancellor and President Clark Kerr and California Governor Pat Brown, set in motion the plan to clone itself across the state and increase enrollment tenfold.

If you are thinking about giving money to help America win this race with education and technology, I would not recommend Harvard. U.C. Berkeley, Columbia, and MIT for moving people whose parents’ were in the bottom quintile into the top 1%. And for overall bottom fifth to top fifth mobility? CUNY. U.T.-Pan American. TCI. SUNY Stonybrook. Pace. and Cal State-LA. That is what Yagan, Turner, Saez, Friedman, and Chetty say… http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/papers/coll_mrc_paper.pdf.

https://www.icloud.com/pages/03URgLnTOy7BZ-FIR9S23Dh8w

Must-Read: Heather Boushey: Investing in Early Childhood Education Is Good for Children and Good for the Economy

Must-Read: Ross Douthat’s citations here are to journalist Joe Klein’s 2011 unprofessional trashing of Head Start and Republican Tennessee political Kevin Huffman, plus Baker, Gruber, and Milligan (2008) and Lipsey, Farran, and Hofer (2015). These are not the four citations that anybody would choose who is not actively attempting to misrepresent the state of knowledge about early childhood education programs.

This is one of the many, many things that makes me think that the New York Times does not have a long-run future. Its only possible edge is to develop a reputation as a disinterested information intermediary as the legacy position it had gained as a result of its role as central place for upper-class New York print ads ebbs. Things like this make developing such a reputation materially harder.

Smart New York Times executives would kill the op-ed page and give its budget and its newshole to David Leonhardt to fill, and then back off and let him do his thing. But these are the executives who let Nate Silver walk at least in part because of the political staff. As Nate said:

This guy Jim Rutenberg…. Jim Rutenberg and I were colleagues at the New York Times in 2012 when 538 was part of the New York Times. They were incredibly hostile and incredibly unhelpful to 538, particularly when 538 tried to do things that blended reporting with kind of more classic techniques of data journalism…. When we went to New Hampshire… the New York Times political desk is literally giving us the cold shoulder like it’s some high school lunchroom…. We filed the story pointing out… that Rick Santorum had probably won the Iowa Caucus, a story that involved a combination of data work and reporting…. They were apoplectic because their Romney sources were upset…. A story that… got things totally right pissed them off because they didn’t get the scoop and it went against what their sources wanted…

But the executives aren’t that smart…

Heather Boushey protests about the lack of journalistic quality control here:

Heather Boushey: Investing in Early Childhood Education Is Good for Children and Good for the Economy: “Ross Douthat used his New York Times column to express frustration that hoping for a “substantive debate about domestic policy” in this presidential election year is “delusional”…

…He imagines a scene from a future debate between… Hillary Clinton and… Donald Trump… over the benefits of early childhood education. Douthat even added several hyperlinks… links that alas fall short on revealing where the evidence actually stands today….

Randomized control trials that follow children from pre-school through adulthood… children who participate… do better in school, are more likely to attend and graduate college, and are less likely to smoke, use drugs, be on welfare, or become teenage mothers… the Carolina Abecedarian Study… the Milwaukee Project… Project STAR… Raj Chetty and his co-authors find that kindergarten test scores are highly correlated with outcomes at age 27, such as college attendance, home ownership, and retirement savings. Like in the Perry Preschool/High Scope study, in Project STAR, researchers found that while the cognitive effects on test scores fade as a child ages, the non-cognitive effects did not. Of course, not every study found such results… the Early Training Project….

Overall, though, the evidence points to the conclusion that investing in early childhood is important for future outcomes both for the children themselves and our economy more generally. If columnists provide hyperlinks to real-life academic studies to buttress fantasy debates between the two presidential candidates, they should at least point to the best studies available. In this case, the preponderance of evidence shows that early childhood education works for the children, their families, and the broader U.S. economy.

Must-read: John Quiggin: “Education: An Investment, Not a Filter”

Must-Read:John Quiggin: Education: An Investment, Not a Filter: “Implicit in this statement is the ‘screening’ theory of education…

…The idea that doing a degree might equip you with useful specific knowledge, or with general skills in reasoning, writing and so on, doesn’t get mentioned…. However, the long-term evidence is clear: in Australia, as everywhere else in the world, the wage premium for graduates has remained large enough to make going to university a very good decision, even as the proportion of young people undertaking university education has risen from a tiny minority in the mid-20th century to around 40 per cent today. One interpretation of this is that, over the past century or more, the entire world has been engaged in more and more elaborate screening for no good reason. A more plausible explanation is that technological change has eliminated the kinds of jobs that used to employ kids with a Year 10 education (the median level of achievement when I was young), and replaced them with jobs that need the skills (specific and general) of a university graduate. There’s every reason to think that these trends will continue in the future, so we are going to need more education not less…

Must-read: Harry Brighouse: “Get your students to know each other and make them write for each other”

Must-Read: Harry Brighouse: Get your students to know each other and make them write for each other: “A brief conversation with 2 students crystallized for me why two things I have been doing in my classes for a while work well…

