Half Sigma

The decline of America as a leader in technology

According to today's Wall Street Journal, R&D is growing rapidly in China:

Multinational companies, drawn by a huge and inexpensive talent pool, are pouring money into research and development in China — a trend that promises to broaden the country's huge role in the global economy.

The total number of foreign-invested R&D centers in the country has surged to about 750 from 200 four years ago, according to China's Ministry of Commerce. And in a survey of multinationals published in September by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, China was by far the most frequently cited location for R&D expansion, well ahead of the U.S. and third-place India, China's chief rival as an emerging innovator.

So then I did some Googling and found a recent article from a publication called Inside Higher Ed claiming that the situation isn't so dire and the U.S. still leads in engineering. But reading the Higher Ed article closely, the case isn't made very well.

The Duke report, which uses data from the National Center for Educational Statistics, the National Association of Software and Service Companies, and the Chinese Ministry of Education, put the number of American degrees in 2004 in engineering, computer science, and information technology at 222,335; Indian degrees at 215,000; and Chinese degrees at 644,106.

Wow, that's nearly three times as many engineers in China, and the numbers will surely grow because China has about for times our population, China is still developing and many citizens of China's poorer regions are still gaining access to higher education, and the Chinese obviously have greater respect for engineers than we do in the U.S. where engineers are stereotyped as nerdy geeks. A big percentage of engineering graduates in the U.S. are foreign born or first generation. Engineering is just not a career that native Americans are interested in.

People brainwashed into thinking that America is always the best will denigrate the Chinese engineers. For example, the Higher Ed article says:

A key factor is often left out of the doomsday prophesying: quality. Over 290,000 of the Chinese degrees, and 103,000 of the Indian degrees are “subbaccalaureate.” In the United States, 84,898 of the engineering degrees awarded were associate degrees.

In the U.S., an associate degree is a worthless degree that attracts students who aren't smart enough to make it in a B.S. program, but I wouldn't assume the same about China. I have been told that junior high school aged Chinese students are learning the same math as high school aged American students. International math and science comparison always place Americans students behind those of China and other Asian countries. When it comes to science and math, the U.S. is certainly not the world leader.

When you subtract these lesser degrees, the comparison seems almost as dire: 354,106 baccalaureate level Chinese engineers vs. 137,437 American engineers. And the momentem is with the Chinese. We can expect declining enrollment of engineering students in America and increasing enrollment in China.

This is yet another example of how the U.S. is becoming a marketing economy while China, a few decades behind us, is now becoming an information economy.

High schools withholding class ranks

A NY Times article discusses a trend in U.S. high schools to not give out their students' class rank. This is probably related to the self-esteem trend. God forbid that we give students any information that might hurt their self-esteem. Without rankings, every kid can feel like a valedictorian.

Unfortunately, this hurts the students' chances of getting into colleges, because without class ranks colleges have no idea what the high school grades mean. I'm sure it's the very same people who complain about standardized testing who are also opposed to giving out class ranks, yet without a class rank colleges can only rely on the SAT tests to gauge applicants' educational performance. Quite ironic, isn't it?

Mr. Shain of Vanderbilt said an internal review showed that the admission rate at Vanderbilt was highest for students with a class rank and lowest for those whose schools provided neither a rank nor general data about grades.

"You're saying your grades don't matter and that you won't tell us what they mean," Mr. Shain said. "I think it's an abdication of educational responsibility."

An appeal to Larry Summers

Larry Summers, the President of Harvard, has announced that he is resigning. (I previously wrote about Larry Summers.) Everyone agrees that Summer's comments about women not being good at math are what led to his downfall, even though he was not well liked by Harvard's left wing before that.

Bloggers like Dr. Sanity are rightfully angry that after his remarks, he overdid the apologizing. Dr. Sanity writes:

Summers abjectly apologized and fell all over himself backpedaling after making some perfectly harmless remarks which happend to mightily offend (to the point of causing a near-swooning episode) some of his female faculty. And for his herculean efforts to appease the eternal victims of academic feminism, Summers reaped only further scorn and rage, expressed in an angry offensive against his administration--not entirely dissimilar to the escalation of the more recent cartoon jihad.

In the history of academia, I don't think anyone has ever come closer to voluntary castration for the cause of radical feminism. And look where it got him.

All his apologizing didn't save his job. What a waste. Too bad he wasn't a man who stood up for his beliefs. He would have still been forced to resign, but at least he wouldn't have resigned as a wuss.

So here is what I urge Summers to do. Summers needs to recant his apologies. He needs to say something like this:

After my remarks I apologized over and over again. This was a mistake on my part. I confess that I was a wuss. I thought that if I kissed the asses of Harvard's left wing I would be allowed to keep my job with its big salary and prestige. But I was wrong.

However, all the apologies don't reflect my true beliefs. I stand by everything I originally said. The only thing I regret about my remarks is that I apologized for them.

Unfortunately, it's highly doubtful that Summers will say anything like this.

PhD: a bigger scam

I wrote about how law school is a big lie, but Gary North informs us that a PhD program is an even bigger scam.

Merit based college aid on the rise

According to the NY Times, small colleges are increasing their use of merit aid:

So prevalent has the practice become that over the last decade, the amount of money granted in merit scholarships nationally grew to $7.3 billion in 2004 from $1.2 billion in 1994, said Kenneth E. Redd, director of research and policy analysis at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

The amount of need-based assistance has also grown, though at a slower rate. Need-based grants, including those from private universities and from the state and federal governments, increased to $39.1 billion in 2004 from $18.6 billion in 1994, a 110 percent increase, Mr. Redd said.

I find the increase in merit aid to be a positive trend. It makes college more affordable for those who are best able to benefit from college.

However, the increase in need based aid is worrisome. I hope the need based aid isn’t going to marginal students who would be better off not attending college at all.

I also hope that someone isn't turning down Harvard for a free ride at a crappy place like "Allegheny College." That would be a big mistake.

Interest rates to rise on student loans

Congress is reducing spending on student loans. (If you subscribe, the WSJ has a better article.) I'm opposed to student loans, but Congress is doing this backwards, making things worse instead of better.

The money savings come from raising interest rates on the loans. So young people will be burdened by even bigger debt repayments than they already are.

Congress should, instead, save money by lowering the amount of money that students can borrow. This would force colleges to cut costs and maybe discourage some students from unnecessarily attending college.

Unlike all other forms of debt, student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. So student borrowers make a deal with the devil in which they can ruin their lives forever because they are never allowed a fresh start if they borrow beyond their ability to repay.

Too many people going to college

With an article in today's NY Times titled What's the Return on Education?, I was hoping for a meaty examination of the issues, but instead it's all fluff.

So here is the much better Half Sigma explanation. First of all, we know that people with more years of post-secondary education have higher average salaries. But why? Here are the four factors that contribute:

(1) College students have higher IQs than non-college students. The SAT, which is basically an IQ test, is used to select people who are suitable for college study. The book The Bell Curve explained that IQ is positively correlated with income independent of education.

(2) College students come from wealthier families than non-college students. Wealthier families provide their children with industry contacts and other advatanges that help them earn more money independent of their degree.

(3) Credentialism: employers value the credential of the degree even though the degree holder doesn't have any job skills that the non-degree holder doesn't possess. Somem industries, such as law, are regulated so that only those with the credential are allowed to practice. Education for the sake of the credential imposes an externality on society. The person with the degree is getting a job opportunity over an equally qualified non-degree holder. Normally, the best public policy is to discourage activities with externalities, but U.S. policy of encouraging education is doing the opposite and thus making a bad situation worse.

(4) Students might actually be learning job skills that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to learn if they were not in college. This primarily applies to more vocational courses of study such as nursing or engineering.

I think that the economists in the NY Times article are ignoring factors (1) and (2), especially factor (1) because it's politically incorrect.

My conclusion is that America is overeducating its youth, and we should cut down on the number of people attending college. A good start in this direction would be for the government to stop funding higher education and to cut out the student loan program.

Bogus for-profit education and Republicans

There's an article in today's WSJ about for-profit education that really gets me mad. The article is about how Republicans want to pass legislation that would be a "windfall" for these schools.

Proponents of for-profit colleges, including the Bush administration and Congressional Republicans, say these schools are reaching out to underserved students, many of them poor or minorities.

Seems to me more like a scam to steal money from the students and from the taxpayer. Marginal students don't benefit from this education. They wind up worse off because they wind up with education loan debt and become serfs to educational lenders.

One proposed change involves eliminating the "50% rule" that requires colleges to provide at least half of their instruction in bricks-and-mortar classrooms to be eligible for federal financial aid.

Sure it's possible to learn without being in a classroom. But it's just as easy to learn without being in a classroom without paying money to a for-profit "school." No one is stopping anyone from buying a book, or even borrowing one for free from the library, and learning from it!

The classroom requirement at least helps to prevent some fraud.