…and I want to recommend them to other teachers; and also make a recommendation for students…. R: ‘MA might come to class on Wednesday. I mean, it’s like she’s in the class, so she might as well just come along’. Me: ‘What do you mean?’ M: ‘Well, we all just argue about class in our apartment for half the week, and she can’t really avoid it’. R: ‘Yes, as soon as the memos start coming in on Sunday, we start reading them to see what everyone says’. M: ‘We always look to see what S [a very poised, provocative, freshman] says, because at least one of us will disagree with her’. R: ‘And even if M and I agree, G always disagrees with us. Our apartment is just full of argument from Sunday through Wednesday’

So what are the two things I do?… Requiring students in my smaller class to post several memos a semester online. I’ve scaled it up lately…. The benefits for me are huge: first, everyone has done the reading, and second, I know what they do, and do not, understand…. The fact that they have done the reading transforms class discussion…. 2.The other thing I have started doing in my small classes is requiring the students to introduce themselves over and over again. Probably the first 6 or 7 class meetings in a row I make them do this, and then again occasionally, later…. The more important effect, that I have become increasingly deliberate, and explicit, about, is that they learn one another’s names…. The idea behind getting them to know each other’s names is to induce them to spend more time talking to one another outside of class…. The memos give them something to talk about…

Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty

Must-Read: Matt Bruenig: Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty: “Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute claim to have hatched a bipartisan consensus plan for reducing poverty…

…The consensus plan will focus on three things: education, marriage, and work…. Since 1991, we have done precisely what the education-focused poverty people said to do. Between 1991 and 2014, we steadily reduced the share of adults in the ‘less than high school’ and ‘high school’ bins and increased the share of adults in every other bin…. [But] the poverty rate for each educational bin went up over this time and overall poverty didn’t decline at all. In fact it went up…. As the adults migrated up the educational bins, they took the poverty into the higher educational bins with them…. There are a number reasons why aggregate education gains do not necessarily translate into aggregate poverty declines. I will discuss three…. First, handing out more high school and college diplomas doesn’t magically create more good-paying jobs…. Second, having more education does not necessarily increase people’s productive capacity…. Third, poverty is really about non-working people…. Old-age, disability, unemployment, having children do not go away just because you have a better degree…. To the extent that education does nothing to provide better income support for those who do find themselves in these vulnerable situations, its effect on overall poverty levels will always be weak, or, as with the US in the last 23 years, totally nonexistent…

Must-Read: Robert Lynch and Kavya Vaghul: Benefits and Costs of Investing in Early Childhood Education

Must-Read: Robert Lynch and Kavya Vaghul: Benefits and Costs of Investing in Early Childhood Education: “A case for public investment in either a targeted or a universal prekindergarten program…

…can be made with the best policy depending in part on whether a higher value is placed on the ratio of benefits to costs (which are higher for a targeted program) or the total net benefits (which are higher for a universal program)…. If public funds are limited, a targeted program may be more attractive…. If a larger priority is placed on narrowing the achievement gap between children from low-income and upper-income families than on promoting economic growth, then the targeted program may be more effective…. A universal prekindergarten program… is likely to generate greater future economic growth…. In addition, children who are not eligible for a targeted program can benefit from high-quality pre-K, and targeted programs frequently fail to reach many of the children they are designed to serve…

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Case-Deaton and the Human Capital Debate

Noah Smith: Case-Deaton and the Human Capital Debate: “A tendency toward healthy behavior is a powerful and important form…

…of human capital. It is not at all clear that this kind of human capital can (or will) be created by MOOCs, self-study, or other forms of online learning that are being touted as replacements for college. In fact, right now it looks like the health-related human capital boost from college is all that is holding it together for our upper middle class.

Must-Read: James J. Heckman: Quality Early Childhood Education: Enduring Benefits

Must-Read: James J. Heckman: Quality Early Childhood Education: Enduring Benefits: “The recent debate around the new Vanderbilt study…

…Opponents and proponents of early childhood education alike are quickly turning third-grade assessments into a lopsided and deterministic milestone instead of an appropriate developmental evaluation in the lifecycle of skills formation. There is a reoccurring trend in some early childhood education studies: disadvantaged children who attend preschool arrive at kindergarten more intellectually and emotionally prepared than peers who have had no preschool. Yet by third grade, their math and literacy scores generally pull into parity. Many critics call this “fadeout” and claim that quality early childhood education has no lasting effect. Not so…. Too often program evaluations are based on standardized achievement tests and IQ measures that do not tell the whole story and poorly predict life outcomes.

The Perry Preschool program did not show any positive IQ effects just a few years following the program. Upon decades of follow-ups, however, we continue to see extremely encouraging results along dimensions such as schooling, earnings, reduced involvement in crime and better health. The truly remarkable impacts of Perry were not seen until much later in the lives of participants. Similarly, the most recent Head Start Impact Study (HSIS)…. The decision to judge programs based on third grade test scores dismisses the full range of skills and capacities developed through early childhood education that strongly contribute to future achievement and life outcomes…. Research clearly shows that we must invest dollars not dimes, implement high quality programs, develop the whole child and nurture the initial investment in early learning with more K-12 education that develops cognition and character. When we do, we get significant returns…. Yes, quality early childhood education is expensive, but we pay a far higher cost in ignoring its value or betting on the cheap.