For-profit higher education companies are expected to generate $17.6 billion in revenue this year, up from $10.3 billion in 2001, according to Eduventures Inc., a Boston research firm. As much as two thirds of that money comes from federal student grants and loans, the firm says

If the education was truly worthwhile, the free market would figure out a way to give it to students without the federal government having to pay for two thirds of it. For-profit education seems like a scam-industry which would barely exist were it not for taxpayer funded government handouts.

Other key provisions aim to put for-profits on equal footing with conventional rivals. Traditional schools rarely accept coursework from for-profits because they lack accreditations from the eight regional commissions that have set standards for generations. For-profits generally receive accreditation from newer bodies that traditional schools consider less rigorous. A provision in the bills would prohibit conventional schools from rejecting credits based solely on their accreditation . . .

The federal government shouln't be telling schools how to operate. What the hell happened to Republicans being in favor of small government, fewer regulations, local control? I guess it's just bullshit that gets thrown out the window when multi-billion dollar business interests which donate big money to their campaigns come begging for help. ("U.S. Reps. John Boehner of Ohio and Howard McKeon of California, sponsors of the House bill, received a total of $180,000 in 2003 and 2004.")

Career schools in NY Times

Article in the NY Times today about the shady practices of career schools.

Some critics also charge that the schools make rosy promises about jobs for their graduates that do not materialize.

Sounds just like law school. This just demonstrates that people from all social classes are easily suckered into spending lots of money for useless “education.”

Is there a single honest person in the world?

Someone with the title of "assistant superintendent in charge of exams and answer sheets" is the last person you'd expect to be responsible for encouraging people to cheat on tests, but Isben Jeudy was caught giving his son Jerrell the answers to a New York State Regents' Exam. NY Times.

As for the father, he had been praised as having a promising career and had planned to assume a new job next week as a principal in the Uniondale district. But now that is in doubt.

"People were absolutely amazed" by the case, Superintendent Grishman said in an interview.

He added: "This guy was absolutely the last guy you would expect to be anything other than straightforward and honest. He was a gentlemen who should be up for superintendent in a few years, too bright to do something so stupid."

Everyone's a cheater. Trust nobody. (And read my post on the economics of cheating.)

Isben Jeudy: SHAME ON YOU.

How Starbucks keeps the poor from getting rich

It’s in today’s Washington Post:

She just graduated summa cum laude, after three years of legal training that left her $115,000 in debt. Part of that debt, which she will take a decade to repay with interest, was run up at Starbucks, where she buys her lattes.

It’s too bad she didn’t read my essay Law school: the big lie. There’s no way a law degree from a state school (Michigan and Virgina excepted) is worth $115,000. But she could have saved a few thousand by cutting the latte habit:

[A] five-day-a-week $3 latte habit on borrowed money can cost $4,154, when repaid over 10 years.

Bogus research paper about blacks “acting white”

A research paper (link to PDF file of paper) proclaims to show that school aged (grades 7 to 12) blacks who “act white” (interpreted as having high grades) have less popularity because they are shunned by their peers. (Hat tip: Tyler Cowen.)

While this sounds reasonable, after reading the paper it’s clear to me that the authors have completely misinterpreted their findings. I guess you can be stupid but still be a Harvard professor.

We learn from the paper that for white students at public schools, there is a positive correlation between grade point average and popularity, but it’s a weak correlation.

Blacks also experience a positive correlation between GPA and popularity. But when blacks comprise 20% or less of the students, then at those schools blacks with GPAs higher than 3.5 have a drop-off in same-race popularity. But there is no such drop-off in schools where blacks comprise 80% or more of the student body.

But I think that the really interesting finding, which was hardly discussed at all, is that at private schools the most popular white students have a GPA of 2.0, and as GPA increases above 2.0 popularity drops.

What’s going on here? My take is that high GPA has a negative effect on popularity for students of all races at all schools. High grades are not valued at all in the school aged community. But there exists another factor, one which causes both higher GPAs and higher popularity. This other factor is the student’s family’s social and economic status (SES). The kid from the high SES family is more popular because he or she has better clothes, better electronic gadgets, and just has an overall higher "class" that the other kids are able to sense.

The primary factor in how well a student does in school is the student’s genetic intelligence. Students from higher SES families, on average, inherit higher intelligence. Higher SES families also place a higher value on high grades, but I believe this to be weaker than the genetic influence.

At private schools, all the students likely come from a similar SES background, so at these schools GPA is not very highly correlated with SES. Removing the polluting SES background factor allows us to see the true nature of GPA and popularity. High GPA students are shunned.

I'm sure that if the researchers went back to their data and did a multiple regression analysis which includes both the kids' GPAs and their families' SES, then the real truth would emerge.

Going back to the issue of why blacks have a drop-off in same-race popularity when their GPA exceeds 3.5, it should be obvious that such high ability blacks have little in common with the other blacks in their school and more in common with the whites (who score a standard deviation higher in most measures of academic achievement), so they will have more white friends and less black friends. There is no evidence from the statistics in the paper that this has anything to do with being shunned for “acting white.”

* * *

Other bloggers mentioning this paper: Scott Scheule, The Everlasting Phelps, Lockjaw.

No Child Left Behind’s impossible goal

I don’t mean to keep blogging about education, but this morning I couldn't help but notice this NY Times article about No Child Left Behind which “requires schools to bring all students to grade level over the next decade.”

This is obviously an impossible goal because some children simply don’t have the innate ability to read at grade level. The definition of grade level is based on what the average child is capable of.

It will be really interesting to see what happens in a year or two when everyone fully realizes that this goal simply isn’t going to happen.

Thoughts on ability grouping in primary and secondary education

I’m going to use this post to respond to some of the comments from my previous post on genes and success. In the comment section, I endorsed what educators refer to as ability grouping.

Ability grouping is opposed by liberals who hate the idea that children have different levels of ability. So we see the typical liberal response, which was a comment by probligo:

Separating children on the basis of a perceived ability is wrong, totally wrong. That is an approach that smacks of eugenics; the kind of experimentations that Mengele carried out; the kind of pseudo-science that people use to denigrate those who are different in race or belief or religion...

Notice the hysterical liberal reaction, bringing up images of Nazi Germany, as if somehow I suggested that children should be sent to gas chambers or something. Liberals often bring up Hitler and Nazis when they can’t make a rational argument.

The ability difference between children is real, not “perceived.” When we give reading tests to children, some will score several grades levels above their real grade, and others score several grades below. Only a crazed liberal could possibly think it makes sense to put children of such widely differing abilities together in the same classroom.

I don’t merely endorse intra-school grouping, but recommend that school districts create separate schools for differing ability levels. I was the beneficiary of such ability grouping when I was a high school student. Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan uses a competitive admissions test to select only the brightest students in all of New York City. The result was a far better public high school than ever would have been possible otherwise.

My wish is that future students from middle class families that can’t afford private school tuition have the opportunity, like I had, to attend a first class public school.

One of the reasons why I was so outraged by the bogus Newsweek article about the “best high schools” is because it seems like a typical liberal plot to discredit selective admissions high schools by excluding them from the list.

* * *

Responding to what mikeca said:

Since when does society have an obligation to ensure that a person’s intelligence is “property nurtured and directed towards a useful occupation?” What happened to personal responsibility?

Only the most crazed libertarians disagree with the notion that society does have an obligation to provide education for children so they can indeed be properly nurtured and directed towards a useful occupation. I can’t for the life of me see how the notion of “personal responsibility” can truly apply to school aged children who lack the wisdom, experience, and reasoning ability to really understand the world around them. The law certainly recognizes this, which is why we have juvenile courts, and why children under the age of eighteen are not held liable for any contracts they enter into.

If lousy schools ruin intelligent children and prevent them from achieving the success they should have had based on their intelligence, then I certainly do hold society responsible. And sometimes intelligent children do get ruined when they are thrown into a school where all their peers are so much less intelligent that they don’t relate to them, and the intelligent child who seems different gets ostracized and fails to develop social skills that are needed down the road as an adult. Then we wind up with the stereotypical intelligent loser.

World's most bogus list of top high schools

Newsweek once again publishes the world’s most bogus list of top high schools.

Why is this list bogus? Because the sole criterion for ranking schools is the average number of Advanced Placement (AP) tests taken per student. The grades on the AP tests don’t even matter! Nor do any other measures of academic achievement obtained by the school’s students. If people ever start taking this list seriously, this will create the obvious incentive for high schools to game the system in ways that do nothing to improve the quality of their education.

Even worse, schools that have competitive admissions are excluded, so genuine top public high schools like Stuyvesant High School (“noted for its many accomplished alumni, its rigorous academics, and for sending the most students to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton of any public school in the United States”) are completely ignored.

One has to wonder if the inventor of this list, Jay Mathews, is receiving kickbacks from The College Board, the organization that makes money administering the AP tests. (Jay Mathews has a very long but pathetically bad article defending his list in today’s Washington Post.)

Newsweek should be ashamed of itself for perpetuating such crappy journalism.

UPDATE

Thanks to Kimberly Swaggart (who has an excellent education blog) and Orin Kerr of the Volokh Conspiracy for pointing out a newspaper article from Florida which reveals that the high school which is supposedly 10th “best” in the whole nation actually got a grade of D from the state of Florida.

Orin Kerr writes, “It doesn't take a genius to realize the silliness of the methodology used to determine Newsweek's rankings....”

Why liberals oppose vouchers and school choice

Reason 1

Liberals oppose choice for exactly the same reason that Don Boudreaux supports it.

Don argues that, under a privatized education system, parents who are fundamentalist Christians would send their children to a school where they teach that God created man, and reasoning parents would send their children to a school where scientific theories are taught, and everyone would be happy!

The problem here is that people aren’t just unhappy when their own children are forced to learn stuff they don’t agree with. They are also unhappy when other people’s children are forced to learn stuff they don’t agree with.

Because liberals currently control the school curriculum (educational administrators are overwhelmingly liberal), they are happy with the status quo. Liberals know that the power to influence children today is the power to influence what society will be like in twenty years. Liberals will fight tooth and nail to keep that power.

Reason 2

Liberals love egalitarianism. Ideally they would like to lift up the disadvantaged, but they also would rather pull down the advantaged than have a society where there is inequality of any sort.

Liberals know that the more choices parents have with regards to their children’s education, the more inequality there will, because some parents are more capable of making such decisions, and some parents have more money to give their children an advantage that poorer children don’t have.

Under the current system, everyone (except the upper class who can afford private schools) has to send their children to the same crappy public schools. The schools are crappy but equal. Liberal control over the educational bureaucracy (see reason 1 above) helps to ensure equality within a public school system.

If we started handing out vouchers, and gave private schools the right to apply admissions criteria, what would happen is that the more capable students with more capable parents would wind up in better schools. Liberals prefer a system where every child attends a crappy school rather than one where some attend a crappy school but the majority attend something better.

Advice for getting into an elite college: be a leader

A co-worker asked for advice for his daughter, who is in high school and wants to apply to Wharton (which he knew is my alma mater).

I happily discovered that his daughter has very high SAT scores, but I pointed out that while low grades and test scores are nearly a guarantee of getting rejected, even super high scores don’t guarantee acceptance.

What the elite universities are looking for are future leaders. Why are they looking for leaders? Well, from a cynical viewpoint, leaders make more money, so they will have more to donate to the university when they’re alumni. They also add to the prestige of the university.

I handed my co-worker a Dilbert cartoon which depicts one of Dilbert’s co-workers inviting him to join MENSA. Dilbert asks, “If we’re so smart, why do we work here?” This cartoon demonstrates how many people smart enough to get a high score on the SAT can easily wind up in a dead end job where they won't be likely to donate any significant amount of money to their alma mater. Dilbert is an example of the kind of applicant who gets rejected.

George W. Bush, on the other hand, is the kind of applicant the elite universities are looking for. People like to make fun of Bush for not being so smart, and they express disgust that Yale and Harvard Business School accepted him over candidates who were surely smarter. But the schools saw Bush’s leadership potential.

It may very well be that an important part of W’s leadership potential was the fact that his father was a Very Important Person, but the admissions committee knows that if your father is a Very Important Person then you’re a lot more likely to become a future leader. No one ever said this admissions process was fair.

Sports are considered strong indicators of leadership, for some reason or other. Excelling at high school sports will help one’s candidacy. If the college applicant isn’t athletic, then some other extra-curricular activity is essential. The goal of these extracurricular activities is to demonstrate leadership. Being on three teams isn’t as valuable as having a leadership role on a single team. And the same applies for non-athletic activities.

All the essays on the admissions applications are opportunities to demonstrate how the applicant is a leader and not just a nerd who gets high grades but will wind up like Dilbert after he enters the workforce.

All those liberal college professors

The Dartmouth Review informs us that among Dartmouth Professors, there are 12.5 registered Democrats for every registered Republican (hat tip: Power Line).

Who does the Democratic Party really represent? One of its most important constituencies is liberal college professors.

And a related question: will there ever be a more even ratio of college professors? I say not very likely. Those with rightist leanings are more likely to seek practical higher paying careers in business rather than low paying careers in academia. And the few who seek jobs in academia will often face discrimination for their rightist views, causing some to give up their quest.